“Away from the citronella candles and electric bulbs illuminating the trees into the surrounding darkness, Eze walked into the ascending crescendo of the raucous night, calling back over his shoulder, ‘Well, come on, I got something to show you.’”
Jesmyn Ward's debut offers glimpses of the writer to come, as "Where the Line Bleeds" balances tremendous character-sketching with some clear over-writing, memorable renderings of atmosphere and place balanced against plot shortcuts and confusing shifts in perspective and time.
While the story hovers around the relationship between twins Cristophe and Joshua and how they manage fractured dynamics with Cille and Sandman, their estranged mother and father, Ma-mee is the core of the book. The blind grandmother tries to hold the twins and extended family together, with most of them figuratively blind to the toll it is taking on them.
On the strength of subsequent works like "Salvage the Bones," "Sing, Unburied, Sing," "Let Us Descend," and "Men We Reaped," Ward has become one of my favorite novelists. This work from 2008 documents that artist on the verge of emergence, after she works out some issues with how things escalate in confusing ways, the passage of time, and the omission of the voice of a key character in Laila.
"Where the Line Bleeds" shows a novelist finding her voice, a hint at Ward's eventual ascension as one of our most revered chroniclers of the South.
“His brother, their wounds, Ma-mee dimming like a bulb, his parents’ places unknown and orbiting them like distant moons: it was enough.”
No comments:
Post a Comment