Total Immersion Recommended

[Note: Images in this post are photographs from my Leelanau home, not the world of downstate Whiteheart, but I tried to get as close in spirit as possible.]

 

Weeks passed between the day I received my ARC of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel and the evening I finally gave myself the delayed pleasure of opening it and plunging into that rural mid-Michigan world, familiar to me not only from her previous books but also from my years spent in Barry and Kalamazoo counties. It’s a rather different world from Leelanau. The soil is different, the sun rises and sets over different landscapes, and the people inhabiting that world live different lives from most of Leelanau. Most. Not all. The thing is, Campbell’s world is one not often ventured into by American literature, but it's been there all along, waiting to be seen.

 

One of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s short story collections focused on men, another on women, all apparently lost souls to whose lives she brought great sympathy. Her novel Q Road gave us three protagonists -- a man, a young woman, and a boy -- along with a host of fascinating minor characters. Then came Once Upon a River, the novel completely owned by Margo Crane. 

 

The Waters is a different kind of story. Large and ambitious, containing themes and worlds both mythic and postmodern, The Waters gives us from Campbell, for the first time, an entire community, bound together -- and torn apart – and bound together again -- by its own unique history. A community seeking redemption and a way forward in difficult and uncertain times. They often have a hard time showing it, but these people care about each other.

 

The home of Hermine (not Hermione) Zook, healer and matriarch, is a bog island protected by a drawbridge. When local people come to her for healing medicines, consultations take place off the island, out by the house built and formerly lived in by Hermine’s husband, the legendary Wild Will Zook (long ago banished by his wife), a house he lived in alone until joined by Hermine’s oldest daughter, Primrose, who has also disappeared, moving across the continent to California. Molly, a nurse of modern medical ways, is the practical, nearby (and only biological) daughter. Finally, there is the lazy, lovely, magical Rose Thorn, golden-haired mother of eleven-year-old Dorothy, known as Donkey, a mathematical genius made nervous by infinity, a child being raised on M'sauga Island by Herself (Hermine).  

Donkey milks the cow, avoids eating meat, eavesdrops and spies on adults, and longs for a father. Titus is the father she wants, and the choice is logical (passionate Donkey tries hard to be logical), given the electricity that has always crackled between Rose Thorn and Titus. In this postmodern rural Michigan fairy tale, as in European fairy tales of old, however, missing fathers are a recurring theme. Never mind that the entire community of Whiteheart, Michigan, longs to see Titus and Rose Thorn together.

 

“Once upon a time” opens Chapter Zero: Prologue, and Chapter Six opens with an echoing “Once upon a time,” the phrase signaling both history and fabulism. Each chapter bears, besides its number, a sentence heading. Chapter One announces a crucial truth: “Rose Thorn always comes home.” Whiteheart can accept the absence of Wild Will Zook, but they need Rose Thorn. They need Rose and Titus together. This is where we begin.

 

Chapter One introduces us to Whiteheart. With the addition of Smiley, the barkeeper, the men drinking beers and pops at the picnic table outside the Muck Rattler Lounge after church on Sunday – Rick Dickmon, gun-totin’ Jamie Standish, Tony Martin (known as “Two-Inch Tony,” but not for reasons you might at first imagine), Whitey Whitby, pot-bellied Ralph Darling – constitute the core community we come to know as we read. The men reappear singly and as a group throughout the novel, their wives and girlfriends remaining in the background, along with Titus’s father and his Aunt Ada, but together they fill in a picture that foregrounds the reclusive healer and her three daughters. It is, however, Titus Clay to whom all local eyes turn. It is Titus, together with Rose Thorn, they believe, who will hold them together, if only --. But it is Rose Thorn, not Titus, who leaves and returns….

 

Old celery fields, a cranberry bog, a gravel truck that makes its regular run along Lovers Road (that truck reminds me of the caterpillars in Q Road, easily overlooked but a symbol of what life has become in this place), rumbling past Wild Will Zook’s empty house and the Boneset Table where Hermine leaves her cures to be retrieved by those in need. Farm fields and giant black willows. Somewhere in the background, the Old Woman River and pollution from a paper mill no longer in operation. Donkeys and wild, flowering plants, massasauga rattlesnakes (“muck rattlers,” Whiteheart calls them) and church-going people, unsure of what they believe but longing for beauty.

