Indie Books

"George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died." Such is the beginning,  the story of George and his father. Tinkers, by Paul Harding, won  the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. It is his debut novel.

Paragraphs are pages long.
Narratives are  jumbled; present and  past interwoven.
Third person  switches to first person.
Time passes, the clock stops,  hours are relived.

We learn about his life, George's, his father's, his children and grandchildren, his attempt to understand them, to record his thoughts and discover his words and the sound of his voice were nothing like he anticipated. We feel the weight of a life, the weight of regret, the times and places that defined that life.

We learn how to see clearly. How to take things apart and put them together, how clocks work, how pain and chill feel, how family and ties bind and strangle too.
We learn that language is a marvelous tool.

This is a first novel!
"Tinkers is an elegiac meditation on love, loss and the fierce beauty of nature." {Book jacket}

Some reading should be sipped slowly.

Mornings on the lake. Cool, cloudy.
Geese and ducks glide slowly.
 I stand at my deck and sip my third cup.
 It's a fine morning.
Soon, I will wrap myself with a warm blanket and sit down to read:

Home, by Marilynne Robinson.

The book traps you in its tiny spaces. I'm straining  to hear and see the three people in this house.  The conversations are slow, measured. Nobody wants to make a mistake. Nobody wants to hurt anyone.  The three of them are together under one roof perhaps for the last time.  Dark rooms and hesitant movements  prevail.

I fear what will happen.
I read four, six pages and I stop.
I decide tamilies are hard to know. And it all feels confusing and oppressive. It digs into our conscience, our sense of right and wrong.

I confessed to another blogger that I couldn't get through this book. It was not the book's fault. I forgot that some things are too cold to handle with bare hands. This is one of them.

Redemption takes time, I tell myself. It is measured in small sips, small apologies, simple acknowledgements.

Yes, some reading should be sipped slowly.