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Freight

by Mel Bosworth (Goodreads Author)

4.36 of 5 stars 4.36 · rating details · 44 ratings · 19 reviews

This unflinching, quirky novel follows a flawed yet lovable everyman as he searches for Home. We never learn his name. Nor do we learn her name—the woman whose freight is still too much for him to carry. But we know he likes soft things. We know he works through pain. We know his childhood still clings to him, despite his graying hair. And through knowing him and all his f...more

Paperback, 1st, 212 pages

Published September 9th 2011 by Folded Word Press (first published September 2nd 2011)

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Nov 07, 2011 Lavinia Ludlow rated it 4 of 5 stars

Mel Bosworth is the author of the novella Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom, the chapbook When the Cats Razzed the Chickens, and in September, he released his first full-length novel Freight through Folded Word Press.

Freight is a comprehensive glimpse into an unnamed protagonist’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, cleverly narrated through systematically chosen metaphors, epiphanies, and theories. We follow the narrator through different cities, miscellaneous jobs, girlfriends, an...more Mel Bosworth is the author of the novella Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom, the chapbook When the Cats Razzed the Chickens, and in September, he released his first full-length novel Freight through Folded Word Press.

Freight is a comprehensive glimpse into an unnamed protagonist’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, cleverly narrated through systematically chosen metaphors, epiphanies, and theories. We follow the narrator through different cities, miscellaneous jobs, girlfriends, and interjected flashbacks of his childhood: the games, the skinned knees, the parental coddling, the dirt and grass he’d eaten both voluntarily and involuntarily.

Bosworth often relies on literal and figurative actions such as eating, carrying, losing, and throwing up to move his plot forward: “When I grow too hungry and there’s nothing to eat, I have to eat myself. Then I get too empty and fall apart. I sit on benches, shaking. I get pushed around by the wind. I put down a lot of alcohol so I don’t have to think about the things I found and carried. I destroy things that are pretty because I don’t want to look at them anymore because they remind me of how ugly I am, which is why no one wants to eat me.”

He also divides chapters into themes such as what the narrator forgets, destroys, and remembers, weaving in his realizations as the story advances: “Death is a cure to a lot of things like cancer and disease and happiness, although I’m not sure anyone would want be cured of happiness. And some might not want to be cured from cancer if that cure means death, because then they aren’t alive anymore and being alive with cancer is something. I could be wrong. My opinions may change with time and that’s okay. That’s why time and opinions keep moving like passengers on a green bus.”

There were occasions when I felt the prose was rushed, repetitive, and felt more or less like an information dump: “…someone grabbed me by the collar and pulled me off the hood. We went to a house party that had a pool. I swam in warm water with girls and boys. We drank from glass bottles. Then I went back to my truck. My friends wanted me to come inside the house with them but I said I had to make a call.” However, Bosworth’s style maintains a rhythmic charm, and I can’t recall a single passage which didn’t end with a punching epiphany: “Lucas’s body was eating itself alive. That’s hard for me to imagine, but I try. It’s like his whole body was a mouth and it was eating itself. Like a collapsing star. Like a black hole. And if someone is a black hole there’s no way they can get away from themselves.”

The uplifting thing about this book is that despite the narrator’s setbacks, heartbreak, loneliness, and isolation, he looks toward the future optimistic and hungry. He expects more and more out of himself and his interactions with others, still wholly aware that he’ll continue throwing up, carrying others, and enduring universal disappointment and loss.

This full-length novel was a debut for both Mel Bosworth and Folded Word Press. A definite must-read for Fall 2011.
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Dec 21, 2011 Seth Berg rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

When I was a wee fellow, I could transform tree branches into ray guns, bed sheets into fully functional flight mechanisms, and crawdads into intergalactic sea creatures. My dirt-scrapingly dull pocket knife could save the world, and on particularly clear nights I could ting a pebble off of the moon with my slingshot. I was a kid: oblivious, blissful, and overflowing with wonder.

Reminiscing is a means by which we explore our various eras, phases, mistakes, and elations in order to evaluate the p...more When I was a wee fellow, I could transform tree branches into ray guns, bed sheets into fully functional flight mechanisms, and crawdads into intergalactic sea creatures. My dirt-scrapingly dull pocket knife could save the world, and on particularly clear nights I could ting a pebble off of the moon with my slingshot. I was a kid: oblivious, blissful, and overflowing with wonder.

Reminiscing is a means by which we explore our various eras, phases, mistakes, and elations in order to evaluate the person/s we have become. At the very least , reminiscing allows us a means by which we may perpetuate our child-like wonder, re-explore that which defines our respective constructs of love, or lack of love—the pigeon-toed girl wearing the stretched out V-neck T-shirt, the gentle neo-hippie prancing barefoot in the sand—reminiscing is visceral, terrifying, addicting, thick, and adjective upon adjective upon adjective. However, in its purest incarnation, reminiscing simply takes us home.