What will become of them all?

 

A customary request accompanying ARCs asks that reviewers refrain from making direct quotes, as changes may be made between advance copies and the book as later released to the public, and only that request and my bookseller conscience could have stopped me. But this post is not even, I realize, a book review, as I have written almost nothing about the conflicts and secrets that create a taut, suspenseful story line. So be it. I waited as long as I could before beginning this novel, because I knew before opening to the first page that I would not want it ever to end, and what I want for you, dear readers, is to have the whole of the pleasure, also, as you immerse yourself in The Waters, of coming to know the world of Whiteheart and its people for yourself, as I did. 

 

Before writing this post, I read no other reviews of The Waters (and still have not), though eventually I’m sure I will. For now, I am simply basking in the luxury of being a small-town bookseller and blogger rather than a paid reviewer who must meet certain conventional expectations. I am also happy, in my modest role of bookseller-blogger, not to be preparing a class in American literature, which would require me to trace out echoes of mythic themes that reverberate through the novel. 

 

(After you read this marvelous story, you may want to review the story in Genesis of the snake in the garden and explore other stories, as well, such as the Brothers Grimm tale of “Rumpelstiltskin” and the Lives of the Saints -- but please wait until after you have read the book! What you already know and what you find in the novel’s pages will be enough for your first time through. Just be immersed in the experience, please.)

 

Afterward. After-word. Ah, yes! I finished the last chapter of The Waters before going to sleep and saved the Epilogue to read the next morning. My last word today is that if an epiphany be tearful and inarticulate, that’s what I experienced. Stillness. Gratitude. Perfection.

 

The Waters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

W.W. Norton & Company

Janary 2024

Hardcover $30

I will happily take orders in advance for reserved copies!

Out in the Country, But Far From Dead

The lines of the Scottish poem came into my head as I waited for my screen to come to life.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead 

Who never to himself has said 

      This is my own, my native land!

Okay, that was a digression. Couldn't resist. Back on track now.

I don’t generally underline in books. But when it's an old 60-cent paperback, and someone else has already underlined a lot in it and spilled coffee on the cover, and when the pages are literally falling out, for Pete’s sake – then I feel completely free to underline to my heart’s content.

Our reading circle’s latest self-assignment was Gogol’s Dead Souls, a book I’ve read more than once before but always enjoy re-reading, because just as you can't step into the same river twice, a book is always a new experience each time you enter its world. 

This time around I was very conscious of the ways Gogol refuses to keep to any recognized literary formula. Not only is Chichikov an anti-hero, but the author himself keeps intruding into the narrative to remind us of his characters’ failings (not just Chichikov, all the characters) and to plead for our sympathy. He mourns, in particular, the negative reception his protagonist is sure to find among critics and general public and how that will all bounce back on him, the author. Oh, poor me! An author such as I, “who dares to bring all that he sees into the open,” is much to be pitied!

All those things that an indifferent eye fails to notice—all the slimy marsh of petty occurrences into which we sink, all the multitude of splintered everyday characters who swarm along the drab, often painful road of life—he shows them clearly in relief, thanks to the power of his merciless chisel, so that the whole world may view them. This author will not receive world-wide acclaim, nor will he see tears of gratitude or feel the unanimous enthusiasm of hearts he has stirred; no sixteen-year-old girl will throw herself at him, giddy with admiration for her hero; it is not for such as he to become drunk at the sweet sound of his own words; and, of course, he cannot avoid trial by his contemporaries, a hypocritical, unfeeling court, which will pronounce the characters he has created with such care insignificant and vile, will assign him a dishonorable place among authors who have insulted mankind, will ascribe to him the traits of his own characters, and will rob him of his heart and soul and of the divine flame of talent. This is so because his contemporaries will not recognize that microscopes ... are just as wonderful as telescopes....

