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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 4, 2003)
Winter Reading 2003-2004 She Who Is Wintering by Kate Moses. Anchor Books, 2003. Paperback, $13. I f the number of books written about an individual determines whether they have achieved icon status, poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 31, has made the grade. Her short, meteoric life and her six-year marriage to British poet Ted Hughs has prompted volumes of biography. Her poems have been peered at and prodded; a movie about her life has just been released. Icon and archetype, Plath’s allure remains: young, gifted, depressed, jilted, dead. I doubt the reams written about Plath get closer to her emotional interior than Wintering’s fictional account of her last months. Author Kate Moses, born a year before Plath caved in to the depression that haunted her for more than a decade, could well be Plath’s second self, a voice from beyond the grave that allows us to enter the poet’s troubled genius. Moses doesn’t push the case that the “she” who inhabits her book is Plath. She doesn’t need to. Moses’ language is so lush, so electric, her emotional perceptions so exquisitely drawn that if she is not channeling Plath herself, you simply don’t care. Whoever Moses is channeling, the character is believably close to the Plath revealed in her poems and journals. Any doubt that Moses can pull off the fictional recreation of Plath falters mid- way on page 2. “What has happened to her customary morning dread, the sharp stink of her panic?” Moses writes as her Plath wakes in her newly rented London flat on Dec. 12, 1962. “Where is her more ortho- dox heart with its quick metallic ticking, grinding in her chest? Her mind searches for it, the familiar hemorrhage of fear, the known morning ritual of materializing ter- ror…” By page five, questioning the veracity of the fictional Plath is moot. There is only abject voyeurism, the thirst to know more about this grasping, vibrat- ing poet. This thoroughly female book is fed by the interior anguish and exterior details of Plath’s daily struggles. Moses deftly weaves into the narrative events from Plath’s life that fed her poems: a sliced thumb, bees from her backyard hive, the mother who sucked away her spirit, the father who died too soon, the husband who left her, the horse that, briefly, carried her beyond it all. Wintering demands immersion. Soak up its glorious words and lush images. See the acres of daffodils that dazzled her when winter gave way to spring at her manor house in Devon. Feel what we all lost because even the promise of the flow- ers’ beauty was not enough to coax Plath out of the darkness that closed down around her like a shroud. — A. Tallmadge Trickster Coyote Cowgirl by Kim Antieau. Forge, 2003. Hardcover, $24.95. D ear Kim, Congratulations on the publi- cation of your third novel, Coyote Cowgirl. I’ll tell my pals in Eugene to check out your cosmic road trip through the surreal West. They have a fondness for the peculiar in that burg. I’ll talk about your heroine, Jeanne Les Flambeaux, who’s the black sheep on the family farm, blessed with stylish chutz- pah, emotional stamina and a shrugging attitude toward bumbles and misfortune. She’s also a torch singer, who croons bal- lads dedicated to food and friendship. She became my instant buddy, sharing recipes and gossiping about her goofy life. My favorite running gag is Jeanne’s ambivalent relationship with a chatty crys- tal skull, dubbed Crane (as in cranium). How did you come up with this wacky dude? After dubious lover Johnny books with the family jewels, our gal rescues Crane but fails to recover a ruby scepter so important to her mom and dad. In hot pursuit, Jeanne and the ancient noggin set off on a journey that would give Hunter S. Thompson a silly grin. They travel to the casinos of Vegas, a Goddess temple and eventually a Southwestern oasis of calm and loving grace. Along the way, people disappear in ways that would alarm talk radio jocks devoted to crop cir- cles and spooky abductions. Familial bonds are reconnected, and Jeanne discov- ers that her latent skills as a chef are beyond potent. Well, Kim, that’s my take on your tasty tale. Have readers told you that your narra- tive reminds them of Gabriel Marquez’s madcap realism or the mysterious spice and teardrops in the film Like Water for Chocolate? We writers work with the same basic ingredients, but clearly, your visions are your own. In your novels, short stories, and personal essays, you see beyond nearby hills to the higher ridges where the trick- sters howl. — David Johnson Gingerbread People • Fudge • Buche de Noel • Baby Fruitcakes S W E E T T RE A T S F OR Y OU R HOL ID A Y E A T S B e s t S w e e t T o o t h In d u l g e n c e & B e s t B ak er y f or 200 3-200 4 Toffee • Mini Poundcakes • Holiday Pies • Frangipane Mint Bark • Holiday Cookies • Handmade Marshmallows reader’s delight. Wolff makes storytelling look simple, but his elegant, disarming style is deceptive, because among lucent prose and ironic humor lies his serious in- tention to show the boulder-strewn path a “book-drunk” schoolboy must travel to find his own literary voice. The New England prep school the nar- rator attends has a long literary tradition of bringing three notable writers to campus each year. Final-year students submit sto- ries or poems to be judged by the writer, and the winning boy has a private conver- sation with him or her. In 1960, Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway were to visit, and our hero wants to write a stunning, contemporary story to win the chance to visit with Rand and/or his hero, Hemingway. I don’t know if students still read Rand, but I love the narrator’s headlong rush to embrace her pitiless elitism, his disillusion at her autocratic presence and his ability to recognize the sacrifice made by his parents and grandparents for him compared to her heartless characters. “I could no longer read Ayn Rand’s sentences without hearing her voice. And hearing her voice, I saw her face; to be exact, the face she’d turned on me when I sneezed. Her disgust had power. This was no girlish shudder, this was spiritual disgust. …She made me feel that to be sick was contemptible.” Later the narrator faces an even more daunting lesson around Hemingway’s scheduled visit, but for now, it’s enough that he brings to his own life the lesson learned from observing Rand’s ruthless, naked power. Something like this may have happened to Wolff in his form- ative years, because in his memoir, This Boy’s Life, he looks at the cir- cumstances of his life squarely, without sentiment or blame, and loves all the characters who fill his story. A layered, literary story, Old School is accessible on a number of levels. It’s a beauty. — Lois Wadsworth Sweet Life 755 Monroe St. • 683-5676 • www.sweetlifedesserts.com Hours: Sun - Wed till 9:00pm • Thur - Sat till 11:00pm DECEMBER 4, 2003 13
