In this astounding novel, we are given the story of Thomas Sutpen, a man who came out of the West Virginia mountains with nothing to his name, arriving in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833 to build a fortune and carve out a plantation, expecting to found a dynasty. We learn about him only indirectly, through the stories that are told to young Quentin Compson. About to leave for Harvard, Quentin endures the wisteria-scented heat of September listening to Miss Rosa Coldfield, whose sister married Sutpen and bore him two children, and his father, whose own father had been Sutpen's only friend. Once in the deadly cold of his Harvard dorm, Quentin and his roommate Shreve, a milk-fed Canadian encountering the twisted kudzu of the South for the first time, continue to try to wrestle the bits of story into a narrative that makes sense.

Each new fragment reveals and occludes the few bare facts, suggesting motives and rationales for everyone involved. New facts shift the pattern in a kaleidoscope whirl. Faulkner has said that no one character has the true story, but the reader can come to it. In last week's blog, I mentioned the impossibility of truly knowing someone's life. Here, where we do not hear from Sutpen himself, we find a mosaic assembled from what these others say about him which may turn out to be the most truthful way to get at the reality of another person and what is in his or her heart.

Faulkner describes language as “that meager and fragile thread . . . by which the little surface corners and edges of men's secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into the darkness where the spirit cried for the first time and was not heard and will cry for the last time and will not be heard then either.”

I believe this is true, that what binds us together is language and the stories that we tell.

It is almost impossible for me to read Faulkner with my writer's glasses on. This is my third time reading this particular novel, maybe my fourth. Each time (after the first) I thought Okay, now I'll really pay attention. And each time I've gotten swept up again in the dramatic flood of his language: a dizzying, poetic, mad rush of words. I binged on Faulkner as a teen, reading everything I could lay my hands on. I fell into his Yoknapatawpha County as into an alternate world and traced the lineages of the Compson, Sartoris and Snopes families through various novels and stories. I got drunk on his language, his sentences that went on and on yet made perfect sense and could not be any shorter.

Yet in an earlier reading, I managed to recognise that Sutpen is an avatar for the South, the old South of plantations and slavery that seceded from the U.S. and thus instigated the Civil War. Sutpen has that combination of hubris, courage, innocence, and greed; he believes that it is fine to use other people heartlessly in order to reach his own ends. And what trips him up is the fatal flaw that destroyed that South and continues to be the original sin that this country cannot get past.

And I'd marked what he said about women, as Rosa says: “I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward—and then endure.”

In this reading I was taken with the structure of the book. Revelations are carefully meted out. The scene of Sutpen's son Henry in school with the dandy, Charles Bon, at the beginning is echoed by Quentin and Shreve at the end. Sutpen as a barefoot child is turned away from the front door of a mansion, setting in action his long quest, and then he himself turns a young man away—figuratively—by not acknowledging him as his son.

Or did he? I still don't know the truth of it. Yes, through all the bits and pieces I can see a narrative that makes sense, but I don't know that it is true. It is only what I'm told.

I've waited a couple of weeks to write about this book, but my thoughts still haven't settled. They are like the birds at the feeder, startling up at the slightest shadow into a flurry of wings. Ondaatje's books always give me plenty to think about, and this one is no exception.

The first part is about Anna and Claire, two teenaged sisters who live on a farm in Northern California with their father and a young man named Coop. The father had brought Coop from the neighboring farm to help with the work and learn to be a farmer after Coop's family was murdered. Older than the girls, Coop moves out to and restores the cabin that the girls' grandfather had built when he first came to stake his claim. The story moves between the three young people, circling around the incidents and stories that make up their past.

Details bring their lives into vivid focus: “Coop, who with his confidence would sweep a hay bale over his shoulder and walk to the barn lighting a cigarette with his free hand.” And “Sometimes Claire and I would come down the hill with the car lights turned off in complete blackness. Or we would climb from our bedroom window onto the skirt of the roof and lie flat on our backs on the large table-rock, still warm from the day, and talk and sing into the night. We counted out seconds between meteor showers slipping horizontal across the heavens.”

Later sections follow Anna, Claire and Coop as they move out into the world, scattered by an act of violence. Only Claire returns regularly from her job in San Francisco to visit her father and ride the high ridges of the farm. Coop has become a gambler, while Anna is in France, researching the life of a nearly-forgotten poet, Lucien Segura. She lives in his now-empty house and meets a young Romany named Rafael who once knew the author.