In Mel Bosworth’s debut novel, Freight, we find ourselves led through a non-chronological-if-you-so-wish collection of encoded memories by our nostalgic narrator: a nameless, occasionally matter-of-fact, occasionally hyperbolic fellow who is searching—for that which is largely determined by the respective conglomeration of muck and paper airplanes and funerals and laugh-until-you-cries which coalesce uniquely within each of us—but ultimately, our narrator is searching for that place he defines as home, whether figuratively or literally.

Iconic objects permeate this multi-tiered search and each performs a specific, often overwhelmingly polar emotional function: tackling a freshly built snowman, our narrator’s hands coming together as womb, results in a profound declaration of love and demonstrates the lengths to which our narrator will go to express his love, even if only for his recently destroyed snowman. This type of behavior thickly populates Freight and ensures that we challenge our own mastery of self-awareness. Despite the heft of the freight with which our narrator is grappling, we know that he knows what he likes and in this knowing we connect intensely, almost telepathically with our narrator and fight through the muck to rediscover, and possibly redefine home.

Sometimes, however, our narrator confuses those items he likes—cedar chest as time machines, a cute, drunken blonde girl—for those inherently deep affirmations he needs: it’s okay that he assassinated the baby birds when he was husky; it’s okay that he can’t fix everything. In both this confusion as well as in the numerous snapshots stuffed with tranquility and clarity, Freight reminds us to savor every moment regardless of where each may land on the good/bad spectrum and to remain relentlessly and unapologetically alive. After all, that is what the search is all about, right?
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Aug 18, 2011 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

“That’s when they build new snowmen to destroy. Because they love them. Because the the snowmen are there.”

So Mel Bosworth writes in his debut novel Freight. In many ways Freight runs past the general idea of what a novel is and not only breaks it down to it’s core (who the character is) but plays as a middle child does with ants and a magnifying glass creating wonder through destruction.

There is no point where the character’s name is known, and I doubt knowing this carrier of the freight even m...more

2 likes · like · see review

Jul 08, 2011 Liana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

LOVED it. Will be re-reading this in the near future!

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Jul 08, 2011 Alex rated it 4 of 5 stars

Freight I Found:
If you hang around for long enough and don't destroy yourself proper, you get lucky and come across those good bits that Hansel and Gretel left behind in that forest. Yesterday on my run through the woods I found a $20 bill. It was just sprawled there in the soil, wet and limp for my taking. The day before that I found Mel Bosworth's first full novel "Freight" at my door. It was also just sprawled there but on my porch, crisp and clean, for my taking. And so I did.

Freight I Ate:
I...more

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Sep 07, 2011 Jessie Carty rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I love to take notes when I read; although I found myself so wrapped up in Mel Bosworth's first novel "Freight" that I only have a handful of notes. You know, however, that you truly enjoyed a book when one of your first notes is: devestatingly beautiful.

The narrator of "Freight" has had a lot to carry. He is, perhaps, as worn as the cover so artfully looks, but that just means he is broken in. As I have been teaching my composition students this week: this narrator has reflected and shown us in...more

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Aug 23, 2012 Tom rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Is Mel Bosworth's Richard Brautigan's long lost son? Because he sure writes like it. I can't recall a touch as deft and sweet and surreal since I started my Brautigan kick years ago with his story, "1/3, 1/3, 1/3." The POV of Freight is so gently charming, revealing a central character who seems unable to be anything but himself. Indeed, when increasingly the first person narrator seems only a vehicle of irony, unreliability in the extreme, Bosworth employs the most reliable narrator I think I'v...more

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Aug 31, 2011 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars

Mel Bosworth is love. Mel Bosworth is also about movement.

More - http://bentanzer.blogspot.com/2011/08...

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Jul 25, 2011 herocious . rated it 4 of 5 stars

http://theopenend.com/2011/07/25/book...

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Aug 21, 2011 xTx xTx rated it 5 of 5 stars

I loved Freight. I ate it up. Fast. I wanted to. It was easy. Such a tenderness. Such a way of looking at life in terms of carrying. Of putting down. Of throwing up. Boxcars and boxcars of everything we experience in this life trailing behind us like the heaviest of ants. Invisible, but so very there.

Freight helped me understand that I am not by myself in the carrying. In the putting down of things not always good for me, but yet, still choosing to put them down. Freight made me realize that as...more I loved Freight. I ate it up. Fast. I wanted to. It was easy. Such a tenderness. Such a way of looking at life in terms of carrying. Of putting down. Of throwing up. Boxcars and boxcars of everything we experience in this life trailing behind us like the heaviest of ants. Invisible, but so very there.

