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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Sep 2021, 224 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2022, 224 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Erin Lyndal Martin
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In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.
Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she ranges across the dead landscape and washes up at a "resort" on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call "Big Girl."
In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this "gabby seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, an army of the aged and ill, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth"?
Rivetingly strange and beautiful, and delivered with Williams's searing, deadpan wit, Harrow is their intertwined tale of paradise lost and of their reasons—against all reasonableness—to try and recover something of it.
Book One
If they do this when the wood is green,
What will happen when the wood is dry?
—Luke 23:31
My mother and father named me Lamb. My mother believed that I had died as an infant but had then come back to the life we shared. As I grew, her intention and need was to put me in touch with where I had been when I was dead, what I remembered of it and what I had learned. She believed I was destined for something extraordinary.
My father did not believe I had ever been dead. Nor did any of the doctors they consulted.
A young man was watching me the night I was said to have died. He did not harm me was the truth of it. It was just a story that was to grow up around us both, causing us both to be outcasts.
My mother and father were at a dance, the first dance of the summer.
My mother lacked good judgment in many things. She would be the first to admit it. She had taken up with this young man who was still a teenager a little more than a month after I was born. He was a town boy, he ...
Harrow is a difficult book in many ways. There's nothing easy about reading it, which I happen to like. The book replicates the post-apocalyptic haze it depicts: events are vague and fleeting, people come and go with little to introduce or see them off, and even the main character isn't always central. And yet, I'm utterly haunted by it, likely because there's so much left unknown. Furthermore, as someone who copes with difficulty by using dark humor, I appreciate how nothing is sacred in the author's jokes. A few times, I cackled so hard I dropped the book...continued
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(Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin).
In Joy Williams' Harrow, two characters discuss Franz Kafka's "The Hunter Gracchus," a short story written in 1917 and published posthumously in 1931, along with a document that was marked as a fragment, which appears to be an addendum to the story.
Franz Kafka was born into a well-to-do Jewish family on July 3, 1883 in Prague. He had considerable conflict with his father growing up and throughout his life and wrote extensively about his father's "intellectual domination," temper, and habit of crushing all enthusiasm out of his son. Kafka went on to study law at the University of Prague and worked as a law clerk for a year. Whatever he did, life with his father was simply too oppressive.
Kafka wanted to move to Berlin, where his fianc...
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