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eileen9311's review against another edition
4.0
While this collection of memories definitely deals with the author’s emergence as an accomplished writer, parts of it focused on things which intrigued me more – her childhood, Edward Hopper like images of bygone days, immigrant grandparents, and her impressions of several young friends who’d endured terrible traumas. Surfacing throughout the various vignettes is a clear love and respect for her hardworking parents. The author deals thoughtfully with the passage of time, and the resulting erosion and distortion of memories. ‘We are young for so long, it seems. Entire lifetimes. And when we’re young we can’t comprehend how personalities shift inexorably over time, as slowly, or nearly, as the wearing away of granite by water or wind.’ She writes of her parents ‘So often wanting to tell you how in patches of sudden sunshine hundreds of miles and thousands of days from home I am pulled back into that world as into the most nourishing of dreams, I am filled with a sense of wonder, awe and fear, sadness for all that has already passed from us and for what must be surrendered, in time.’
I loved the various windows into her past! What vivid pictures and emotions she conveys! The Sunday drive, the one room schoolhouse……… ‘We learned to “diagram” sentences with the solemn precision of scientists articulating equations. We learned to read by reading out loud, and we learned to spell by spelling out loud. We memorized and we recited’. One could almost hear them all, chanting along!
I admit to reading selectively, skipping and skimming where it suited me. The chapter about an autistic sibling I couldn’t bear to read. Because my background in literature is lacking I wasn’t able to properly appreciate the pages which detailed her studies. Overall, though, The Lost Landscape was a treasure! Such rich writing, with so many passages, flagged, to reread!
I loved the various windows into her past! What vivid pictures and emotions she conveys! The Sunday drive, the one room schoolhouse……… ‘We learned to “diagram” sentences with the solemn precision of scientists articulating equations. We learned to read by reading out loud, and we learned to spell by spelling out loud. We memorized and we recited’. One could almost hear them all, chanting along!
I admit to reading selectively, skipping and skimming where it suited me. The chapter about an autistic sibling I couldn’t bear to read. Because my background in literature is lacking I wasn’t able to properly appreciate the pages which detailed her studies. Overall, though, The Lost Landscape was a treasure! Such rich writing, with so many passages, flagged, to reread!
redbluemoon's review
5.0
I read some novels by Joyce Carol Oates, and I so loved them that I wanted to discover her nonfiction works for Nonfiction November. I also thought I might help me to understand some recurrent themes, I thought she might speak about it in her nonfictions.
I was as taken by her words as with the novels I've read; Joyce Carol Oates has a kind of magic, she always involves me in her books.
To discover her childhood was fascinating; I discovered some common points, like in The Words by Jean-Paul Sartre. This kind of similitude always baffles me, because I (naively) thought nobody could really feel or live the same. I felt close to the girl she was, the teenager she was, the young woman she was.
This memoir was both instructive and moving. The chapters about her parents and her sister were heartrending, even if she didn't want them to be so. Her speaking about her husband was touching, and also really intimate, as she can't properly speak about it with strangers/readers. Her numerous reflexions about religion, sexism, misogyny, society, racism made me feel like we were on the same wavelength; I felt exactly the opposite while reading [b:M Train|24728470|M Train|Patti Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429289871s/24728470.jpg|43579550] by Patti Smith. I kind of relate these two books because they are memoirs, but the authors have, for me at least, nothing in common in their way of thinking, their way of living, of loving, of seeing life and art in general.
I felt empty at the end of the book. It is quite rare, but it is always the aftermath of the emotion I felt reading.
Now I want more than ever to read every single book written by Joyce Carol Oates!
I was as taken by her words as with the novels I've read; Joyce Carol Oates has a kind of magic, she always involves me in her books.
To discover her childhood was fascinating; I discovered some common points, like in The Words by Jean-Paul Sartre. This kind of similitude always baffles me, because I (naively) thought nobody could really feel or live the same. I felt close to the girl she was, the teenager she was, the young woman she was.
This memoir was both instructive and moving. The chapters about her parents and her sister were heartrending, even if she didn't want them to be so. Her speaking about her husband was touching, and also really intimate, as she can't properly speak about it with strangers/readers. Her numerous reflexions about religion, sexism, misogyny, society, racism made me feel like we were on the same wavelength; I felt exactly the opposite while reading [b:M Train|24728470|M Train|Patti Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1429289871s/24728470.jpg|43579550] by Patti Smith. I kind of relate these two books because they are memoirs, but the authors have, for me at least, nothing in common in their way of thinking, their way of living, of loving, of seeing life and art in general.
I felt empty at the end of the book. It is quite rare, but it is always the aftermath of the emotion I felt reading.
