Hannah Coulter: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Music to the senses....
Review: Dear Mr. Berry,

I don't know if you will ever see this, but it is the only way I know of letting you know how much your stories mean to me. I read your books with a highlighter, as there are just too many meaningful passages not to be marked and referenced over and over again. You certainly have a gift for words. The melodious nature of your writing is as addicting as is anything else I have ever experienced. The stories you tell and retell about the citizens of Port William, are for me lessons of a sort. For those of us who sometime wonder what love is, what kindness means, and what it means to be part of something greater than self-serving interests, well, you provide an extraordinary example in your wonderful work.

Thank you so much, for the pleasure I get when I read what you have written.

Rating:
Summary: Best book by Berry, best book in America - 2005
Review: This novel is superb. Oh, so Berry may not create hyper plots but then such plots usually numb more than they inspire. He writes from a deep well focusing on place, person, and love. Not love in some sappy, sentimental sense, but love rooted in knowledge.

The prose is luminous. It's like Berry found a way to turn his poetry into a novel.

This is a deep reading experience. You'll overhear the story of a woman who lost her mother, than her first husband, but found a place in which to make a world, a kind of new world, almost a new Jerusalem (it is sacred ground in the best, ordinary sense).



Rating:
Summary: Port William past and future
Review: Wendell Berry has continued the story of the people of Port William and their common sense, appreciation of the meaning and fullness of community, and wiseness about their place in the world. The story is told through Hannah Coulter's eyes as she looks back on her life in the arms of that community.

People in Port William don't live in fear. "It was getting on toward dark, but I could see the car well enough, and I didn't recognize it. I hesitated a minute. The country is full of strangers now, and you hear tales. There are , no doubt about it, some people who would knock an old woman in the head more or less on speculation. But I thought "What of it?" and went on out."

Hannah's accounts of the two loves of her life and the deepness and fullness of that love are the best descriptions of mature, lasting love that I have ever read.

Hannah looks to the future of Port William with some sadness as the lines of generations of farmers have been broken. This is reflected in the paths chosen by her own children.

"But did we tell the stories right? It was lovely, the telling and the listening, usually the last thing before bedtime. But did we tell the stories in such a way as to suggest that we had needed a better chance or a better life or a better place than we had?

I don't know, but I have had to ask. Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different. Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place. Or suppose the stories you tell them allow them to believe, when they hear it from other people, that farming people are inferior and need to improve themselves by leaving the farm. Doesn't that finally unmake everything that has been made? Isn't that the loose thread that unravels the whole garment?

And how are you ever to know where the thread breaks, and when the tug begins?"

Wendell Berry's writing is a gift and I am deeply grateful.