There are lovely structural parallels in the story. Rafael, Segura, and the three young people all are affected by fathers and stepfathers, their crafts and mistakes and disappearances. Segura's empty house echoes the grandfather's abandoned cabin and the deserted town of Allensworth in Southern California which Anna stops in during her flight from her father. The Central Plain of California, stark and barren, through which she travels was once a sea of flowers, like the depression in Segura's lawn that was once a pond. The story moves in and out of the past, setting up reflections and remnants.

Anna walks Segura's paths, swims in his stream, and sits at his blue table translating his work. She learns that she can hide in art, take refuge in the third person. I love the moment when she falls in love with the task, listening to Segura read some of his work on an old cylinder. “There was a sweet shadow and hesitance in Segura. it was like a ruined love, and it was familiar to me.” It reminded me of a recent conversation with my friend, Steve, when he told me of a casual comment that made him want to know more, and thus set him on his life's work. It also reminded me of a recent Writer's Almanac segment about Stephen Ambrose and how a professor's comment that a research paper “would add to the sum of the world's knowledge” changed his life.

What I find myself returning to again and again is Anna's quixotic effort to capture and preserve the past, Segura's past. A single life is short and buried in the flood of all the lives that come after and around it. You devote your life to accruing knowledge and experience. You expend considerable effort in shaping it into a coherent whole, and then you die and all of that is gone and no one really knows what it was like to be you. Marty introduced me to a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “People”, which has these lines: “To each his world is private . . . In any man who dies there dies with him / his first snow and kiss and fight / it goes with him . . Not people die but worlds die in them.”

The last part of the book gives us what Anna will never know: Segura's story. We find out why he left his family to come alone to the house where she sits, how Rafael met him, and why the blue table is important. Whole peoples have gone, whole towns deserted or drowned. We wonder about the Anasazi, the Mayans, the Minoans. We read about Colette or Wague and wonder What was it like to be you? The birds rise up again and then resettle in a different pattern.

I like reading books set in familiar places, but can also be entranced by those set in places where I'd like to go. Cara Black's mysteries featuring Aimee Leduc as a detective who mostly works computer security are set in Paris, a place that is high on my bucket list. Leduc is assisted by René Friant, only four feet tall, but dapper and wise.

On the very first page, as Leduc struggles to finish a system upgrade within the deadline, this story is launched by a phone call. A woman's voice begs her to go down to the courtyard, promising that it will only be for a few hours. When Leduc, armed with her Beretta carefully explores the courtyard, she finds a baby hidden behind the garbage containers. And we're off into a whirl of danger made even more frenetic by her attempts to care for the baby.

Black draws even the most minor of characters with a fine brush, such as the homeless man, Jules, with whom she takes refuge, or Jean Caplan who owns a dusty second-hand shop and tries to watch out for and feed Helene, an elderly woman whose life is packed into shopping bags. Black captures both the young and rebellious heir to a long-gone Polish monarchy and his uncle, an elderly Count hanging onto his memories, avoiding stereotypes and bring them both alive with small details and surprising inconsistencies.

Where Black really shines, or at least what delights me most are her descriptions of Paris, the back streets and hidden courtyards, the stones lining the Seine, the tunnels below. Leduc lives on the Ile Saint-Louis, a small island in the middle of the river, originally a “feudal island fortress”, now only eight blocks long and three blocks wide whose inhabitants refer to the rest of Paris as “the Continent”. Black shades the people and places with subtle references to the city's past. The faded aristocrats and the down-and-out both suffer the long reach of tragedy.

This is yet another excellent entry in the series: smart, fast-paced and full of heart. I highly recommend it.

I hadn't read anything of Styron's since Sophie's Choice but picked this up because I was spending a week in the Tidewater area of Virginia. The three stories making up the book are linked by having a common protagonist, Paul Whitehead. Set during the Depression and World War II, the stories present Paul's memories, based, as the Author's Note tells us, on Styron's own experiences. The tone of the stories avoids nostalgia and sentiment, giving us the boy's experiences unmediated by the experience of age.

The third story, which provides the name of the collection, is a masterpiece. On the morning in question, a brutally hot one, Paul is awakened at 1 a.m. by his mother's scream. In the last stages of cancer, her pain cannot be mitigated even by the morphine delivered by the night nurse. Forgotten, Paul lingers around the edges of the house where his mother is dying, overhearing his father's increasingly despairing conversations, taking comfort from the maid, Flo, who is legendary in the town for her crankiness, and examining his own memories of his parents arguing.