Now I want more than ever to read every single book written by Joyce Carol Oates!
anfribogart's review against another edition
4.0
Molto piacevole questo memoir di J.C.Oates, una scrittrice che mi ha sempre incuriosito per la sua estrema prolificità letteraria e per la capacità di affrontare i generi e gli argomenti più disparati. Oltre a soddisfare la curiosità biografica questo libro contiene dei momenti letterari a mio avviso molto intensi, soprattutto quello in cui l'autrice parla della propria insonnia. Joyce parla con estremo affetto e con grande delicatezza dei propri genitori, persone di umili origini ma di grande umanità. Lo consiglio a tutti quelli che amano questa autrice.
dickh's review against another edition
5.0
While I am clearly biased towards anything written by Joyce Carol Oates, I think her fans, and all others, will enjoy this book.
samhouston's review against another edition
4.0
My friends know that I have long been fascinated by the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. I seldom agree with the author’s political views (especially as displayed daily on her personal Twitter account), but her novels and short stories are so dark and revealing of the depths of the human soul that I have often wondered what could have shaped Oates into the writer she is. Over the years, Oates has revealed bits and pieces of her childhood in magazine articles and books, but it is her new memoir, The Lost Landscape, that offers both the clearest and the most complete look at the “hardscrabble rural upbringing” that helped create one of the finest (and most prolific) writers working today.
Many of the pieces included in The Lost Landscape have been previously published in publications ranging from AARP Magazine to the New Yorker. Some have appeared in previous of her books such as The Faith of a Writer and [Woman] Writer. Some, Ms. Oates tells us, appeared in “substantially different form” when first published. But the important thing is that they are now available in one, easy to find volume that longtime fans of her work are sure to appreciate.
The Lost Landscape is largely a reflection on the author’s earliest years through the eyes of the person she is today. It does not pretend to be a biography or even a “complete” memoir because Oates admits that like most of us she can only remember tiny bits and pieces of her past in any detail at all. She realizes that her memories may be incorrectly tainted by the perceptions of the naïve child she was when she experienced the events being recalled. She uses personal photographs from her childhood to recreate as best she can the events memorialized by the pictures, often spending as much time deciphering what is in the photographic background as on the event itself. She says:
“Taking pictures has been our salvation. Without taking pictures our memories would melt, evaporate. The invention of photography in the nineteenth century…revolutionized human consciousness; for when we claim to remember our pasts we are almost certainly remembering our favorite snapshots, in which the long-faded past is given a visual immortality.”
The book is divided into three sections, each representing a distinct phase of the author’s life. The first, and longest, section begins with her earliest memories and ends with the conclusion of her formal education. Along the way, readers learn of Oates’s childhood on the upstate New York farm of her maternal grandparents, her early education in the same little one-room schoolhouse her mother attended, and her earliest attempts at telling her stories through “books.” There is even a long chapter on one of her favorite pets, a chicken she and her family dubbed “Happy Chicken.”
The Lost Landscape’s other two sections are considerably shorter than the first and focus on what is essentially the rest of the author’s lifetime – from her days in Detroit and Windsor to details she learned later in life about the childhoods of both her parents. Particularly moving are her final reflections on her parents that make up the book’s third, and shortest, section.
Bottom Line: The Lost Landscape is an illuminating look at the creation of a writer, a memoir rather surprisingly created by a writer who seems to mistrust the very genre in which she frames it.
Many of the pieces included in The Lost Landscape have been previously published in publications ranging from AARP Magazine to the New Yorker. Some have appeared in previous of her books such as The Faith of a Writer and [Woman] Writer. Some, Ms. Oates tells us, appeared in “substantially different form” when first published. But the important thing is that they are now available in one, easy to find volume that longtime fans of her work are sure to appreciate.
The Lost Landscape is largely a reflection on the author’s earliest years through the eyes of the person she is today. It does not pretend to be a biography or even a “complete” memoir because Oates admits that like most of us she can only remember tiny bits and pieces of her past in any detail at all. She realizes that her memories may be incorrectly tainted by the perceptions of the naïve child she was when she experienced the events being recalled. She uses personal photographs from her childhood to recreate as best she can the events memorialized by the pictures, often spending as much time deciphering what is in the photographic background as on the event itself. She says:
“Taking pictures has been our salvation. Without taking pictures our memories would melt, evaporate. The invention of photography in the nineteenth century…revolutionized human consciousness; for when we claim to remember our pasts we are almost certainly remembering our favorite snapshots, in which the long-faded past is given a visual immortality.”
The book is divided into three sections, each representing a distinct phase of the author’s life. The first, and longest, section begins with her earliest memories and ends with the conclusion of her formal education. Along the way, readers learn of Oates’s childhood on the upstate New York farm of her maternal grandparents, her early education in the same little one-room schoolhouse her mother attended, and her earliest attempts at telling her stories through “books.” There is even a long chapter on one of her favorite pets, a chicken she and her family dubbed “Happy Chicken.”
The Lost Landscape’s other two sections are considerably shorter than the first and focus on what is essentially the rest of the author’s lifetime – from her days in Detroit and Windsor to details she learned later in life about the childhoods of both her parents. Particularly moving are her final reflections on her parents that make up the book’s third, and shortest, section.
Bottom Line: The Lost Landscape is an illuminating look at the creation of a writer, a memoir rather surprisingly created by a writer who seems to mistrust the very genre in which she frames it.
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