In Wyoming Stories, Annie Proulx can achieve more in three pages than other writers can do in a book. Watkins writes controlled chaos, dread and hope with the same virtuoso lines, wit and boldest of all feminist vantages. They inhabit brothels, dig desert debris of auto accidents, are quasi-prisoners in desert hideouts, seek out sparkling high rise casinos in Vegas where bad things happen. They are misfits, Manson followers, and missing persons. In the short stories they populate, her characters are adapted to the harsh landscape. In the Story Prize winner Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins’ modern-day Nevadans (I am one of them these days) are the true inheritors of the Old Wild West. I like to think Diaz’s characters could be the great grandparents of the characters in my novel. In a meandering path across the west on horseback, on foot, sleeping under rocks, Håkan ricochets through a labyrinthine landscape peopled by the bizarre and audacious, quick-on-their-feet con-men (and women) all striving for their daily bread and more by any means necessary, perhaps the most enduring of American credos.
In the Pulitzer finalist In the Distance, a young Swedish immigrant arrives on the American West coast alone and in search of his brother lost in transit. Via myths, poems and witches’ songs, the book asks how did Eden die? And how can we live on if or when we see the truth? In the Distance by Hernan Diaz Across a devastated desert landscape, Tayo’s psychic journey weaves over mesas, into canyons and caves and through uranium dumps. Tayo is a WWII vet who returns to his New Mexico pueblo, ruined by modern existence and war. If you don’t know Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, you should find this classic. The physical and moral stakes are high in all. As in all great journey literature of the past (think The Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings), the travelers in these books must all navigate landscapes and mindscape through confusion, despair, rage mixed with love, elation and terror in order to live. You’ll notice that many of these books, like mine, center around orphans, widows and widowers, the abandoned, the dazed, the shunned, the outcast, and lots of women folk. But the excellent fictions I’ve listed here were even more helpful to me in how they explored internal wildernesses, mappings of psychic and spiritual paths from Lostness to (some kind of) physical, moral or existential Foundness. I walk alone in remote desert canyons every day now, mountain lions certainly-sometimes looking on from cliffs, bears in Alaska before that when cell phones weren’t a thing. I’ve lived in very wild places for most of my adult life. These books were, of course, useful to me in thinking more deeply about landscape, the cold-hot-hungry-thirsty smallness-of-self realizations that actual wilderness imposes. I knew some of this already.
0 kommentar(er)