If I were teaching a class on the short story, I would have the students study this one carefully. It succeeds on all levels. The word choice reflects the vocabulary of a thirteen-year-old boy who likes to read, as we know from the books in his room. The things that he thinks about and notices—his guilt over drinking directly out of the water bottle in the refrigerator, the rankness of the chicken necks boys are using to catch crabs, his worry over what the changes in his body mean—are also typical and beautifully rendered in sentences that ache with clarity and emotion.

The organization of the story amazes me, the way answers are given and withheld, the echoes and repetitions, the gentle foreshadowing, the voices of the people in his world. Gruff Mr. Quigley docks Paul's pay for every soda and harangues Ralph, the store drudge, yet shows his compassionate side first to Ralph and later to Paul. Flo listens to radio preachers in the night and tries to comfort Paul with her faith, while later attempts by the Presbyterian minister and his wife to comfort Paul's father, a stalwart of the church, draw only a shocking contempt for a god who could allow such pain. The headlines of approaching war on the papers Paul delivers are echoed later as he trudges the street by the Flying Fortresses from the Army base down the road flying over him. And these signs of war are themselves premonitions of the death and grief to come.

The story takes on even more meaning when set against the other stories in the book. In the first story, “Love Day”, Paul is 20 and serving as a platoon leader in the Pacific. As he and his shipmates fret about when they will actually join the assault on Okinawa, Paul recalls an incident from childhood when their Oldsmobile broke down near a peanut field, and his father, although an engineer helping to build warships, is unable to fix it. Paul's remarks on a story in The Saturday Evening Post he's reading about a possible Japanese invasion earn him a tongue-lashing from his mother who loves the Japanese culture and upbraids him for reading trashy, scare-mongering stories. His father, who never raises his voice, a gentle poet somehow caught up in building war machines, snaps and tells her not to be such a fool, asking what she thinks he does all day, what she thinks the Flying Fortresses are that fly overhead every Sunday.

In the second story, “Shadrach”, Paul is ten and caught up with a family called the Dabneys, who have come down in the world, the father a bootlegger and the mother “a huge sweaty generous breadloaf of a woman”. An only child, he loves their “sheer teeming multitude” of seven children and loud eccentric life. One day, an ancient and emaciated black man turns up, Shadrach, who has walked from Alabama to die on Dabney land, 75 years after Mr. Dabney's great-grandfather sold him. Through dissolute generations since, the once-proud plantation has been reduced to a dilapidated box home made of concrete blocks.The struggling family nevertheless tries to honor the wishes of this all too human (and rank) reminder of their past.

The past and how it informs our present is one of the threads brought out by the proximity of these stories, as is the expectation of war, the small wars with those around us and the mechanized war of nations. But mostly the stories are about what it means to be a man, trying to protect your family and honor your legacy, taking refuge from emotion in gruffness and in words. This last reminds me of Ian McEwan's Solar which was also partially about hiding from emotion in words. McEwan's trademark of having some violent event intrude on normal life and set the story in motion seemed to me contrived after Styron's remarkable stories of the chaos that can upend our small and private lives.

Songs are stories, too, even when there are no words. Thanks to my friends for all the great music and for all the sweet dances.

The Jolly Tinker, Jeff Warner
Mandalay, Jeff Warner
The Bonny Bay Of Biscay-O, Jeff Warner
Across The Blue Mountains, Suzannah & Georgia Rose
Hallowell, Suzannah & Georgia Rose
Travelers Prayer, Suzannah & Georgia Rose
Narrow Space, Suzannah Park & Nathan Morrison
Darlin' Corey, Suzannah Park & Nathan Morrison
Amelia , Suzannah Park & Nathan Morrison
Man Of Constant Sorrow, Suzannah Park & Nathan Morrison
Three Pieces By O'Carolan: The Lamentation of Owen Roe O'Neill / Lord Inchiquin / Mrs. Power, John Renbourn
4×32 Strathspeys – Young Ivercauld's / Appin House / Gordon Castle / Bonnie Beatons, Waverley Station
Arran Boat/Paddy Fahey's/Devlin's/Bagdad Bully, Alexander Mitchell
Monongahela Sal, The NewLanders
Hard Times, The NewLanders
Run, Johnny Run, The NewLanders
There'll Be Some Changes Made, House Top
Do I Worry, House Top
What'll I Do, House Top
Over the Rainbow, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
True Life Near , Craig Taborn
Diamond Turning Dream, Craig Taborn
Neverland, Craig Taborn
Spirit Hard Knock, Craig Taborn
Forgetful, Craig Taborn
Bird on a Wire , Jennifer Warnes
Total Eclipse of the Heart, Bonnie Tyler
Rocky Beaches, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
Snow Drop, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
Bethany Beach, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
Needle Case, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
Southern Cross, Ken Kolodner, Brad Kolodner
The Cordwainer's March/Mick Walsh's/Road To Banff, Ken Kolodner & Elke Baker
Purple Lillies, Ken Kolodner & Elke Baker
Booth Shot Lincoln/Moneymusk, Ken Kolodner & Elke Baker
Shebeg An Sheemor, Happy Traum
Delia's Gone, Happy Traum
White Oak Mountain / Kitchen Girl, Sally Rogers
Planxty Fanny Power, Sally Rogers

