Wendell Berry is an activist, short story writer,
essayist, and novelist. He has written
on environmental issues, anti-war philosophy, and is a chronicler of rural
America. He is also an author I was
unaware of until his works were collected and republished by the Library of America (LOA). The Library is a nonprofit that reprints
for perpetuity important writings which otherwise might be dropped by commercial
publishers. He is one of only a handful
of still-living authors to be so recognized. One of my winter reads was the LOA's collection of Berry’s Port William Novels & Stories.
The fictional river town of Port William, Kentucky, where
the stories are set is “one of the most fully imagined places in American
literature” said the editor of the collection.
And he is right. Port William as
a place, is not unlike Faulkner’s use of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Fittingly, Berry’s novel A
Place on Earth is included in the collected works. Place is important to these stories because
it helps shape the lives of each character.
The characters and stories draw heavily on the real-life environment
where the author was born into a family that has been living on the land for
five generations. Berry’s literature
breathes the air, land, and people of the rural community. He writes of Port William’s residents collectively
with the lost-to-time term of the “Membership” -- the Membership being
generations of residents of the small town and surrounding farms who have been
neighbors for so long they are considered family, related or not. They know and
take care of each other through good and bad. It is a sense of community that
has nearly disappeared, lost to industrialization, technology and with
increasing numbers of each new generation moving away.
At 985 pages, the collected works include 27 stories,
including the 326-page novel A Place on Earth. While not written in
sequence, the editor has arranged the stories chronologically according to the
time period covered in each. A Place on
Earth recaps and encompasses all of the shorter stories and could be read as a
stand-alone book. I’d advise reading all
of it. Yes, that will take some time. But, the character development in the shorter
stories is well worth the read – and easy to do because you can stop after any
of them and return to it later.
Recommendation: Yes.
And let me repeat, I’d advise reading all of it.
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