“I’m showing the world as it is, people as they are, and of course I’ll pay the price for my honesty!” the author complains bitterly. Do you feel sorry for him, or are you laughing?

I laughed. Somehow in the context of the novel -- and though passages like these leave the story to one side for as long as they last, and so are not really “in the context of the novel” – somehow even these passages come through time as comedy, as if Gogol, dressed as a clown, pushes Chichikov off-stage for a few minutes, takes center stage himself, and cries the tears of a clown for a laughing audience before going over to drag Chichikov back into the spotlight.

George Lucas, of “Star Wars” fame, says he quite consciously followed the structure of Joseph Campbell’s myth of the hero's journey: Departure, initiation, return. With Gogol, on the contrary, we meet the anti-hero Chichikov already well launched into his journey. He is no longer young. His quest is absurd. Only after ten chapters of misadventures does the author give us Chichikov’s background, the story of his childhood, youth, adult trials, and the inspiration for his journey. “Departure” is the final chapter of the book! And the journey is not over, either, when the book has been closed. Gogol intended Dead Souls as the first book in a trilogy. He completed one of the sequels but burned it before he died. 

It’s difficult to see what Chichikov would have done for two more volumes and what kind of conclusion the author could have found for his tale. No matter, I say. I find this novel ever so much funnier and more believable and satisfying than Gogol’s famous short stories.

There is another story formula that Dead Souls does not fit. -- In fact, as many formulae as there are, it’s a safe bet that Dead Souls fits none of them, but the one I have in mind was laid out by Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher mystery novels, in a talk he gave in Traverse City at the National Writers Series. Here’s the formula: There is a town with a problem it cannot solve. A stranger arrives. He solves the problem and is rewarded. Think of the riddle of the Sphinx, which no one could answer until Oedipus appeared on the scene.

Well, Chichikov comes to town as a stranger, but the village where he lands had no obvious problem before his arrival. It's a place where nothing much seems to happen at all, which is why everyone is so delighted to welcome a stranger. But then Chichikov's bizarre, incomprehensible business deals get everyone stirred everyone up and give rise to even more bizarre speculations until all hell breaks loose! And far from laying to rest the fears he has produced, Chichikov is lucky to escape with his own skin!

As he did in his short stories, Gogol again trots out generalizations and stereotypes –

The haven was familiar, just as the inn was – the kind of provincial inn where, for two rubles a day, a traveler can get a quiet room, with cockroaches peeking out of every corner like raisins....

-- but with his own distinctive, remarkable additions, e.g., those cockroaches “like raisins”! Stinginess, he tells us, has “a wolf’s appetite and grows hungrier the ore it devours.” And who can forget the picture of Plewshkin, with his black eyes like darting mice!

In a way, Chichikov and his quest to acquire “dead souls” – that is, to acquire, by purchase or outright gift, deeds showing him as the owner of serfs who have, in fact, died since the last census, relieving the seller of the tax liability and gaining for himself, he hopes, collateral that will qualify him for a generous government loan – serve as a scaffolding on which Gogol builds the portrait of a pre-Revolutionary rural Russian village. Looked at it this way, the village is the main character of the novel.

I don’t know. I need to think further about this. Actually, I’ll run it by the others in the reading circle and see what they think. But be honest now -- weren't you relieved to find a literary topic rather than a political topic here today? 

Earth keeps turning, sun keeps shining....

Year’s-End Thoughts

My year’s-end reading can get a little frantic, as I’m trying to finish one book and squeeze in another, but I found time this morning to go through some articles I’d missed in the November 24 New York Review of Books. One was a review of a new intellectual biography of Alexander Herzen, who had been little more than a name to me up to now, and from that review I see Herzen as a fascinating, congenial writer and quite possibly (I need to learn more) a kindred spirit.

According to Gary Saul Morson, reviewer of The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen, and quotations he gives from  Aileen M. Kelly’s book in support, Herzen was, throughout his life, tugged in two directions, “inclined in turn to romantic utopianism and ironic realism.” As a self-described romantic pragmatist, I was instantly sympathetic.