This has been an odd year for me. I read fewer books than usual, but among them are some that will go on the best-of-a-lifetime list.

1. To the End of the Land, by David Grossman

This is one of the most deeply moving books I’ve ever read and it has stayed with me long after I closed the cover. No other fiction I’ve read comes close to capturing as this book does what it means to be a parent or what it means to belong to a land.

2. Precious Bane, by Mary Webb

First published in 1926, Precious Bane is a novel about life in a village in the Ellesmere district of Shropshire. It captures the sumptuous beauty of rural life in the pre-industrial past but also the superstition, brutality and terror, thus providing a realistic picture of what is often sentimentalised as Merrie England.

3. In the Temple of a Patient God, by Bejan Matur

Matur’s poems ache with power. Her words and images barely control the deep, rumbling force that threatens to explode in blinding light. A Kurdish Alevi from Southeastern Turkey, she draws on that dark heritage of war and defeat and loss and exile to create the poems in this collection.

4. Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell

Everyone talked about the film, but the book is better. Woodrell’s economical prose captures life in this remote valley in the Ozarks without sentimental hand-wringing, with just the calm clarity of purpose that moves sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly through her day.

5. The Forest of Sure Things, Poems by Megan Snyder-Camp

I ended up reading this collection four times. The first time I just enjoyed the words, the sound of them, the flow. The second time I read for images, lingering over each poem and letting resonances collect in the space between them. The third time I read for meaning. I let everything go for my fourth reading, allowing words, images, and meaning to merge into an extraordinary experience.

6. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

In compelling prose, Skloot tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman from rural Virginia, who died of cancer in 1951 in Johns Hopkins Hospital. Cells harvested from her tumor, in accordance with the standard practice of the time, became the first cells that could be grown in a laboratory, a huge advance for medicine because they enabled researchers to run tests in laboratories instead of on live people. Yet Henrietta’s family knew nothing of the continued existence of her cells nor of the contributions to society they enabled.

7. Journey from the North: Autobiography of Storm Jameson

In her long life (1891-1986), Jameson wrote over 45 novels and served as President of the London center of the P.E.N., the first woman to do so. This narrative captures the vitality of life as we live it: a jumble from beginning to end, sprinkled with mistakes, false starts, and moments of unreasoning joy.

8. The Solace of Leaving Early, by Haven Kimmel

Langston Braverman has come home to her small town of Haddington, Indiana, simply walking out of her PhD orals and abandoning that life and all its dreams. She takes refuge in the hot attic of her parents’ home where she imagines that she is writing a novel. Or maybe an epic sonnet sequence. In reality she is mostly sleeping and contemplating the wreck of her life. I found the book smart and funny and unexpected.

9. Breaker, by Sue Sinclair

This is the third book of poetry from the Toronto-based Sinclair, though the first one I’ve read. Or rather, immersed myself in, since I’ve read and reread it, set the book aside for a few months, and read it again. Poets are often advised to go deeper, to make space for more profound meaning to emerge. Sinclair’s poems make me look at the things of this world in a new way.

10. Searching for Caleb, by Anne Tyler

In discussing The Help, I said that the relationship between domestic help and their employers was more complicated than Stockton’s book indicated. For a more nuanced view, I went back to this Anne Tyler novel from 1975. While the relationship between the Pecks and their long-time maid Sulie is a very small part of the story, it is a crucial one and Tyler nails it. In just a couple of scenes she captures the conflicting emotions that drive their behavior towards each other. It is a privilege to read this woman’s writing.

