Canadian-Literature : The Living

The Living

CDN$ 5.49


Listening to Lawrence Luckinbill read Annie Dillard s historical novel The Living takes a little getting used to. The very first sentence reveals a pronounced and distracting lisp, but don t let that dissuade you from continuing. Luckinbill s voice also exhibits a simple honesty, a gruffness that is perfectly suited to the steely pioneer spirit of Dillard s story. Surprisingly quickly, the vocal idiosyncrasy fades away, leaving only the emotional resonance of Luckenbill s obviously heartfelt connection to this powerful tale. Dillard s finely crafted prose and Luckinbill s sincere voice carry you back to the early days of American expansion, into the truly Wild West and the stone-hard life these settlers would be forced to endure. She had cried out to God all day and maybe all night, too, that he would lend her strength to bear affliction and go on. She was not aware that underneath she prayed another prayer as if to a power above God, or at least to his better nature, that he was finished with the worst of it. Of course, God isn t finished, and neither are these brave souls. Dillard opens their world slowly, stretching the horizon generation by generation, tethering the fate of one small family to that of the struggling town that they are helping to build and, ultimately, to the inexorable rise of the emerging nation. (Running time: six hours, four cassettes) --George Laney

Grand Scale - Grand in scope and finely detailed...this is just the kind of journey-driven writing that I like. Quirky but real, like the conditions of our lives. I missed the lack of dialogue, though, and feel like she walks a thin line between showing and telling. A bit too much telling for my taste, because I was a little distracted worn & out by the end of this journey.

Extemely Detailed - Classic Annie Dillard - An exhasutive piece of brilliance set in the Pacific Northwest circa 1850-90s. Dillard paints word pictures of the magnificent scenary as well as of the characters down to the minutest detail. A must read for those who want a realistic portrait of the difficult yet full lives the men and women led in settling and growing this land. She has cleverly written into her characters many underlying and intertwining themes that are evidence of her great talent. Only that she would write another novel.

Depressing, but vivid - Annie Dillard has one of the clearest, most attractive writing voices I have ever read. It s almost always an eye-opening joy to read her, just for the way she puts words and sentences together. This novel is no exception, although it s not her best work.The plot here - about the settlement of the Pacific Northwest, and some characters in and around Bellingham, Washington - is fairly interesting, although not compelling. After about 100 pages, I started to find the title ironic: I felt it should be called ",The Dead and Dying.", One gets a real taste of how difficult life was in the 19th century, when the frontier was still being opened.But Dillard s style does not mesh well with the demands of a novel. She is far better at conveying her innermost thoughts, her memoirs and essays are what make her so good. If you have the choice, read those rather than this.

Extremely rewarding - This novel is about settling the Pacific Northwest in the same way that Moby Dick is about whaling. The richly drawn narrative provides a framework for Dillard s exploration of the mysteries of life, suffering and death. There is a philosophical and theological depth to this work that is rare in contemporary fiction.This is not to say that Dillard sacrifices literary quality to make philosophical points. To the contrary, some of the sentences are simply breathtaking. One of my favorites occurs early in the novel, when Dillard is describing the forbidding topography of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of one of the settlers:",God might have created such a plunging shore as this before He thought of making people, and then when he thought of making people, he mercifully softened up the land in the palms of his hands wherever he expected them to live, which did not include here.",This novel can be difficult at times, but it is worth the effort and rewards the close reader.

Start ",living.", Read Dillard. - Reading a book rarely gets better than reading Annie Dillard. I often reread her nonfiction books. Her writing is insightful, poetic, and moves from page to page with a sustaining ring of truth.Midway through ",The Living,", Dillard s main character, Clare, thinks to himself, ",set thine house in order, for thou shalt die, and not live.", ",The Living", is Dillard s only novel. It is set in the last fifty years of the 19th century, on the Washington coast, roughly twenty miles south of Canada. As Dillard s novel gradually unfolds, we witness her characters enduring the hardships of living and dying as they struggle out their interrelated lives deep in the unsettled Pacific Northwest. ",Accidents happened,", Dillard observes, ",and human bodies were thin-skinned parcels out of which the force of life leaked at a prick . . .all deaths were accidental, or none was, for disease was just as random an accident as injury, and all die. None died prematurely, for death battened on only the living, and all of those, at any age", (pp. 150-51).Dillard s characteristic attention to detail is evident on every page. Her novel includes salty rocks, sawdust, black snails, drizzling rain, dark, dripping trees, choirs of frogs, ",the slushy sky,", gulls, and the solitary, white summit of Mt. Baker ",above the sky, higher than the clouds.", At times the movement of the plot seems to slow to the point of no plot, but never to the point of stopping death, for ",death was ready to take people, of any size, always, and so was the broad earth ready to receive them", (p. 156). Dillard s writing here is so real that it is hard to believe this novel is pure fiction. This is a 5-star book. I ve given it four stars only when measured by most of Dillard s other books.G. Merritt



The Living