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#16 | ||
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#17 |
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gmw and Victoria, thanks for sharing your personal experiences! My grandparents had a small farm in the Eastern US where they raised pigs and cows which they sold for food purposes. We only visited annually in the summer, and I was mostly scared of the animals so I did not spend much time in the barns or pastures. I stayed inside the farm house with a book and being with my grandma in the kitchen. My brother, on the other hand, liked to follow my grandpa around outside. A missed opportunity that I now wish I had experienced more of the outdoor activities or could even remember more about those days.
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#18 | |||
cacoethes scribendi
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And I can see that previous paragraph comes over excessively critical. I do like that they are attempting preserve as much of this lifestyle as is feasible, and I do like that he makes connections to the past ... but a little bit acknowledgement of reality would be good too. Quote:
James might have been the only son of a generation that left things only to sons, and so his future may have been secure (although he learned later it wasn't), but didn’t he know any kids that were the youngest of many sons? Kids who were always going to have to find a living somewhere outside the shelter of this tiny community? Surely he must have known some. And what if James had had an accident as a young man and could no longer work the farm? (It almost happened to his grandfather.) So his 13yo self was not just selfish, but stupid too. That’s okay, most 13yos are, but how can the 40yo James not look back and see this, and accept that maybe the families of the area should own up to their responsibilities. Generations of ignorance and prejudice is no reason to perpetuate the problem. In fact he does seem to make it part way there near the end, as he talks about his own children, but if he truly does see this, I wonder why he left the start of the book as it was. There is quite a lot that feels like personal development between the start and tend of the book, which again has me wondering if this was an intentional progression - if so it ran (and hit with me) the risk of alienating the reader from the start. |
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#19 | |
cacoethes scribendi
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![]() I think we all have missed opportunities from our childhood. My father used to take us around the places where he grew up and tell us stories of what farming was like in those days, and what it was just being a kid in the country of those times ... and now he is gone and so are most of those stories. But I remember enough of them to recognise how different it was for me - which, perhaps unfairly, has me distrust claims of following too closely in the footsteps of our fathers. Times change and we change with them, even if we don't always see it in ourselves. I said "perhaps unfairly" because one of the drivers of change where I grew up is in trying to make a living from the farm. But if you're farming in a protected enclave then I suppose it may be possible to retain more of the past in what you do. But even then, change never really stops, and we see that quite clearly revealed in this book. |
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#20 | |
Snoozing in the sun
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Indeed, if you go back and look at the early pages, he is acknowledging very early in the book that, for example, tourism is hugely important to keeping the place going: "More than half the employment in the area is reliant upon tourism ..." Later in the book of course he talks about "... the upside to new people coming into a community ...", though of course he also writes that "two worlds that didn't understand each other were colliding". At the same time, his 13 year old self felt that the teacher was looking on the lives of his family and the families of his fellow students with a lack of respect. And really, if someone shows no respect for you and your way of life, why would you respect her different value system? |
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#21 | |
Snoozing in the sun
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I gave it three stars, as I did enjoy it. I gave MacDonald's book five stars, which I do only rarely. |
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#22 | |||||
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Even if he had other experiences he hasn’t disclosed, that are at the root of whatever was going on, there should be some acknowledgement by the time he’s 40 that it wasn’t acceptable to hurt people. Quote:
But even if that was the Northern culture he was steeped in, it seems like an omission, as a grown man and father himself, not to say he regrets his participation. (Unless I missed something, which I sometimes do). Quote:
![]() I enjoyed his take on time too. I’ve read that writing in the first person can be very tricky to pull off. It must be more so, if you veer a bit from a straight linear path. I was thrown off initially, when the voice would shift in time. But once I figured out what he was doing, I enjoyed it, and thought it was creative for him to try. Maybe reading the passages slowly, as you did, is a good match for a vignette approach like his. |
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#23 |
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Now I’m second guessing myself, in terms of the school issues. Maybe as an author, Rebanks was trying to strictly maintain a thirteen year old’s voice in that chapter. In that case, he wouldn’t offer his reflections from an adult perspective, even if he was uncomfortable and felt regret.
Last edited by Victoria; 09-16-2019 at 05:26 PM. |
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#24 | |
Snoozing in the sun
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In the same way, he wrote of his conflict with his father when he was some years older than the schoolboy. |
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#25 |
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You might be right, Bookpossum, but it didn't feel like that to this reader. And definitely got me off on the wrong foot with the book. While I ultimately liked the book, if this hadn't been a book club read, I'd have walked away from it well before I got to the parts I could enjoy.
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#26 | ||
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But hearing other perspectives I can see how he could feel it’s more honest and honourable to own up to the resentful boy he was without flinching. So again, the vigorous discussion issybird touts has enriched my reading experience. |
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#27 | |
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#28 | |
Snoozing in the sun
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I probably have more sympathy for Rebanks than others do. It took me ten years to get over hating school and realise I wanted to go to university. So I could empathise with his situation, even though I have otherwise lived a very different, suburban, life. |
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#29 | |
cacoethes scribendi
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That the author gives us such direction later and for other things suggests they are not that way in the opening. Everything he does and says through the book seems to try and affirm the "we are different" message in the opening - even, it seemed to me, if he had to turn his head away to make sure he never saw anything that upset his worldview. When he begrudgingly went back to school, he seems to deliberately avoid the company of those that might spoil the picture he had built for himself. He never opens himself to the possibility that there are others out there recognisably the same as he without being connected to the Lake District, and that there are others that are different but whose value does not depend only on what they can contribute to the Late District. I found his perpetual isolationism very wearing. |
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#30 | ||
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As for the criticism of his "perpetual isolationism" in writing about his life and the life of his family and the other farmers of the area: well, surely that's what he was setting out to do, and I can't see anything wrong with that. He was writing about what he knows, as is only to be expected in a memoir. |
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