11. Sketches from a Hunter's Album, by Ivan Turgenev

Beautiful descriptions, fascinating characters, and a realistic picture of the plight of the Russian peasants just prior to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

12. The Most Dangerous Thing, by Laura Lippman

The death of Gordon “Go-Go” Halloran brings together four people who had been inseparable for a few years in the late 1970s but have since lost touch. Dickeyville, where the story is set, is a most peculiar neighborhood even in a city known for its colorful neighborhoods. The quality of memories, individual and shared, and the use to which we put them are always concerns of Lippman’s, but here there is also the idea of venturing out of the everyday world into woods where, as in a fairy tale, anything can happen.

I subscribe to a fair number of literary magazines, far more than I can read, to be honest. Mostly I cycle around, subscribing to different ones, but there are a couple of standards that I'm not willing to give up, even for a year. One of these is The Sun.

Proudly ad-free, The Sun always repays my attention with excellent writing and strong insights. It starts with an interview, which I'm sometimes tempted to skip over it, but I've learned that there are always at least a few nuggets that will make me sit up and pay attention. The rest of the magazine is full of strong, personal stories. Most are nonfiction, but one or two are fiction. There are a couple of poems, lots of striking black and white photos, and a section called Reader's Write, where readers send in short pieces on a particular topic.

I'm choosing one recent issue to discuss—November 2011—because it seemed particularly outstanding to me. The cover is a gorgeous photo by Gary Harwood taken at a dance competition. Shot from above, one woman in perfect focus appears to be standing still,looking up, her skirt a mandala around her, while other dancers are a spinning blur. Her expression outdoes the Mona Lisa as she stares into your eyes with an inscrutable expression.

The interview with Michael Meade centers on the need for stories. He says that “We have a seeded self that begins to germinate at birth. Our true goal in life is to become that self.” He talks about working with a group of young people, telling them stories about initiations and young people “finding their souls.” A dance was to follow his talk and he told them, “‘understand who you are in the midst of the dance. No one else is dancing the same way you are. So be in the big dance of life, but also be yourself in the big dance.'” Then when the music started, the young people started dancing up to him saying “‘I'm showing you who I am.'” Gave me chills.

I liked the poem “Loving a Woman” by Ellen Bass. In just a few lines, she recreates a day and places me right in it. She uses unexpected words and strong verbs: “The day was warm, / a thrum of insects, budding of cells, / the fat leaves opening their pores . . .” I felt the water of the stream washing over me and felt the sun “pouring into the mouths / of the leaves as they stirred . . .”

My favorite piece is by Brian Doyle, someone who turns up regularly in these pages. “Elson Habib, Playing White, Ponders His First Move” starts with Elson considering the queen's pawn and remembering his grandfather's advice. And from there, the middle of the first sentence until the end, we are plunged into the voice of the grandfather, talking to the child Elson as they play. The grandfather talks about pawns and sly bishops, describing people he has played such as a man from Alexandria who “would sacrifice pawns on purpose sometimes to set himself an imbroglio.” He is a romantic, saying “Imagination is the great secret of chess, not experience.” Doyle stays in character beautifully as the old man imparts life-lessons slant-wise, talking about slurping tea from a saucer and light that falls like golden dust. Doyle also uses repetition effectively, repeating a phrase just often enough to add depth to the character.

Another piece, excerpted from Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations reminds me that people have a tendency to laziness and timidity. “In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience — why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality . . . We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence . . we want to be the true helmsman of this existence.” But he adds that “it is a painful and dangerous undertaking thus to tunnel into oneself.”

The essays, being true, often plumb these dangerous depths, prompting some readers to complain in letters to the editor that the magazine is too dark. One in this issue hurt me to read, but I was glad I did. “Baby Lollipops” by Jaquira Diaz, is about a dead toddler in the local news when Diaz was a young girl just after her parents divorced. At first she and her little sister live with her father and his mother, but then they are stolen by their mother, a drug addict. Diaz can't stop thinking about the toddler, who had apparently been killed by his mother. “We are supposed to love our mothers. We are supposed to trust them and need them and miss them when they're gone. But what if that same person,the one who's supposed to love you more than anyone else in the world, the one who's supposed to protect you, is also the one who hurts you the most?” I thought of the lovely essay my friend Fernando Quijano wrote about his mother; it too is about how we find and create a way to go on and still see beauty and still be able to love.

