Remembering
A Novel
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
A poetic novel of despair, hope, and the redemptive power of work deepens an award–winning author’s grand Port Williams literary project.
After losing his hand in an accident, Andy Catlett confronts an agronomist whose surreal vision can see only industrial farming. This vision is powerfully contrasted with that of modest Amish farmers content to live outside the pressures brought by capitalist postindustrial progress, and by working the land to keep away the three great evils of boredom, vice, and need.
As Andy’s perspective filters through his anger over his loss and the harsh city of San Francisco surrounding him, he begins to remember: the people and places that wait 2,000 miles away in his Kentucky home, the comfort he knew as a farmer, and his symbiotic relationship to the soil. Andy laments the modern shift away from the love of the land, even as he begins to accept his own changed relationship to the world. Wendell Berry’s continued fascination with the power of memory continues in this treasured novel set in 1976.
“[Berry’s] poems, novels and essays . . . are probably the most sustained contemporary articulation of America’s agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal.” —Publishers Weekly
“Wendell Berry is one of those rare individuals who speaks to us always of responsibility, of the individual cultivation of an active and aware participation in the arts of life.” —The Bloomsbury Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the course of a single day in 1976, the span of this elegiac novel, while in San Francisco attending a conference on agricultural technology, an emotionally troubled journalist wanders through pre-dawn streets reflecting on the early days of his marriage, on his parents and their love of the land. ``Berry writes with grace and eloquence of the beauty in handed-down lives,'' declared PW.