Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

Baseball has always had a mythic aura about it, but in Delillo’s opening salvo to Underworld, he turns it into a sport with many players on and off the field. And of course, the shot heard round the world was a home run... so what happened to the ball?

I started this weighty tome back in 1997, back when it was first published and read half of it before setting aside for some unknown reason. Which is a pity, since I was entranced with Delillo's delicious prose. Now I'm starting over with the intention of finishing it. But what a pleasure to read the beginning. The first 60 pages are among the finest I've ever read.

Now the book careens from The Odyssey and Fenelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus, which is his own inspired fan fiction novel. But then, oh my soul, it takes a new path in what seems the opposite direction toward In Search of Lost Time, which brings Proust into the circle of connectivity. Insights teem.

What a dense little book of literary craftsmanship. Illuminating in so many ways. As a student of Homer and the epic, I’m so drawn to his discursive imagination.

Part one is an examination of the ring technique Homer uses, in which “the narrative appears to meander away into a digression... although the digression turns out in the end to be a circle” back to the point of departure.

Riches.

So many conjunctions between this book and me. And my wife too, who has lost her father and her mother already. Recipe boxes. Bluebird boxes. Boxes of ashes. All of these resonate. So much more.

So much of Margaret's childhood is startlingly different from mine, but there are just enough moments that resonate with my own youth... like turning over rocks to look for roly-polys and worms in the long, clockless summer. And feeling like the whole world is boundary-free for us kids... until we come upon the scary place. Delightful reading.

Too familiar now that we live on a farm in the rural country hills of Southern Oregon. The daily rituals of life and death that nature acts out brutally yields so much beauty still. And this lovely book honors those rituals with such lively elegant prose that veers into something more timeless. A kind of living poetry. I’m entranced by each single-page chapter.

Beautiful precise prose. A hybrid of biography and natural history. The processes of nature are beautiful but arc toward death.

How does one accompany a friend to the grave? What are the conditions for watching someone decide when it’s time to die? When do we acknowledge that loneliness isn’t just the ruling principle of dying, it’s the most singular characteristic of living? Ms. Nunez goes there.

A bracing read. Everything about these people seems familiar. The same long faces, stricken with the brutal realities we are made to endure.