North Woods was on a lot of the end-of-year-best-books lists. It also garnered a bit of chatter this spring as a possible choice for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (It wasn't selected.) It's synopsis gained my attention and attracted me to it:
A sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries.
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become home to an extraordinary succession of inhabitants . An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to apples. A pair of spinster twins survive war and famine, only to succumb to envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths a mass grave, but finds the ancient trees refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a conman, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle; as each one confronts the mysteries of the north woods, they come to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.
Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space. (Publisher)
In a small way North Woods, whose stories revolve around a small cabin in Western Massachusetts over the centuries, reminds me of The Overstory, whose stories all relate to trees. North Woods has a series of linked stories told chronologically centering the action on or near the cabin. Three centuries of stories, families, characters, and schemes. And all these stories are not told in the same formats -- some are told in prose, others in lyrics and poetry, newspaper articles, medical case file entries, real estate advertisements, a true-crime detective story, a page entry from an almanac, and even a historical society speech. In addition to the humans in the stories, we also meet some of characters again as ghosts, and in the most comic of the stories we encounter a beetle who is making her home in a piece of wood brought into the cabin as firewood, and her beetle-lover who is very attracted to her scent, “What perfume! Threo-4-methyl-3-heptanol! Alpha-multistriatin!”
Daniel Mason clearly has a naturalists eye for details many of us city-dwellers would miss. In fact a detail I missed as an audiobook listener, each of the twelve chapters dealt with a different season or month, which allows the readers to see the forest and the environs around the cabin in what is now Western Massachusetts from a different and new vantage point as well.
North Woods is a story about American history told at a micro scale: colonialism, puritanism, homesteading, Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, abolition, seances, LGBTQ+ issues, suburban sprawl, mental illness make appearances in the stories. It was looking at a history not of a particular family but of a particular location. It got me thinking what my spot on earth would have to say, what stories it would tell, over time.
The audiobook was excellent and used a variety of voice actors, ten in all. That seems about right considering the story took place over at least three centuries. But I didn't get the benefit of viewing any of the photos, illustrations, or the variety of written formats in the book. I think, but I am not sure, that the odd illustration on the cover is actually a historical drawing. The cougar, called a "catamount" in the book, is often talked about with no actual sightings. So it makes sense to include an illustration of what the people of the time thought the cat might look like.
My rating: 5 stars.
2024 Twenty Books of Summer Challenge
19 / 20 books. 95% done!
No comments:
Post a Comment
I look forward to your comments and interactions! Join in the conversation.