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3.56 AVERAGE
3.56 AVERAGE
A beautiful book of stories that are tender and touch on small themes that touch is deeply. This is a book of deeply Midwestern stories written at a time when the Midwest was the West. Garland was a great during his life though he seems mostly forgotten.
This was a truly beautiful piece of work from someone that intimately knew and loved the prairie. His words paint vivid beautiful pictures of not only golden flecks of sunlight bouncing through the leaves but also of the pain and suffering that goes from being tied to your land. Hamlin won the Pulitzer for Daughter of a Middle Road which I have just started reading, but Main Travelled Roads was definitely better in my opinion than Son of a Middle Border. He absolutely captured the moments that I see when walking through the fields early that take my breath away, the feeling of infiniteness of the prairie sky, the song that the lands sings as wind whistles through the corn and the grasshoppers string.
Its not just the beautiful imagery though, he also captured the people well, and not in a demeaning way. He wanted to show that people on the prairie could be genius, loyal to a fault, kind and giving, and utter scoundrels. He showed them as people rather than as idealistic farmers that were in the propaganda at the time,. (I would like to mention here that as a woman married to farmer I found truck commercials almost deeply insulting in their desperate ass-sucking attempts to glorify modern day midwesterners, the commercial writers could learn a thing or two from Hamlin). He demonstrated the almost death defying work of the farmers, the tenacity and perserverance of their women, and the deep pains of farming and homesteading. He showed the needs of young women, love that knows no times, desperation, fear, and courage. He captured it all in this wonderful collection of short stories.
You wont walk away from this novel without learning something.
Its not just the beautiful imagery though, he also captured the people well, and not in a demeaning way. He wanted to show that people on the prairie could be genius, loyal to a fault, kind and giving, and utter scoundrels. He showed them as people rather than as idealistic farmers that were in the propaganda at the time,. (I would like to mention here that as a woman married to farmer I found truck commercials almost deeply insulting in their desperate ass-sucking attempts to glorify modern day midwesterners, the commercial writers could learn a thing or two from Hamlin). He demonstrated the almost death defying work of the farmers, the tenacity and perserverance of their women, and the deep pains of farming and homesteading. He showed the needs of young women, love that knows no times, desperation, fear, and courage. He captured it all in this wonderful collection of short stories.
You wont walk away from this novel without learning something.
I have a soft-spot for "pioneer" authors, Willa Cather and Ole Rolvaag in particular, so I picked up this little collection by Hamlin Garland with high hopes.
Ultimately disappointing. Some of the plots or characters were good and/or touching. . .But his prose was a little cumberous, and I was left with a foul impression of bigotry.
I'm probably just being hypersensitive because of a bias in favor of my own Scandinavian ancestry, but his tone and characterizations of the "stupid Norwegians" was a turn off.
Altogether, it was an okay read, but nothing special.
Ultimately disappointing. Some of the plots or characters were good and/or touching. . .But his prose was a little cumberous, and I was left with a foul impression of bigotry.
I'm probably just being hypersensitive because of a bias in favor of my own Scandinavian ancestry, but his tone and characterizations of the "stupid Norwegians" was a turn off.
Altogether, it was an okay read, but nothing special.
Garland's vision of American farm life in the mid-West during the later years of the 19th century is -both harsh and captivating. His characters are well-drawn and believable, even if Garland's prose is a bit dated, and the support they demonstrate for one another in the hard scrabble life they have chosen is - like the hurricane in Houston - a reminder that in difficult times people sometimes overcome their selfish proclivities and reach out to one another as human beings.
Short stories. Mostly ok. No twists or anything. just stories about farm people in the Midwest in the mid to late 1800s.
A collection that is mostly hit-or-miss, but the hits are very remarkable. Although "Under the Lion's Paw" tends to get anthologized most often, I think Garland is at his peak in "Up the Coulee," with its fine balance of impressionism and mud-caked, life-on-the-farm realism. (What Garland termed "veritism.") Worth reading, even if Garland tends to come off at times as "Willa Cather Lite."