Herzen did not buy general formulae -- big slogans, principles, goals, abstractions, e.g., the idea of ‘progress.’ A thinker ahead of his time, he denied teleology to nature before such a view became the norm. Nineteenth-century determinism saw the future unrolling necessarily from the present, such that if we could but identify all contributing factors we would have complete foreknowledge. Herzen, like Henri Bergson, denied the sweeping claims of determinism, then so firmly held across disciplines and political views. In his essays, he saw the determinist view as one of many absolutes people used as substitutes for God, “the mysticism of science.” As Morson puts it, “[L]aws and chance interact. Repeat a situation, and it might develop differently.” Evolution without a predetermined endpoint. Darwinian.

Here is a line, quoted in the reviewed book from Herzen’s own book, From the Other Shore:

The future does not exist.

It is not necessary, according to research paper guidelines, to set apart and center such a brief quotation as that, but I do it intentionally, as it is the crucial kernel of any denial of determinism.

To his Bergsonian denial (I cannot help seeing it as Bergonian) of determinism, Herzen joined a Wittgensteinian propensity to question himself as rigorously as he questioned others. It is a rare philosopher -- a rare human being -- who can say of a view he held formerly with great conviction and passion, “I was wrong,” so I very much want to explore the thought of Alexander Herzen in 2017. For now, for this week, I am delighted to have stumbled on an introduction to his work.

Denying determinism, Herzen went on to say of the future,

It is created by the combination of a thousand causes, some necessary, some accidental, plus human will....

And so, from what little I have read in a single book review, I’m pretty sure Herzen would not have seen moral progress as inevitable. He would not have seen the “long arc of the universe” bending necessarily toward justice or any predetermined end. He would have seen that as simply one more silly myth, a comforting but basically irrational belief.

Where does that leave us? Well, please note, if there is no predetermined end, no “necessary” direction that will manifest in one future rather than another, the possibility of moral progress cannot be ruled out, either. (“He loved italics,” the reviewer notes of Herzen, listing some of his other writing excesses. Sigh! We have that in common, too!) And note also Herzen’s inclusion of “human will” in the myriad of causes that will bring about whatever future comes about. I think it leaves us with a lot of possible outcomes, some of them desirable.

Now if someone says, “I don’t believe in x” but engages in x on a consistent basis, does that person really hold the stated belief? I don’t see it. On the other hand, I see other people all the time, in my own life and in the public arena, who act on and live their beliefs. This is what I was struggling, probably very awkwardly, to say in my previous post about faith as practice, creating a future of justice.

The future is in our hands. The world will be what we make of it. What shall it be, my friends? What will we make of this year so soon to begin?

“For Love OR Money” Cannot Be the Question

“I’d do this even if I didn’t get paid for it,” said best-selling author Stephen King. Anyone who loves to write can identify with that statement. But what works for work (e.g., writing) does not work for businesses (e.g., a bookstore).

No one pays me to write blog posts, and it’s anyone’s guess how many people care at all that I take time to put an idea or observation into words, let it percolate a few days, go back to rewrite and polish, and finally hit that magic ‘Publish’ button. Granted, a blog post is not a novel or a poem. And how many deserving novels and poems, memoirs and histories, books and articles on economics, politics, philosophy, and what-have-you are already out there in the world, looking for an audience? The mind not only boggles -- it reels, stumbles and falls, blinking wide-eyed. Everyone has something to say! No wonder so many writers have to work other jobs!

Writing is work, for anyone who tries to do it well, even for those who can’t live without it. It just happens to be work we love. We would also love, as Stephen King manages, to be paid for our time and effort, but we don’t expect that to happen often.

(It’s so exciting when the rare opportunity presents itself to be paid for writing. Three hundred words? Twenty dollars? Hey, great! Because I’d be doing this anyway, even without pay, even without a word of feedback. Because recreating the world in sentences is one of my ways of being in the world, to paraphrase Jim Harrison.)