That's why I keep reading this magazine. Try it. Just one issue and you'll be hooked.

Set in the brooding moorland of England's Peak District, the story concerns the murder of young Neil Granger and the disappearance two years earlier of his friend, nineteen-year-old Emma Renshaw. DC Ben Cooper, temporarily assigned to the Rural Crime Unit, works the murder as well as a rash of thefts while DS Diane Fry is given the missing persons case, revived by the discovery of Emma's blood-stained cell phone. One name keeps coming up when the talk turns to crime and the small town of Withins: the Oxleys. They are behind the pranks, the fires, and—some believe—the burglaries. Anything bad going down in the Withens area must have the incorrigible Oxleys behind it.

This is the fourth book in the series featuring Fry and Cooper which includes One Last Breath. I'd actually read this book before, but it's been long enough that I didn't remember the details. Listening to the audio version added some layers I hadn't been quite so aware of before. The accents used for different characters placed them firmly within the class structure that persists in England and reinforced the story. Every time she spoke, Diane Fry's accent reminded me that she was from a lower class than Ben Cooper, contributing to the defensiveness natural to a woman succeeding in the man's world of the police force. Even without their reputation, the Oxleys' accents would have aroused prejudice. Sure that no one in authority would listen to them, it was no wonder the Oxleys operated outside the law. They have their close-knit family and their traditions, reminding me of the Ozark families in Winter's Bone.

What I did recall about the book was that morris dancers were involved, both Cotswold and Border morris. Morris is a traditional performance dance from the English countryside. It was mentioned in Shakespeare and was part of the traditional village life that Hardy memorialized in his Wessex novels. The dance predates written records, so no one knows its exact origin. It is thought that the name derived from the term for Moors, due to the old custom of dancers blacking their faces. Booth worked closely with a local team to get his details right, and his research pays off in accurate descriptions of the dances, the traditions, and even the good-humored rivalry between Cotswold and Border dancers. Booth's accuracy is important to me because I am a morris dancer. Jane Austen and others wrote about the traditional social dances—country dances and quadrilles—but it's rare to find a mention of the performance dances in literature. It's a comfort to stumble across something so familiar in the course of your difficult day, like suddenly seeing a friend or hearing your favorite O'Carolan tune. Your heart just opens.

Not that you need to know anything about morris dancing to enjoy this book. The pacing is good; the characters interesting; and the setting spectacular. This time through, I especially enjoyed the scraps of the region's history, the navvies who dug the huge tunnels for the trains and their deplorable living conditions. Perhaps “enjoyed” isn't the right word. Reading about the decision to continue using men to dig the tunnels even after machines became available because men were cheaper made me sad and furious. These tunnels in particular had the highest death rate for navvies, from accidents and cholera and malnutrition. Thinking of the 99% and the Occupy movements, it seems nothing has changed. People's lives count for nothing against the possibility of making a fortune. I think of all those railroad barons with more money than they could ever spend, and all those who died building the railroads.

I take comfort from Booth's rounded presentation of the Oxleys. They are neither stereotypical louts nor the saintly poor; simply people using their limited resources to do what they think best. And I take comfort, too, from the way—as in all the best mysteries—chaos resolves into the order of a satisfying conclusion.

Since my memoir came out last summer, I've been teaching some memoir writing workshops, and one question I always hear is How do I start? There are several answers to this question, but one of my favorites is to write little bits as they come to you and then after a while see what you've got, see what makes you want to write more. In the future, I will recommend they read this book.

Winik gives us brief portraits of people in her life who have died. While Spoon River Anthology is her model, these are all real people, and the stories are from the author's point of view rather than that of the dead person. No names; instead each person is identified by some trait, such as The Skater or The Mah Jongg Player. In just a few pages she gives us a strong sense of the person. Each chapter is quite brilliant, though some are more wrenching than others: she writes of her first husband's death, her first child's.

Writing a whole book seems overwhelming. Writing a single scene or a character sketch feels much more manageable, but in fact writing a short piece well is much more difficult. I always find it much easier to write five pages about something than to condense it to one paragraph. Winik succeeds by providing vivid snippets and not falling into a formula. Sometimes she recounts an incident to bring a person to life, sometimes description, like The Jeweler who looked like a Bavarian elf, sometimes just a brief summary. But always her details are vivid and a bit wacky like this summary of The Bon Vivant's background: “He was the youngest of three boys raised in the swamps of East Texas by a Jewish salesman of women's clothing, and all three emerged from that thicket with elegant Southern manners, true modesty, and rare taste.”

