Jonathan’s Reviews > The Wave > Status Update

Had not heard of Ebeneezer Creek http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifesty...

The sky dusked sombrely. Little glintings of the evening sheared over the fields after the progressing train. Grant was restive under melancholy. There was a slithering and a squeaking under the body of the car. Ominously, it seemed, the engine was slowing down. A few houses reared themselves in a clearing, and a mild dazzle shot from naked lamps in uncurtained rooms.

There was a heavy, dinning sound, like wind blowing, and it never stopped, in the place where Kalicz and the man walked with the iron that was red-hot like the heart of God, so that no man could approach it or look on it unless he blinked and his eyes watered. But the heart of God was a cold thing, even to sinners it was a cold thing.

I am sure, had I been an American (or studied the civil war) the names of Longstreet and Pickett would have let me know what was about to happen....I should probably read a history of the Civil War one of these days...

He staggered on into the dusk. Ah's sorry faw y'all, Dicey, but Ah's sorry faw me mos'. Ah ain' ugly as y'all is, but Ah's ugly 'nough, Gawd knows. An' what lil education Ah picked up from de newspapahs, hit ain' wuth much. Dis heah is freedom. Dese new swamps round de rivah is free as de cemetaries. Dis heah feelin' Ah got in mah stomach, don' nobody own. An' da's 'bout all.

What I find most impressive (aside from the sustained brilliance of the prose) is the structure of this work - The character is The War and its shape is delineated by tracing the effect of its passage on hundreds of individuals. It is almost like reading hundreds of very short stories, interlinked though they are. It should feel fragmented but it really doesn't.

Sadie had brought a rocker out of doors… He wanted to see her idle now and then, and had at first encouraged her to read the news. But women lacked the sense of proportion that kept men calm. Her female soul was too easily affected. For a woman who was a good churchgoer, and a paragon in domestic tasks, she was much more excitable than he would have anticipated.

There was a little wind rising. On the bold profiles of the hills, sudden isolate trees leaped into waving prominence. The pines, in the steady, parted sunshine, began to seethe like cataracts. The needles on the rocking boughs sucked the air in and out, in and out, like glassy gills; and Dawsy thought of fish. The path below was like an evening river with green eels moving softly through it.

This is fantastic. The prose is phenomenal and the way she is approaching the Civil War is certainly unique

Behind the spit of sand, the flat-spread claws of the groined palmettos spread their glistered fans.