The Next Step on Desire Lines: The Page Proofs!

The page proofs for my new short story collection, Desire Lines: Stories of Love and Geography have arrived from Oberon Press! 

Very interesting to go over the text after several months away from it.  The pub date for the book itself is Nov. 1.  There will be details about the launch later.

Desire lines, urbanists say, are paths that people take whenthey want to go somewhere. They frequently have no relationto the formal layout of roads and sidewalks. They sometimeslead to new places. They are often maps of the heart. The photo is of such a path, such a "desire line," in the Champs des possibles that got me thinking.

The Best Book My Bookies Won't Read Next Season:Lobbi, a Slacker's Excellent Adventure

It's always difficult to make up reading lists for book discussion groups.  You want to have a certain balance, include a few books that will challenge the reader plus others that are simply a pleasure to read.  And then, if you're working with libraries, you usually have to make sure there are enough copies for everyone to be able to read it.

 The Greenhouse by Ava Audur Olafsdottír was one I put on the lists for my three English groups this year, having done it previously for my French groups.  Unfortunately, though, it hasn't made a big enough splash in the English-speaking world for there to be enough copies in libraries around here for the groups to read it.

What a shame!  This is a book that should have a wide audience.   A coming of age story by an Icelandic writer, it  was  a best seller in Europe, but was only tardily published in English by  Amazon.com.  The big on-line book seller may have been looking for another Scandnavian blockbuster like the Kurt Wallendar mysteries or the  Millenium Trilogy.
What they got is something quite different, but I think more interesting.

Lobbi is 22 years old, just finished with a stint on a fishing boat, and ready to follow his dream which is to grow roses.  He has an unpaid job restoring a medieval rose garden waiting for him in an unamed southern country, and as the book opens he sets out, full of angst and unfocussed lust and not quite sure what lies before him.

So far it sounds like a slacker's excellent adventure, but things are more interesting and complicated than that.  He also has a six month old daughter, the fruit of a 20 minute tryst with a friend of a friend whose picture he shows to all the young women he's attracted to.  The child's mother wants to continue her studies and tracks him down in his mountain top garden, saying, in effect, 'okay, it's your turn to look after the baby.'

By the end of the book, he's fallen in love with the mother of his child,  restored the garden and shown the monks who had let it go to ruin the beauty of nature.  The ending isn't a feel-good one, though, since he's left with the child and we don't know what will happen next.

Furthermore, the novel can be read on many other levels: as a feminist view of the diety, as a reworking of many myths, and as a comment on the relevance of conventional religion (Lobbi has a monk as a mentor who never quotes scripture but always has advice taken from old films.)

If this sounds interesting, please suggest it to your library: it would be great to discuss it with my bookies some other season.

The Dollmaker: A Novel about Detroit--and Ordinary Courage--During World War II

It took me a couple of days after the announcement of Detroit's very close brush with complete bankruptcy to remember Harriette Arnow's novel about life in Motor City during the Second World War, The Dollmaker. 

First published in 1954, the story centers on Gertie, a strong, capable woman who  moves with her husband and children to Detroit so he can work in the war industry.  As a gripping story of  what it was like to move from Appalachia to a big, crowded city, the book has few peers.  It opens with Gertie, whose hobby is whittling dolls, doing a tracheotomy on her little son who is choking with diptheria.  From then on, the reader is hooked.

I first read the book after Joyce Carol Oates wrote about it in The New York Times in 1971. It had more or less been forgotten, even though it had been a big best seller when it was first published.  Whe I read it, I found it engrossing.  The image of the steel mill Arnow paints has stayed with me ever since.

Oates's essay apparently is now an afterword for an edition that is still in print: a  paperback edition was published in 2009.  To judge from the number of teacher's guides on-line, the novel must also appear on reading lists for a number of high school and junior college English classes.

That should not scare you away, though.  Read it to get a feel for what it was like to work in the factories of Detroit in the city's heyday, to understand what ordinary folk were up against, and to appreciate the strength of the women who had to stand by their menfolk.