Port William novel series by Wendell Berry
I love a book with a map and family tree, don’t you? Anyone who knows me knows I am severely directionally dyslexic and maps do me no good in finding my way (GPS changed my life -- I need words telling me left, right, and straight), but I love maps like the one in this book,
, the first (I think) book in the Port William novels by Wendell Berry. I have a set of hardcover versions of
The Lord of the Rings
series, and it has maps like this. They’re a treasure.
I read
Nathan Coulter
last night. My night was one of those (many) nights where I wake up in the wee hours of the morning feeling quite awake. The novel is short, so I finished the whole thing. I started on another in the series,
Remembering
. I had ordered two to see if I like them. Now I’ve ordered them all. So much for not gaining more books and spending less on them. I did buy several used, so that kind of counts.
According to the internet, the order of the
is:
Publication Order of Port William Books
Nathan Coulter (1960)
The Wild Birds (1986)
Remembering (1988)
A World Lost (1996)
Two More Stories of the Port William Membership (1997)
Jayber Crow (2000)
That Distant Land (2002)
Hannah Coulter (2004)
Andy Catlett (2006)
A Place in Time (2012)
Publication Order of Port William Membership Books
A Place on Earth (1967)
The Memory of Old Jack (1974)
I don’t know what the deal is with “Port William Books” vs. “Port William Membership Books.” I’ll have to see if Google can tell me.
Nathan Coulter
is written in first person, with the person being Nathan Coulter. It starts with him as a young boy, living with his brother, father, and mother on a farm near Port William. On the map you can see the “Coulter Home Place” below the “Coulter Branch” of “The River.” I like the way the “branches” of the river are called that, and named after the family or home it branches off to. It reminds me of the road in Lynden, WA, that bears my maiden name, Kok Road. I was told a woman with the last name of Kok lived at the end of it.
Nathan’s grandfather and grandmother live nearby and are important characters in the book, as well as his Uncle Burley, whose “camp house” is labeled near the top of the map showing the house going through several owners. They own, live, and work on their tobacco farms. Wendell Berry is a tobacco farmer in Kentucky (as well as a novel writer, essayist, poet, and activist for agriculture). As I read the descriptions of the setting, I often imagined it looking like Tennessee, where we visited a few months ago. When Berry described the still air and the heat, I could feel it.
Berry’s writing is phenomenal. Simple but amazing. Spare but rich. I often start books thinking, I am going to read every single word, no skimming, even descriptions, and I start that way but find myself skimming, especially descriptions, in my eagerness to keep reading the story.
Remembering
, which I have not yet finished, is full of descriptions and inner thoughts that I did
not
skip and had no desire to. I started underlining beautiful sentences and dog-earing pages but I had to stop because I’d ruin the book. I have to write about a few of them.
Andy Catlett, the main character of
Remembering
(at least so far) is walking down a hotel hallway in the middle of the night,
going silently past the shut doors of rooms where people are sleeping or absent, who would know which? There is an almost palpable unwaking around him as he goes past the blank doors, intent upon his own silence, as though, his presence known to nobody, he is not there himself.
“an almost palpable unwaking” -- doesn’t that just glow on the page like a gem? Can’t you just imagine it? Doesn’t the whole sentence embody truly being alone? Blows me away.
And in another scene, Andy is walking from the hotel, in San Francisco (where he’s staying for a conference), and comes to a pier.
There, with the whole continent at his back, nothing between him and Asia but water, he stands again, leaning on the parapet, looking westward into the wind.
I pictured the way it feels when I’m standing on the pier in Capitola, when no one else is around. It strikes me with awe every time it happens, and wonder that I can be in this busy, big city and yet all alone on the edge of land that way. I never could have come up with the words to describe it so well as Berry does. “...with the whole continent at his back.” I suppose I could say, nothing between me and Moss Landing but water. Or me and Monterey. Not quite the same ring. If I zoom out far enough in Google Maps, I see I could say, nothing between me and Antartica. That’s a little better.
Berry’s description of Andy walking through San Francisco before dawn, out to the pier, is stunning. I want to say it’s “scrummy,” like Mary Berry on “The Great British Baking Show.”
Later, Andy does some remembering. He imagines scenes of his forefathers and their neighbors. In one part, he imagines two men who will be neighbors meeting for the first time. One says,
“I’ve got two grandboys. Wheeler’s. They’ll be over to bother you, I expect, now that the weather’s changing. You won’t offend me if you make ‘em mind.”
“They’ll be over to bother you…” “You won’t offend me if you make ‘em mind.”
I’ll stop now. I highly recommend these books!