After trying for almost two years to find a book club that I could talk or otherwise finagle my way into, I've found myself in two different ones, both of which are meeting next week. For one, we are reading Medea, by Euripides, which apparently everyone read in high school except me. In the other, we are reading Hannah Coulter, by Wendell Berry. And despite both featuring women as title characters, two more different stories do not exist. I was reading them simultaneously for a day or so and it was a very strange place to be, mind-wise. So I gave up and just focused on Hannah this weekend. Medea and her badass revenge may be the subject of a later post.
(I have accepted that this blog is really only about books. My apologies. If you need an excuse to stop reading, you now have one!)
So. Hannah Coulter. I've only ever read Berry's essays in The Art of the Commonplace, which I found thought-provoking but not particularly persuasive. I'm just too much of a feminist urbanite to buy into most of what he's selling. He is a beautiful writer, though, so I was happy to sign up to read one of his novels. I was unprepared, though, for this novel to make me cry, like, twelve times. (It's only 190 pages long, so that's tears about every 16 pages.) It's a simple story about the life of a woman on a farm in Kentucky, but it made me cry more than novels I've read about war. It's possible that my reaction is more a comment on me than the book, but...I would like to think it's the book.
Basically, if I can distill it down, the novel is about time, place, and membership. In the theological sense. It reminded me of Gilead, though, in that it would have been fairly easy to miss the theology. Fiction is a good medium for this kind of work, I think, because what would otherwise be academic to me (like reading John Calvin) ends up being a good story that makes me cry. I don't want to move to Kentucky and become a farmer, but I did end up loving Hannah as a character and admiring the way she lives in the world and thinks about time. I wonder if it's ever possible to separate the goodness of Berry's characters from their rural Kentucky setting? Probably not. It seems like he believes urban life, at its essence, creates character defects. If so, then there is no hope for me.
What I kept thinking about while I was reading Hannah Coulter was, weirdly, Pascal. The way Berry writes about time and expectation and memory reminded me so much of this passage from the Pensees:
Examine your thoughts and you will find them wholly occupied with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do so, it is only to shed light on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; only the future is our end. So we never live, but hope to live, and, as we are always planning to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
Hannah spends her whole life trying not to dwell too much in the past or future. She tries her best to live, rather than always hoping to live. It's an admirable pursuit.
(I have accepted that this blog is really only about books. My apologies. If you need an excuse to stop reading, you now have one!)
So. Hannah Coulter. I've only ever read Berry's essays in The Art of the Commonplace, which I found thought-provoking but not particularly persuasive. I'm just too much of a feminist urbanite to buy into most of what he's selling. He is a beautiful writer, though, so I was happy to sign up to read one of his novels. I was unprepared, though, for this novel to make me cry, like, twelve times. (It's only 190 pages long, so that's tears about every 16 pages.) It's a simple story about the life of a woman on a farm in Kentucky, but it made me cry more than novels I've read about war. It's possible that my reaction is more a comment on me than the book, but...I would like to think it's the book.
Basically, if I can distill it down, the novel is about time, place, and membership. In the theological sense. It reminded me of Gilead, though, in that it would have been fairly easy to miss the theology. Fiction is a good medium for this kind of work, I think, because what would otherwise be academic to me (like reading John Calvin) ends up being a good story that makes me cry. I don't want to move to Kentucky and become a farmer, but I did end up loving Hannah as a character and admiring the way she lives in the world and thinks about time. I wonder if it's ever possible to separate the goodness of Berry's characters from their rural Kentucky setting? Probably not. It seems like he believes urban life, at its essence, creates character defects. If so, then there is no hope for me.
What I kept thinking about while I was reading Hannah Coulter was, weirdly, Pascal. The way Berry writes about time and expectation and memory reminded me so much of this passage from the Pensees:
Examine your thoughts and you will find them wholly occupied with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do so, it is only to shed light on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; only the future is our end. So we never live, but hope to live, and, as we are always planning to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
Hannah spends her whole life trying not to dwell too much in the past or future. She tries her best to live, rather than always hoping to live. It's an admirable pursuit.
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