Although The Graduate and The Last Brother made me cry, I think my favorite is The Queen of New Jersey who had everything until “As in a fairy tale, everything went wrong.” I think I like it because I've known so many people like this, people whom I thought had it all figured out when it turns that they just haven't been tested yet.

Because of the consistent narrator, this collection of short pieces add up to a memoir, a bit impressionistic perhaps, but the sense of a life. It is this sense of life that keeps the book from being depressing. If we live long enough, we all enter what Jane Smiley calls “The Age of Grief”. People we know have died. People we love have died. And each death marks us in some way.

In the Author's Note Winik says that the book started as an exercise in a writing workshop. Beginning to write about The Jeweler and how he died, she says, “I felt my brain begin to crowd up, as if tickets to a show had just gone on sale and all my ghosts were screeching up at the box office.” Every writer, if she's lucky, knows that feeling.

A writing acquaintance recommended this book as one of the best at providing a sense of place. I have to agree with that assessment. Here the place is the Russian countryside where Turgenev grew up. A member of the gentry just prior to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Turgenev's concern with the plight of the peasants he encounters fuels these stories.

Even though a journeyman writer—these are his earliest published writings—Turgenev succeeds brilliantly at writing fiction that reveals a political slant while preventing the politics from overwhelming the story. This is always a difficult task. As Orwell said, “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.” How Turgenev does it is twofold. First, influenced by Gogol and Dostoevsky, he writes in a realist manner, depicting the peasants, their meagre huts, and the injustices they suffer in a straight-forward manner. Secondly, his narrator is simply an observer, rarely taking an active role or even commenting on what he sees or is told. He lets the peasants and their circumstances speak for themselves.

I guess they spoke pretty loudly: after the book was published in 1852, Turgenev was arrested and then exiled to his estate.

Prior to being collected in book form, these stories were published in The Contemporary, a Russian journal. They do read a little like writing exercises—a character sketch here, a nature description there—so I could almost see him preparing to write a novel. I'm not interested in hunting—I agree with the peasant nicknamed Flea who says of undomesticated beasts and birds, “and a sin it is to be killing such a one, it should be let to live on the earth until its natural end . . .”—but there's actually very little about that. Mostly Turgenev writes about people and places.

The injustices, recounted in a matter-of-fact tone by peasants who expect no more, infuriated me. For instance, there's the farmer Ovsyanikov who when prompted by the narrator as to whether the old days weren't better, says he has no reason to praise the old days. The narrator, he says, is a landowner but not the kind of man his granddad was. Ovsyanikov mentions a patch of land and says, “Your granddad took it off us. He rode up, pointed, said: ‘That's my property,' and took it.”

There are other fascinating characters: two friends, one blustery and one shy, who support and care for each other; an older woman with simple tastes who indulges her artistic nephew; Old Knot whose masters kept moving him from job to job: coachman, cook, fisherman, shoemaker, pageboy, even an actor in his mistress's theatre. Most touching of all is Lukeria, whom the narrator finds in a shed when sheltering from a storm. She had once been a maid in his mother's household, the most beautiful and lively of them all. But now she has fallen prey to a wasting disease, cannot move, can barely eat. Yet she does not complain, but speaks gratefully of the kindness of the villagers who care for her and feed her. She dreams and prays and, when she has the strength, she sings.

Most of all I love the descriptions. As promised I found myself walking through the woods with the narrator, among the “wispy pink runners” of wild strawberries and mushrooms in “tight family clusters.” We lie on our backs and watch the peaceful play of the entwined leaves against the high, clear sky . . . and then suddenly . . . these branches and leaves suffused with sunlight, all of it suddenly begins to stream in the wind, shimmers with a fugitive brilliance, and a fresh, tremulous murmuration arises which is like the endless shallow splashing of oncoming ripples.” Or we go driving on a country road under newly washed willows with larks rising by the hundreds overhead. “On an upland beyond a shallow valley a peasant is ploughing. A dappled foal with short little tail and ruffled mane runs on uncertain legs behind its mother and one can hear its high-pitched neighing. We drive into a birch wood . . .” I could linger here for a long time.