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Title: The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry ISBN: 1582430438 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5
Rating: 5
Summary: Truth rings loud
Comment: Someone I know, thinks fiction is a waste of time. The other day he was praising the brilliance of the movie, An American Beauty(I didn't call him on the fact that it was a work of "fiction" he happened to be praising). I had rented the film because I still give the genre or medium its chances, but had to inform him directly that I pressed the STOP button on my vcr before too long. It was obvious that I'd insulted his sensibilities, but since he knew my reverence for serious fiction and had no problem insulting mine, I felt it was a fair trade. I have no idea why this book is not praised or offered as a benchmark of what stories can contribute to the fabric of humanity. Old Jack must have it pegged, "The Modern Ignorance."
Rating: 5
Summary: Old Jack's journey.
Comment: I arrived at this book after first reading Wendell Berry's recent novel, JAYBER CROW (2000). This earlier novel is about an inner journey. Having "lost his life," 92-year-old Jack Beechum finds it again (p. 122) by travelling into the "deepest depths of his memory" (p. 110), the part of Jack "that holds nearly all of him" (p. 9). Born in 1860, Jack was once known as "a dancer, a drinker, a wencher, a fighter" (p. 38), and as a horse breaker (p. 86). Berry also describes Jack as "a limited man," though "satisfied within those limits" (p. 50), and the "incarnation of his solitude" (p. 61).
Also set in Port William, Berry's beautiful novel opens in the "first cool morning of September, 1952" (p. 7) with Old Jack's vision turned inward from the "stillness of his old age" (p. 79). "More and more now the world as it is seems to him an apparition of a cloud that drifts, opening and closing, upon the clear, remembered lights and colors of the world as it was" (p. 17). "His mind," Jack thinks, "would do well to settle down and be quiet, for pretty soon he is going up on the hill for the long sleep that most people he knows have already gone off to" (p. 24).
"Meditating on his memories" (p. 116), Jack revisits one of "the most powerful themes of his life," the "anger of regret" (p. 31). Among other things, he confronts the silence of his lonely marriage to Ruth, "a silence he was less and less able to bear" (p. 49), and his extramarital love for another woman, Rose. Ruth "remained to him an unknown continent. She offered him no welcome" (p. 45). Jack remembers "they fought it out among those trivial issues that later would show them both the failure of each of them to be what the other desired" (p. 89).
Berry's writing here is as honest as the sweat and dirt of the field on his characters' clothes. Like silence, Old Jack is a good teacher. "The modern ignorance," he observes shortly before his death, "is in people's assumption that they can outsmart their own nature. It is in the arrogance that will believe nothing it cannot prove, and respect nothing it cannot understand, and value nothing it cannot sell" (pp. 141-42).
G. Merritt
Rating: 5
Summary: Beautiful, book, full of substance and health
Comment: A wonderfull book, subtle and true. Berry's writing reflectsthe land that he writes of - not ostentatious, but brimming with life.You will not find cheap sentiment or flashy colors but you will findrealness in Memory of Old Jack. I highly recommend.
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Title: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry ISBN: 1582431604 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: 18 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Fidelity: Five Stories by Wendell Berry ISBN: 0679748318 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: A Place on Earth: A Novel by Wendell Berry ISBN: 1582431248 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: 05 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: A World Lost by Wendell Berry ISBN: 1887178546 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: September, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
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Title: Two More Stories of the Port William Membership by Wendell Berry ISBN: 0917788710 Publisher: Gnomon Press Pub. Date: 17 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $10.50 |
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