Bookselling, on the other hand, as in selling books out of one’s own bricks-and-mortar, public shop, is another matter entirely. I am moved to write about the difference because, over and over, I read pieces by well-meaning people -- often writers with books to sell, which really drives me nuts! -- going on and on about how booksellers “aren’t in it for the money.” Well, guess what. We are.

Yet another in the long line of booksellers-don’t-care-about-money pieces was quoted in and linked to this week in “Shelf Awareness.” The writer admits that he buys online “when I want something” and goes to physical bookstores for discovery. I like the discovery part -- the other part, not so much. Booksellers need patronage both from customers who “know what they want” and those willing and eager to explore and be surprised. To stay in business, we actually need to sell books.

We’re not in this business to get rich, it’s true. (We’re not that deluded.) We’ve chosen relatively low-paying but, for us, spiritually rewarding work over a variety of possible high-paying but, to us, soul-destroying careers with great benefits. Think of paid vacations, paid sick leave, paid health insurance, and pensions. Nope, not for us. But we’ve chosen not to postpone life until retirement, either.

(Does “retirement,” except as a familiar cultural concept, have any place at all in a bookseller’s life? If so, someone needs to explain it to me.)

Show me an independent bookseller, not already independently wealthy, who opens a bookstore to lose money or “break even.”

Show me an independent bookseller with so little imagination that she or he needs an indoor public hobby with a regular schedule just to “keep busy.”

We don’t go into the book business looking for great wealth, but we definitely hope to make a living, however modest. We value our work highly and hope others will value it at least enough to keep us in business, because --

Like everyone else, booksellers (and writers and artists) have to put food on the table and gas in the tank, and occasionally  see a doctor or a dentist. They generally have rent to pay, in addition to perhaps a mortgage and property taxes. Up North we need heat in the winter and a plow to get out the driveway. Even the family dog needs food and shots and license.

That’s reality.

Years ago, I noticed something that still strikes me as odd: Often the same Americans who admire highly successful individuals for working hard, loving their work, and making lots of money seem to think that people who do not make a lot of money, as long as they love their work, should be willing to work for nothing. For this group of workers, loving what they do is supposed to be sufficient reward.

How is that supposed to work?

A terrible and dangerous cultural myth has grown up around independent bookstores. The myth tells people that booksellers don’t want or need to sell books because all they want is to spend time around other people who love books and talk to people about books they love.

THIS MYTH NEEDS BUSTING!

Employees clock in and out and get paychecks. Business owners do not. My business, very seasonal, at the “end of the road,” cannot afford employees. Librarians are on salary; I am not. When I’m in my bookshop, I’m at work, and my work is selling books. Yes, of course I love conversation about books with customers in my shop. It just can’t be an either/or proposition -- either talk or sell books -- because if I’m forced to that choice, another follows directly on its heels: selling books or closing the door.

I know I’m not alone and that I speak for bookstore owners across the country and around the world. If the time comes that my book sales flatline and I end up working for nothing, the curtain will come ringing down fast and for good.

We booksellers may be dreamers, but we live in the real world, too. Please feel free to join us there.

Postscript and Update, 4/13/2016:

My P.S. has to do with small businesses other than bookstores. I want to acknowledge that independent booksellers are not the only ones expected to be happy with loving their work, regardless of monetary return. Friends who operate restaurants in seasonal tourist destinations share the experience. Well-heeled visitors may admire jars of local jam or jugs of local maple syrup but ask for a “better” price, which is to say the business owner should take the cut and be glad of a few pennies in the till. Do not be a cheapskate tourist! A business is not a garage sale, and if you had any idea how hard these people work and how long their work days are, you would offer double their asking price on everything in the place!

My update concerns new bills rushed into law by legislatures in various states, the one I’ll highlight being North Carolina, where the so-called “Bathroom Bill” not only prohibits municipalities from having higher standards of nondiscrimination than the state itself but also prohibits municipalities from having higher minimum wage laws than the state has fixed. The peculiar hypocrisyof these new laws is striking: legislatures in the very states that are outraged when the federal government imposes standards on them have no qualms about imposing state standards on their own constituent municipalities.

