Blind Tongues
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
For Merelene Durham it’s been fifteen years of coping, of determination not to lose her purchase on this world: a world that has become almost unendurable since her rakish husband, Mayfield, fled after encephalitis turned their son Roland’s mind into a strange, shell-holed country.
Blind Tongues is the story of what happens when Mayfield unexpectedly returns, and his conviction that a newly made fortune can make Roland whole again, of a brilliant local attorney whose body bears the scars of aviation heroics in World War II, and finally of Merelene herself, who must choose between these two competitors in love while trying to accept the sweet simplicity of her ageless son.
Sterling Watson, author of The Calling and Fighting in the Shade, has created a stunning evocation of a Florida coast town and of the people struggling for love and solace within its borders.
The Saint Petersburg Times said that “…Blind Tongues is a novel that merits, and repays, quiet absorption and careful reflection” and called it “unique and often deeply moving.”
And, The Washington Post said “…the poetry of Sterling Watson's prose and the depth of his attention to human connectedness keep you reading Blind Tongues.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Swinford, Fla., is a small town populated with stock characters, among them the novel's protagonist, Merelene Durham. She is an abandoned wifeand a survivor: the self-taught, indispensable secretary to and lover of the town lawyer. Then Merelene's husband, Mayfield, returns to Swinford a self-made millionaire and tries to reclaim his family. But their oldest son is fighting in Vietnam, and their youngest, Roland, the brain-damaged victim of a childhood bout of encephalitis, has been forcibly committed to a state mental institution (on a premise readers will find unbelievable). Merelene's lifeand much of the novelis too frequently described rather than simply shown. Watson ( Weep No More , The Calling ) offers an often clumsy narrative overwrought with poetics that fluctuate between country-western artiness (``I feel your fingers on the strings of my nerves'') and very occasional moments of charm (``She felt her heart gather pace, and told it, slow down, but it was the heart that had always galloped at the mention of Mayfield's name, and it did not obey her'').
