''BARKSKINS,'' By Annie Proulx
While this novel is not explicitly about climate collapse, it fires our awareness to five alarms. Through Annie Proulx’s inimitable skills, we inhabit characters of two clashing cultures, and in a narrative that rolls seamlessly across 400 years on this continent, we viscerally experience the day to day, step by step march into planetary peril. We are not just reading about the apocalyptic destruction of our forests. Through the shamanic magic of Proulx’s prose we participate in the carnage, until by those last fateful pages we grasp more deeply than ever before that the survival of life on our planet hangs in our choice between two radically different outlooks. Have we already traveled too far off the road not taken?
It is one thing to read about the native peoples that inhabited the eastern shores of the Americas, it is another to live amongst them, see the world through their eyes, feel their inseparable connection with the Earth. It is one thing to read about the European advneturers who clambered onto these shores and set about ‘’clearing’’ the land for ‘’settlements.’’ It is another to reside inside them, to see and feel the impending, implacable confrontation of worlds. The short stories and novels of Annie Proulx are always riveting, her characters achingly alive and vivid. Here, she holds us in her spell for over 700 pages, then plunges us into those last, brief, pivotal chapters.
An artist makes us feel. No textbook, no lecture, no commentary has the transformative power of art. We know intellectually of the disastrous meeting of indigenous and white cultures through the centuries, of the eradication of native peoples and domination by the white inaders. We read of the destruction of the forests and the accompanying decline of the earth’s ecosystems. We have been warned of the melting ice. The genus of Annie Proulx’s novel is that we’re not just reading of critical events and fateful decisions, we're experiencing them in a delicous 713 page feast. It’s a harrowing, transformative journey that sears beneath intellectual knowing, where we finally come to a new and trembling understanding of the crisis of our lives, the survival of life on this planet.
If anything is going to awaken sufficient emotion to galannize humans into action, it is art such as this.
This book will punch a hole in your wall. it is a genuine Earthshaker. Better read it.
Rich Flanders
''UNDER THE GREAT ELM - A Life of Luck & Wonder''
www.richflandersmusic.com
It is one thing to read about the native peoples that inhabited the eastern shores of the Americas, it is another to live amongst them, see the world through their eyes, feel their inseparable connection with the Earth. It is one thing to read about the European advneturers who clambered onto these shores and set about ‘’clearing’’ the land for ‘’settlements.’’ It is another to reside inside them, to see and feel the impending, implacable confrontation of worlds. The short stories and novels of Annie Proulx are always riveting, her characters achingly alive and vivid. Here, she holds us in her spell for over 700 pages, then plunges us into those last, brief, pivotal chapters.
An artist makes us feel. No textbook, no lecture, no commentary has the transformative power of art. We know intellectually of the disastrous meeting of indigenous and white cultures through the centuries, of the eradication of native peoples and domination by the white inaders. We read of the destruction of the forests and the accompanying decline of the earth’s ecosystems. We have been warned of the melting ice. The genus of Annie Proulx’s novel is that we’re not just reading of critical events and fateful decisions, we're experiencing them in a delicous 713 page feast. It’s a harrowing, transformative journey that sears beneath intellectual knowing, where we finally come to a new and trembling understanding of the crisis of our lives, the survival of life on this planet.
If anything is going to awaken sufficient emotion to galannize humans into action, it is art such as this.
This book will punch a hole in your wall. it is a genuine Earthshaker. Better read it.
Rich Flanders
''UNDER THE GREAT ELM - A Life of Luck & Wonder''
www.richflandersmusic.com
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