Freight helped me understand that I am not by myself in the carrying. In the putting down of things not always good for me, but yet, still choosing to put them down. Freight made me realize that as life gets longer and longer the carrying gets more and more and if you are smart, you can choose to throw some things up that you don’t need to carry around anymore or you can be really smart and not pick them up in the first place. Freight made me feel less bad about having carried a lot of heavy things in my life that were not my choice to carry. Sometimes kids are given the hardest, heaviest things to carry and do you know what that does to their little bodies??!!! It shapes them wrong. On the inside.

Freight helped me remember a lot of people in my life—both alive and dead—that I carry with me every day whether I know it or not. Like, yesterday, I walked into a bar I had only been in one time many years ago. I walked over to a tiny corner with a tiny table surrounded by stained glass windows where I spent three hours catching up with a dear, long lost friend one cold February night. We drank and spoke of everything in our lives, EVERYTHING, that had transpired since we had lost touch. It was pure joy. We were finally reconnected! I didn’t know then that it would be the last time I would ever see that person. Two months later he would never turn 29. Two months later he was dead.

I still carry him.

I loved the voice of Freight. It was simple, sincere, kind, childlike, vulnerable and honest. I wanted to hold this book tight against me and tell it I understood. I wanted to thank Freight for reminding me—in such a beautiful, easy way—that I am not alone in all of the carrying. Even though my carrying might be different from your carrying or his carrying or hers, we are all still holding on to things, people, places, experiences whether we like it or not. All of us heavy with our freight.

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Jan 22, 2012 Samuel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Hmmmmm..." is what I was thinking the entire time I was reading the book, and what I was thinking when I finished as well. I couldn't decide between 2 stars or 3 stars when rating this book but I decided there are enough moments of brilliance to push it up to 3 stars.

1 like · like · see review

Aug 31, 2011 Hosho rated it 5 of 5 stars

Bosworth's FREIGHT is the kind of book we might've seen from Brautigan had he written a choose-your-own-adventure book and, of course, stayed sober. It's got all the inventiveness and charm of a Brautigan, but the center of it never comes apart. It's an insightful rumination on the things we carry, and how those things impact our lives. Mistakes, regrets, fears, sorrows -- we carry them all, just as we carry our victories and joys. Bosworth's unnamed narrator gives us an inner landscape full of...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Mel Bosworth rated it 5 of 5 stars · (Review from the author)

I'm very proud of this book, and when it's finally wrapped and ready to ship later this year, I hope you'll invite a copy to your doorstep.

4 likes · like · see review

Jan 13, 2012 Timothy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Creative and original. Read this one outside the box!

3 likes · like · see review

Jun 28, 2011 J.S. Graustein rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, folded-word

It was sheer joy to edit and publish this book!

1 like · like · see review

Nov 28, 2011 Brooke rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

At first I loved this book - LOVED this book - I couldn't get enough. Then it just kept going and going and I realized that the book was a never ending Bing.com commercial. The section would start with one story and spin off into non-related to semi-related tangents that were only connected to the original story line by a single word.

Some parts I loved but in the end I finished the book and said "what the hell?"

1 like · like · see review

Jul 15, 2011 Andy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Sorry to rate this lower than anyone else here so far. I think maybe Mel is too sweet and kindhearted a guy to write the kind of edgy prose laced with cynicism or stinging satire that I tend to prefer. For what it is though, the heartfelt journey toward emotional maturity of a basically very decent if troubled Everyman, it's very well done. Nice work Mel!

2 likes · like · see review

Dec 31, 2011 Dave Russell rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Well written, but I'm more of a less serious- life isn't sort of funny, it's really really funny- kind a guy.

1 like · like · see review

Apr 25, 2013 Charles A. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Apr 22, 2013 Ipsith marked it as to-read

Shelves: favorites

Mar 28, 2013 Civil Mechanisms rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mar 19, 2013 Victoria Rose rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Feb 22, 2013 Mouse marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Feb 12, 2013 Roger Leatherwood marked it as to-read

Feb 06, 2013 Carolyn Gagnon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Feb 02, 2013 Gary marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Jan 27, 2013 Misty Ramirez marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Jan 18, 2013 Bill Gladstone rated it 4 of 5 stars

Jan 14, 2013 Carol Brannigan marked it as giveaways · review of another edition

Dec 25, 2012 Erin Entrada Kelly rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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About Mel Bosworth

Mel Bosworth is a writer living in western Massachusetts. His work has appeared in PANK, Annalemma, elimae, BLIP (formerly Mississippi Review Online), and Per Contra, among others. He is the author of the novel Freight (Folded Word, 2011),the novella Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom (Brown Paper Publishing, 2010), and the fiction chapbook When the Cats Razzed the Chickens (Folded Word, 2...more

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Books by Mel Bosworth

Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom

When the Cats Razzed the Chickens and Other Stories

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Quotes from Freight

“I don't believe in fate, though, because fate isn't as much fun as freewill. But I do believe that everything is exactly as it should be.” — 1 person liked it

“Helping is good, but too many helpings make us fat. We forget then. We forget to exercise.” — 1 person liked it

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