Boycotting of North Carolina won’t reduce the salaries of those in the state congress but already has resulted in an instant outflow of jobs and a turnoff of tourist and convention dollars. Small businesses and working people are paying the price. Naturally, news of the book world easily captures my attention, so I read with great interest a letter from the owner of Malaprop’s Books in response to an open letter from a group of authors canceling bookstore appearances in North Carolina. The wrong people are being punished, as a St. Louis, Missouri, bookseller points out in a blog post following the letter exchange. Booksellers who have put their livelihoods on the line for nondiscrimination and free speech are the last people who should be pilloried for the reprehensible actions of their state legislature.

This is "shop talk," granted, but it has much wider ramifications. Any time allies are treated as enemies, enemies are strengthened in their opposition and have nothing to gain by becoming allies.

If I Were a Luddite, Would I Be Blogging?

Someone else said it, so I don’t have to. It seems that kids who see parents reading bound, printed books see them as doing something different from reading on a screen. The kids respond differently, too. This does kind of shoot a hole in my poster idea: “READING IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT.” Maybe it is, after all.

But there are reasons to be online and good stuff to read, watch and listen to. For example, if you haven’t watched and listened to the Steve Jobs commencement speech video yet, get with it. How many videos do I watch online a year? Fewer than a dozen, I assure you, but this one is top of my recommendation list.

Getting back to books, though, here’s what absorbed me for an hour or two the other day:

Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Bysshe Shelley married in 1816 after his first wife, Harriet, died a suicide by drowning. Percy and Harriet had been estranged for two years prior to her death, but Harriet’s suicide took place only after her husband had run away with the 17-year-old Mary.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is famous as the author of classic horror novel, Frankenstein, which appeared in 1818, subtitled The Modern Prometheus. In this story, faithful to the original, young Frankenstein steals not mere fire as in the Greek myth but life itself, cobbling together a monster from purloined body parts stolen from morgues and graveyards and bringing his creation to life with “galvanism” (which Webster’s defines as “a direct current of electricity esp. when produced by chemical action”). Everyone knows what became of Frankenstein’s monster. Here is the story as given in The Reader’s Encyclopedia, by William Rose Benet:

Longing for sympathy and shunned by everyone, the creature ultimately turns to evil and brings dreadful retribution on the student for usurping the Creator’s prerogative, finally destroying him.

But then in 1820 came Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a drama in which Prometheus is released from the mountain where he was chained by Zeus as a punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to human beings. Reunited with his true love, he is vindicated in having gone against Zeus, and a new Golden Age ensues. Down with the gods, up with the humans! seemed to be Shelley’s message. Quite a different message from that of the myth and of Mary’s story.

Following their marriage, Mary and Percy Shelley lost three infant children before having a daughter who survived. Mary suffered, understandably, from depression. Percy sought consolation with other women. The bloom was off the rose. Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned (an accident, apparently, rather than a suicide) in 1822 while still a young man. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley lived on until 1851.

What would either of them make of today’s experimentation with cloning and genetic engineering? In hindsight, what fate would they think Prometheus deserved? Did Mary come to wish Percy had felt himself more bound (to her), not quite so free to overthrow convention and tradition, once the shoe was on the other foot and the consequences come home to roost?

So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.

Detour Through the Kalahari: “It may be that the day is just the dream of the night....”

Before the first of our rains finally arrived last week, the grass was parched and brown, and the vegetable garden needed watering every day, but the dry spell that made the cornfields suffer was good for cherry harvest and could hardly be called a drought--nothing like conditions on the opening page of Laurens van der Post’s The Heart of the Hunter (1961):

We were still deep in the Kalahari, moving slowly through a difficult tract of country into which the rains as yet had been unable to break. Since it was already late in the year, the plight of the desert was frightening. Almost all the grass was gone and only the broken –off stubble of another season left here and there, so thin, bleached, and translucent that its shadow was little more than a darker form of sunlight. The trees, most of them leafless, stood exposed against the penetrating light like bone in a X-ray plate. The little leaf there was looked burnt out and ready to crumble to ash on touch. Under such poor cover the deep sand was more conspicuous than ever, saffron at dawn and dusk, and sulphur in between. There was no shade anywhere solid enough to cool its burning surface. What there was, seemed scribbled on it by the pointed thorns like script on some Dead Sea scroll.

