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(More customer reviews)I began to read this book of stories--elegies actually--having just finished C. E. Morgan's All the Living. I say this because it seems so ironic that I would discover both books at the same time, each set in areas where tobacco was the main crop. And each brilliantly composed. I say elegies because that is what all of the stories really are. In a world gone mad--and sometimes I truly believe it has--where collecting possessions seems to be our only reason for existence, it is wonderful to have stories like these. I too had a wonderful set of grandparents who also owned and labored on their farm, theirs up at the tippy-top of Vermont where instead of tobacco maple syrup was the crop they harvested (in addition to haying for their Jerseys). These are stories, like Annie Proulx's, which are firmly held together by the landscape from which they emerge. I found many of the characters to be like shadows, ghosts really, who refuse to let go. And that was wonderful for me, seeing the grandfather crying and the son occasionally lifting lids on the spices his long-dead mother once used in her cooking. The landscape in these stories is both harsh and unforgiving and yet not necessarily so because asparagus does continue to grow, year after year, in spite of all else human that has occurred. Tractors replace mules, the mules who created the roads upon which the huge trucks with all their noisiness take these mules off to slaughter. But Lydia Peelle leaves us with those mules because of memory left by those still living. I believe this is a book that will--and should--win awards. And not least it is wonderfully presented in his binding.
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