Her daughter Mamie has four children and a fifth on the way when the novel opens. only ghost stories,” thinks Peg, the matriarch, born in Ireland in 1854, four years after the famine. Boy, oh boy, was it worth waiting for! Four generations of Garrahan women are placed before us, blessed and cursed, saints and lost souls. Alice Fulton is a poet, a lifer in the locked ward of literature here she is writing her first novel, late in the game. It requires a rousing familiarity with language, backward and forward - the roots of words. Been-there-and-back soul, an ability to separate the glib from the gothic. YOU CAN’T fake quirkiness it requires soul. The second glory of a name, as with Marathon or Valley Forge, springs later from the deeds done there.”
“The deepest poetry of a name and its glory lie,” he writes in this book (which he always claimed was his favorite), “not in liquid sounds, but in all that shines through that name - the hope or terror, or passion or wit, of those who named it. He is the author of several other classics - “Ordeal by Hunger” (1936), the definitive book about the Donner Party, and “Earth Abides” (1949), a post-apocalyptic science-fiction novel, to name just two. Stewart (1895-1980) was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in California and taught for 48 years in the English department at UC Berkeley. “NAMES ON the Land” was first published in 1945 and has remained a classic in the field of onomastics - the study of proper names and their meanings. New York Review Books: 544 pp., $19.95 paper A Historical Account of Place Naming in the United States
0 kommentar(er)
