6/26/2023 0 Comments Plainsong kent haruf reviewHaruf’s writing is so restrained and so precise in its characterisation of the town and the plains that they become luminous. Birth and death – human and animal – echo another across the pages. Two young brothers, Ike and Bobby Guthrie, lose a mother to depression and marital breakdown two old farmers Harold and Raymond McPheron gain a daughter of sorts young and pregnant, Victoria Roubideaux loses a mother but gains something else. Harmonies creep in whilst Haruf maintains the same prose voice. Haruf’s apparently simple set of interlocking stories of the residents of Holt, Colorado set up resonances and symmetries that manage to comprehend the whole of life. Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was coming up. It is no accident this novel is a song that points to both the internal and the external, to the immediate and the transcendent, in the manner of the Colorado plains stretching into the distance. Plainsong – vocal music that expresses and explores desolation, joy, creation, and death as a form of celebration, memorial, and call to prayer and contemplation. Kent Haruf’s simple and unadorned epigraph announces the kind of book that one is about to read. Plainsong-the unisonous vocal music used in the Christian Church from the earliest times any simple and unadorned melody or air
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |