Dear reader,
Anyone who is not good at meditation will be familiar with the tension you get when you try to force Serenity. There's nothing worse than being told to relax, especially when you're issuing your own order.
Instead of trying to clean up my mind with more direct means, I have been drawn to contemplative novels and poetry this spring. Two of them for your consideration.
– Molly
First, the location. Radenham is a rural village in England. The time is 1980. The light industry is booming, with new homes rising to acquire the excess spill that flourished from London.
The “Judgment Day” drama revolves around a volunteer committee to restore local churches. Members include pastors with nasty fantasy lives, clever and stifled housewife, sadly retired accountant and blowhard. Despite the fact that no one is interested in church architecture, the meeting is heated with small slight gazes, daring gazes, fragile alliances and hostile invasions.
I overlooked this little novel in my previous lively adventures of Penelope, so maybe it's my favorite now. Punctuation marks are also used very well. Praise the following sentence in which the mother watches her young child on a picnic:
Claire believes that children's bodies have the same bounty as plants. They spread, reach and bend, helping to the atmosphere, providing light, warmth and nourishment. They have no posture or mechanism. They are indifferent: they are delighted in the eyes.
Read it if you like: Tessa Hadley, Sally Rooney, Margaret Drabre, and the 1945 David Lean film, Brief Encounter.
Available: Good library or bookstore.
In a rare example of the accuracy of the publicity, one of the supporters printed in this book compares to writing to the melting of ether in “snowflakes of the tongue.” The comments come from the “Ghosn Ghosn” genre puzzle, read as a combination of poetry and field notes about the opioid crisis, but author Todd Myers describes it as “essays and ethnography,” and backcovers as “creative non-fiction” and “medical anthropology.” Everything seems right. Good luck to the brave librarian tasked with determining the shelf for this wonder!
In soft, photographic prose, Myers documents and expands the lives of the three (or characters?). Over the past 20 years, we have seen many excellent reports and fiction about events of mass victims who are addicted to opioids. This is the first account I've found and I have to breathe rather than read. It's easy and complicated.
Read it if you like: “How to Stop Time: From Heroin to Z,” by Anne Marlowe. “Vector” by James Richardson. Sarah Mangooso's Guardian: Elegy for Friends. Annie Elny.
Available: Duke University Press.
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