Geography of Saints

Rating:
Summary: Outside/inside
Review: I was very taken by this wonderful real-life novel. Even if the reality level is relatively high, the author manages to turn it into something that transcends the documentary, the journalistic. By mixing many atfirst sight totally unrelated elements, in the end it turns out to be a novel about spirituality in daily life, or about how to see meaning in it.
The location of the American North-West is much more than just an
impressive backdrop. The scenery in the broadest sense of the word, including the population, is subject and metaphor at the same time.
Penny Allen seems to focus on the "outside" of things, but interprets the "inside". All elements come together towards the very end, not only in a literary way, but in the way things sometimes do, in real life.

I read this book with a lot of pleasure and satisfaction. It is
introspective, but at the same time describes mundane and sometimes gruesome events that happen in the real world. And it's funny, if you share the author's sense of humor.

Rating:
Summary: Americana Memories
Review: Memoirs are the current hot genre. Often they depend on one big event for their oomph, or they putter along in a very interior manner. Penny Allen, a radical bohemian filmmaker now living in Paris, caretook a horse ranch in eastern Oregon, which would provide enough gist for most memoirist's mills. Perhaps Allen is lucky, perhaps she draws intense people and events to her, perhaps her filmmaker's gaze sees and frames life as most of us do not--certainly most of us wouldn't have emerged with such an amazing quilt of interlocking stories. Thoreau observed that most people lead lives of quiet desperation, and Allen's time on the high desert proves no exception. She finds these desperate lives and recounts them brilliantly, but after the regular weird folks come the hardcore character actors: the cult of Rajneeshpuram, the Vietnam vet "on patrol," the ghost, and more. With the constitution of a war journalist, she never averts her eyes, and she is willing to tell us exactly what she saw. --Hollis Taylor, Sydney, Australia

Rating:
Summary: West meets West
Review: Penny Allen's memoir captures its reader softly and earnestly. It is a tale told as if someone were sitting next to you whispering into your ear while life continues to rush along around you. It's the kind of whisper that makes you feel like taking a break from the concentration required, but the story is much too enticing to step away. She writes so descriptively about a unique landscape without ever becoming pedantic and verbose. From a perspective of acute awareness, Ms. Allen details a community, and the environment that contains it, with clear, dynamic precision, expressing far more trust in an often-demanding natural world of forests, rivers and animals than in its equally unpredictable human inhabitants. Within this story she also notes her study of the Rajneesh movement in Oregon. She was likely the most knowledgeable "outsider" of that brief but notorious attempt of a spiritual colony to survive within a culture steeped in tradition and the American way. She presents both sides of the story in balance and fairness. Penny confides in the reader and allows the reader to recognize her insecurity in the challenges of adjusting to a new life in a small community with its own pains of growth and cultural changes. Still, she develops strong, enduring relationships with many of the local personalities in the manner of the code of the West. She gives them an opportunity to show themselves to her. The memoir is worth reading, for the view of a small rural community, for the insight and timeless experiences of the writer and for the reflective incentive it gives the reader.

Rating:
Summary: An Intimate Tale in a Broad Landscape
Review: Set in a vivid and dramatic landscape, this memoir tells a story filled with honesty, humor, and courage. Allen observes with a keen eye. She takes on one of the great challenges for a writer, giving us not just the surface of the moments of a relationship but the deep undercurrents, both real and imagined, and succeeds with a grace that seems effortless. Allen's inner journey blends perfectly with the wild spaces, the free spirited horses, and the quirky human world, which is at once familiar, weird, and sobering.

Allen is an engaging guide and companion. We can only hope she shares more of her journey with us.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning language, complex rollicking tale
Review: Though the title tells the potential reader to slow down - that this book can't be read on one level - nevertheless its dramatic true tales propel you through it. Allen plays land traumas off human traumas during Rajneeshee Oregon to move her story into deeper stratas of each. This is the kind of book I seek out to read, one that explores who we are, how we're dealing with each other, our environs.... entertaining and engaging us through gripping images and thrilling phrases.