I recently found several books in which people’s love of the land or the significance of the land makes it feel as if the land itself is practically a character.
“Land” by Maggie O’Farrell is a novel set on a peninsula in Ireland in the late 1800s, more than a decade after “the Great Hunger,” the Irish potato famine that left so many dead or emigrated. Tomas is a mapmaker who works for the British Ordnance Survey project, documenting the changes in the land and buildings to mark how severely depleted the population has become. He takes his young son to help him, but his daughter is the one who’d rather assist with the mapping work, because she longs to travel. When Tomas has a mystical experience in the woods and comes out a changed man, his epiphany makes him unable to finish the maps, and his family needs that income.
This is a huge story of two generations of a family and how much their homeland means to them. It also looks at poverty, British colonialism, nature, myth, and a bit of magic. The characters are so fully drawn you’ll think you could recognize them in real life, and, thankfully, the author tells us what happens to each family member in the end. Above all, she gives us beautiful words: “He sees the arrowhead leaves of an aspen entangling with the ripple-edge foliage of an oak, bending together like conspirators. Underfoot, the ground is spongy with damp. It oozes from the soil, the leaf-rot; it sucks and grips at his boot soles. He glances down and sees that there is thick, luxuriant moss, glistening and emerald-bright, blanketing everything.”
It isn’t a thriller. Nothing happens quickly, yet you’ll want to keep turning the pages. This is a book for readers who love words. If you’ve read the author’s “Hamnet,” you’ll understand. It’s so beautifully written, as when one character is homesick: “She might lie there, thinking about the house, the way the door hinges squeal in hot weather, the smoke trapped in the rafters, the smell of hay off the mattresses.” It’s extraordinary, how she weaves her words into a tapestry and creates a real sense of place. You will almost feel the moisture in the moss on the ground. You will almost hear the buzz of magic in the air. This is definitely one of my favorite books this year.
“The Land and Its People” presents essays by David Sedaris. Are they essays? Or are they true stories, or often rambling thoughts? Among his topics are his family and friends, traveling (“The water in Zanzibar was warm and such an arresting shade of turquoise that it seemed to have been dyed”), sobriety, ageing (“I’m in the hard part of getting old — the part where everything irritates you”), and he includes many interesting celebrity encounters. He’s curmudgeonly (“Few things drive me crazier than people who put their feet up on the furniture”) and his dark sense of humor isn’t for everyone (“I’m just not confrontational. If someone told me he kept a dozen teenage girls locked in his basement as sex slaves, I’d likely ask, ‘Does it cost a lot to feed them?’ ”).
He writes with a bite, and at times he’s deliberately offensive, which can be a shocker if you aren’t used to him. He may make fun of people, but then he’s also endearing and self-effacing. When he was among some 100 comics and humorists from around the world invited to a meeting with the Pope, he writes, “I look at ... the assembled guests and wonder, What was I doing there? ... It was like a reproduction of The Last Supper with one of the disciples replaced by Snoopy. ... I don’t belong here, I thought, embarrassed.”
Sedaris mentions several times that he attended Kent State University. I particularly love his story about Dawn, his girlfriend at Kent State. They loved each other, but he’s gay, so they married other people. But, he writes, “My feelings toward her are proprietary. Though currently on loan to her husband ..., Dawn is mine, and while we’ve never discussed it, I’m pretty sure I’m hers as well. I know because I can feel it. When we’re traveling, when we’re apart. In high-altitude Telluride and sea-level Singapore. In Japan and the United Arab Emirates. In Argentina and Iowa and all the places we go just so we can walk our toenails off and be together.”
I think this is my favorite book of his. He writes, “Life is short, and we should embrace the funny moments whenever we can. After all, what else is there to do?”
Explicit language and adult situations.
“A Far-flung Life” by M.L. Stedman is a novel that begins in 1958 in Western Australia: “Out here, it’s red earth for as far as the eye can see. Overhead, the sun plows an unending blue sky. Under dust-green mulga, a lizard seeks shade and shadow; ants engineer heat-defying nests; kangaroos suck moisture from tender leaves.” The MacBride family lives and works on a sheep station of nearly a million acres, 20,000 sheep, and almost no rain. A tragic accident leads to another, on the level of a Greek tragedy. We follow the family secrets of three generations of MacBrides.
