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Lädt ... How It Went: Thirteen Stories of the Port William Membership (2022. Auflage)von Berry (Autor), Wendell (Autor)
Werk-InformationenHow It Went: Thirteen Late Stories of the Port William Membership von Wendell Berry
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"At the age of eighty, Andy Catlett is preparing himself to join the whole Membership of Port William, which includes those alive as well as those departed who still seem vividly alive. As he looks back on his own life through thirteen stories that range from his earliest childhood memories to the present day, from 1945 to 2001, How It Went reveals Andy at his most loving and retrospective, coming to the end of his days surrounded by the love and memory of family and friends, living among the living and the dead"-- Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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The world Berry writes about was not my world. It was disappearing while my dad was a teenager. Berry’s Andy Catlett was a teenager in the 1940s, as was my dad. Port William was still farmland, before the mechanization of farming. As a teen, my dad helped out the neighboring farmer John Kuhn, driving his tractor. Photographs of Kuhn and his farm from decades before that show the world Andy grew up in. By the time of my birth, post-war housing had sprung up on the farmland.
The stories in How It Went are beautifully written. There is humor and sadness, and great nostalgia for a kind of community that has disappeared. A place that had shared stories, where people helped each other. But there is also prejudice and judgement. From the perspective of old age, Andy understands the beauty of the old world and how quickly it disappeared. Now, most of his friends are “in the graveyard on the hill.” Who is left to remember, to tell their stories?
We were telling of course the story, clearly ongoing and with no foreseeable end, of the departure of the people and the coming of the machines.
from How It Went by Wendell Berry
the boy Andy wants nothing more than to do a man’s work. He attaches to hired hand Dick, who he greatly loved and admired, and who patiently taught him the quiet pride of workmanship. His grandmother told him the stories of the past while he longs to escape outdoors. His father longed to be a full time farmer, but unable to make ends met becomes a lawyer to pay the bills.
Farmers warn against purchasing farming machines, against borrowing money which could be a trap to lose everything. Several years of bad harvest and you can’t pay back the loan, and you lose the farm.
The stories are an elegy to time gone, the end of a way of life. Andy understands that the stories were disappearing as fewer remembered them. “I see that we are passing through this world like a river of water flowing through a river of earth,” our lives being a chance to learn “something of love,” this being “the order of things, nothing to complain about.”
As gorgeous and evocative as these stories are, I was sometimes too aware of the idealism of the past. Elders have always talked about the ‘good old days’ when things were better. Andy’s good old days still included coal furnaces and food fueled cooking fires. There was danger and prejudice and ostracism.
I greatly enjoyed these beautifully written stories.
I received an ARC from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased. ( )