In quiet moments during the day and the dark hours when sleep flees, I have been living in the Kalahari and learning from Laurens van der Post. The excerpt above is only the second paragraph of the book, after a short introductory paragraph of two sentences, so you see how quickly the author plunges his reader into the atmosphere he wants to convey. Van der Post does not mistake the desert for empty land. The Kalahari, we learn as we read, is alive with clouds, stars, plants, trees, people and stories, and the traveler who guides us through it does so with a fine sensibility and love for everything and everyone he meets there.

I know that, ever since I can remember, I have been attracted by deserts in a way I do not properly understand. I have always loved above all others what I call Cinderella country. I know of nothing more exciting to my imagination than discovering in the waste land, which the established world rejects as ugly and sterile, a beauty and promise of rare increase not held out anywhere else in life.

Most of all, he appreciates the culture of the Bushmen. At its most superficial, then, The Heart of the Hunter (sequel to The Lost World of the Kalahari) tells a story of travel through the Kalahari and conclusions the author draws from his experiences, with the next level down his focus on the Bushman, but there is depth beyond a recounting of encounters and tales told. Van der Post’s third level is his search for nothing less than the meaning of life and his finding it in Africa and in the Bushman’s oral culture, from which he draws parallels to cultures and religions around the world. Finally, in all of these stories, as well as in the poetry of Blake and Goethe, he finds the reconciliation of opposites, the reunion of black and white, man and nature, intellect and emotion, life and death.

The Bushman before he came into conflict with European culture and law, with his spirit safely contained in his traditional stories, says van der Post, knew nothing of “that isolation which secretly eats away the courage and individuality of modern man.” Rather—

Armed only with his native wit and his bow and arrow, wherever he went he belonged, feeling kinship with everyone and everything he met on the way from birth to death. I myself would define his ‘participation mystique’ as a sense of being known; wherever he went he felt known, whatever he encountered, starlight, cloud, tree, or animal, knew him.

Those of my readers unfamiliar with van der Post’s writings will no doubt be thinking skeptically about now, Isn’t this just one more book romanticizing of the ‘primitive,’ of which we have known so many? Does the author conclude that we of the literate West are doomed to alienation because there is no way to return to our mythical ‘origins’? Happily—although not at all easily—this is not where Laurens van der Post would lead and leave us. The structure of this book echoes the much longer work of Marcel Proust. Part One of The Heart of the Hunter is “World Lost,” Part Two, “World Between,” and Part Three, “World Regained.” We can, the author believes (along with Proust), “regain” a feeling for the meaning of life and for belonging in the world. All it takes is that we do not let our commitment to words bar the contribution of images to our sense of belonging, that our appreciation for science not blind us to the grace to be found in imagination, mythic narrative and poetry.

Laurens van der post himself (1906-1996) was blessed with the soul of a poet and with a childhood that nurtured that soul. His attunement to the world around him was extraordinary. There is scarcely a sentence in this book unworthy of being quoted, but I will close today with a short excerpt from near the beginning, since in the beginning is the end and in the end the beginning:

The last red glow in the west died down behind the purple range of cloud, and it went utterly dark beyond our camp. Our own fires rose higher than ever, straining like a gothic spire towards the stars which were appearing in unusual numbers. Soon the stars were great and loud with light until the sky trembled like an electric bell, while every now and then from the horizon the lightning swept a long sort of lighthouse beam over us. At last the Bushmen stood up from their work with a deep sigh of satisfaction and wiped their hands on stubbles of grass. ... As always their fires were more circumspect than our own. Ours was a cathedral of flames, theirs little more than slender candles burning in a night devout under stars.

The sight stirred me deeply....