Everything centers on a moral dilemma — or maybe more than one. Life is brutal there, so a few passages are hard to read for an animal lover. The descriptions of the Australian land remind me of “The Thorn Birds”: “The lofty metal windmills in the paddocks turned gently in the breeze, pumping up the precious underground water.”
The writing can be beautiful, as when a character who has been daydreaming awakens, “leaving the dream to rain its rain in some deep cavern of his mind.” The fully developed characters experience some heartbreaking moments that brought me to tears: “There are some events you can’t come back from.”
“Dreams of Earth and Sky” by Shirley Perez West is a novel set in Spanish California in the 1800s, as the United States is expanding into territory owned by Mexican rancheros near San Francisco, leading to war with Mexico. Mariana, 20, is the independent-minded daughter of a wealthy ranchero. “She knew her stepmother would insist she marry soon or be sent to a convent,” but she’s torn between two men: one she’s known all her life, of whom her family approves, and an Irish immigrant who rescues her from a horse fall. “Everyone seemed to have her future decided,” but with the Irishman comes “the possibility of a different life, a chance to choose her own path.” In addition, another family claims they own her father’s land. Can she prove otherwise?
There’s some very nice writing: “The fog-dampened trees dripped water onto dead leaves. Small animals scampered unseen. Far off, a mourning dove hooted. ... He watched, a yearning to belong to the land washing over him.” We meet several interesting characters, including a few drawn from history. It’s a good read, but if occasional untranslated Spanish phrases will frustrate you, read it on Kindle or have a Spanish dictionary handy.
Some travel memoirs also fit this category. “Don’t Go There: A Tour of the World’s Most Sinister Spots” by J.W. Ocker is an atlas of what the author calls “the scariest places known to humankind” — forests, islands, swamps, bodies of water, deserts, mountains, ruins, and manmade disasters. “We make the mistake of thinking that Earth was made for us; that it is hospitable to us; that it protects us. It isn’t. It doesn’t,” writes Ocker. “These places need to be avoided.” They include places you know (Bermuda Triangle and Chernobyl nuclear disaster site) as well as obscure places such as a lake full of skeletons in the Himalayas. I was particularly intrigued by several of the abandoned islands, but maybe the spookiest tale is that of Dyatlov Pass, in Russia’s Ural Mountains, where nine cross-country skiers died of hypothermia in 1959. The rescue party that found them were puzzled. Some bodies were found without shoes, some in their underwear, out in the snow. How the remains were left I won’t repeat here, but it’s all a mystery as to what happened to them. “These experienced hikers cut themselves out of their tent and walked away with inadequate footwear and died. And nobody could figure out why.”
These places are creepy, eerie, ghostly, and often feature UFOs, shapeshifters, murders, strange carvings, suicides, monstrous creatures, or curses. The author gives us a history of each place and why it’s awful, along with his personal experience of traveling there. These accounts range from the eerily plausible to the downright silly. The author provides a nice list of recommended reading.
“This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History” by Beverly Gage presents 13 five-to-ten-day road trips through regions where significant historical events took place. She visited about 300 “historic sites, museums, battlefields, parks, monuments and roadside attractions” to get a view of our shared history and how America came to be what it is. She travels from the Revolutionary War battle sites in New England to California’s “Disneyland, the single most influential historic attraction in U.S. history.” She writes quite a bit about the civil rights movement and the mistreatment of slaves, indigenous people, and Japanese-Americans. She writes, “It’s possible ... to know your history and still love your country. Americans can be patriots and critics, citizens and dissenters, all at once.” It’s not a real travel guide, as she offers no particulars for travelers, but she does offer pages of titles for recommended reading.
Along the same lines is “Revolutionary Road Trip: Hidden Stories from America’s Founding Journey” by Darley Newman, the host of TV’s “Travels with Darley.” She visits stops around battlefields and important sites of the American Revolution.
Happy reading!