Read this again because we ended up doing it for book club, and on this second pass found myself again struck by the writing, which is wonderful not only at a sentence level but also in its structuring and use of imagery and language within each individual story and indeed across the whole collection.
Take the metaphor/figure of the bobcat in the title story, rendered in poetically elliptical terms but arriving with the precisely weighted timing and impact characteristic of the short story form - and its tacit return in another form in the closing piece, "Settlers". Or "The Banks of the Vistula", with its careful, allusive attention to language and its forms and possibilities:
First, of the professors: Occasionally during class you could see hope for us rising in them, and then they would look like great birds flying over an uncertain landscape, asking mysterious questions, trying to lead us somewhere we could not yet go.
Stasselova lecturing: "The reason for the sentence is to express the verb - a change, a desire. But the verb cannot stand alone; it needs to be supported, to be realized by a body, and thus the noun ... This is the power of the sentence ... It acts out this drama of control and subversion. The noun always stands for what is, the status quo, and the verb for what might be, the ideal."
After the narrator, Margaret, burns the propaganda tract whose ideology so initially captures her: I heard about a thousand birds cry, and I craned my neck to see them lighting out from the tips of the elms. They looked like ideas would if released suddenly from the page and given bodies - shocked at how blood actually felt as it ran through the veins, as it sent them wheeling into the west, wings raking, straining against the requirements of such a physical world.
Stasselova, in one of his charged encounters with Margaret, speaking of how the line people draw between the things they consider 'this' and the things they consider 'that' is the perimeter of their sphere of intimacy, and then, a bit later: "This rain," he said then, in a quiet, astonished voice, and his word this entered me as it was meant to - quietly, with a sharp tip, but then, like an arrowhead, widening and widening, until it included the whole landscape around us.
And finally, Margaret's realisation, at her moment of crisis, that Stasselova's lesson is just about the sentence: the importance of, the sweetness of; a new metaphor, the sentence, a longing to leap into the subject, that sturdy vessel traveling upstream through the axonal predicate into what is possible; into the object, which is all possibility; into what little we know of the future, of eternity; and a perfectly underplayed closing image calling back to all of the above (language, what it carries, the arrow, the symbolism of the birds) - Above Stasselova's head the storm clouds were dispersing as if frightened by some impending goodwill, and I could see that the birds were out again, forming into that familiar pointy hieroglyph, as they're told to do from deep within.
Quite something.
(last time, a couple of months back)
Take the metaphor/figure of the bobcat in the title story, rendered in poetically elliptical terms but arriving with the precisely weighted timing and impact characteristic of the short story form - and its tacit return in another form in the closing piece, "Settlers". Or "The Banks of the Vistula", with its careful, allusive attention to language and its forms and possibilities:
First, of the professors: Occasionally during class you could see hope for us rising in them, and then they would look like great birds flying over an uncertain landscape, asking mysterious questions, trying to lead us somewhere we could not yet go.
Stasselova lecturing: "The reason for the sentence is to express the verb - a change, a desire. But the verb cannot stand alone; it needs to be supported, to be realized by a body, and thus the noun ... This is the power of the sentence ... It acts out this drama of control and subversion. The noun always stands for what is, the status quo, and the verb for what might be, the ideal."
After the narrator, Margaret, burns the propaganda tract whose ideology so initially captures her: I heard about a thousand birds cry, and I craned my neck to see them lighting out from the tips of the elms. They looked like ideas would if released suddenly from the page and given bodies - shocked at how blood actually felt as it ran through the veins, as it sent them wheeling into the west, wings raking, straining against the requirements of such a physical world.
Stasselova, in one of his charged encounters with Margaret, speaking of how the line people draw between the things they consider 'this' and the things they consider 'that' is the perimeter of their sphere of intimacy, and then, a bit later: "This rain," he said then, in a quiet, astonished voice, and his word this entered me as it was meant to - quietly, with a sharp tip, but then, like an arrowhead, widening and widening, until it included the whole landscape around us.
And finally, Margaret's realisation, at her moment of crisis, that Stasselova's lesson is just about the sentence: the importance of, the sweetness of; a new metaphor, the sentence, a longing to leap into the subject, that sturdy vessel traveling upstream through the axonal predicate into what is possible; into the object, which is all possibility; into what little we know of the future, of eternity; and a perfectly underplayed closing image calling back to all of the above (language, what it carries, the arrow, the symbolism of the birds) - Above Stasselova's head the storm clouds were dispersing as if frightened by some impending goodwill, and I could see that the birds were out again, forming into that familiar pointy hieroglyph, as they're told to do from deep within.
Quite something.
(last time, a couple of months back)
