REBUILDING A LIFE

  

CABIN is a St. Martin's Press title

 

 

     At the center of Patrick Hutchinson’s Cabin, are his hunger to live meaningfully and his need to exchange a dreary, soul-killing job in the city for physically and intellectually satisfying work. This he found the process of rehabbing a decrepit cabin in the heart of a forest. At the time,  Hutchinson worked as a copywriter in the city. That changed when he came across an ad for a cabin in Snomish, near Seattle, Washington. One day after seeing it, he bought it with money borrowed money from his mom. Subsequently, he set out to solve a long list of problems ranging from procuring firewood for a wood stove of unconventional size, plugging chimney pipe leaks, and dealing with the effects of a mudslide. In the process of fixing the worst of these problems--the tilted floor would remain tilted--he rebuilt his life.

His struggle to upgrade his cabin while resisting the urge to turn it into a duplicate of a city apartment is the stuff of Early American tales. This is a tale that never ceases to be new, particularly when the teller has an engaging style, a keen sense of humor, and sufficient humility to admit that as a construction worker, he is but a novice. His story includes elements of a Quixotic disposition,  a large pinch of Thoreauvian idealism, and the derring-do of American pioneers.  The result is not unlike a snow globe that isolates the reader from troublesome issues such as national politics, pandemics, economic inequality, and other pesky bits of reality. There are no serious conflicts. The bubble is an invitingly warm and fuzzy space that is all the more charming because the reader knows that it keeps out everyday reality.
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Inside the bubble are warmth, friendship, humor, good meals, some drinking, and one disposable chapter about the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms. There is gratuitous profanity, and there are way too many sentences in the passive voice, but there is also the endearing quality of a writer who knows his limitations and goes working, nevertheless. Much like the final version of his cabin, Hutchinson's book is not all of one piece. It ambles, it meanders, but it eventually returns to its source—the quest for simplicity, for green spaces, for a time when it was brave, wise, and virtuous to rebuild, heal, mend, reuse, and make do. Part chronicle of a shambolic adventure, part a reconciliation of what is imagined and what is real, this is a book one would have to be heartless to dismiss.

One can safely say that Hutchinson is the kind of writer who will only get better. He is a determined learner who taught himself the skills he needed to become a builder. He is also a writer whose voice is fresh and compelling. One might say that in his adventure, Don Quijote grew up, flourished, and moved out of the bubble. His readers are richer for that.

 CABIN is a St. Martin's Press title  

 Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.                                                                          

                                                                                                                                  amanuensis                                    

A TREASURE TROVE OF JEWISH FICTION

Although the themes of these stories are timeless and universal, this book is eminently suited for Hannukah gift lists.

 

 Dr. Nora Gold, Founder and Editor of the literary journal Jewish Fiction.net, has assembled an impressive collection of stories beautifully translated into English from 18 languages. First among these is the eerely prescient ''Hostage,'' excerpted  from a novel by Nobel laureate Eli Wiesel.  So powerful is the message of Wiesel's account of the kidnapping of a Jewish writer by Ahmad, a Palestinian, and Luigi, an Italian that it should be obligatory reading for anyone who wishes to understand how the conflict between Palestinian terror organisations and Israel can  spill over into other nations.  

Elie Wiesel is not the only luminary whose work graces the pages of this anthology. Galician-born Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Ukrainian Isac Babel, plus 15 writers from as many countries, prove that Jewish literature   transcends geographical  boundaries. It also reaffirms the truth the that wherever they live,  People of the Book advance the  art of storytelling that began with Bible . 

18 Jewish StoriesTranslated  from 18 Languages, edited by Nora Gold,  Cherry Orchard Books title.

CHERCHEZ MOMZILLA

 

 

Van Gogh's Weeping Woman sitting on a Basket, Van Gogh Museum

 

 

 

 

 

 

VINCENT’S WOMEN: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE LOVES OF VINCENT VAN GOGH

BY DONNA RUSSO, MARCH, 2024

 

Bestselling author Donna Russo researched the life, letters, and work of Vincent Van Gogh for three years. While her 423-page novel, Vincent's Women: The Untold Story of the Loves of Vincent Van Gogh is a hybrid—part distillation of facts gathered from an impressive bibliography, part a work of fiction. It is a story that follows Van Gogh from his difficult childhood in Holland, to a failed stint as a clerk in a London art house, to a brief tenure as a preacher to coal miners, in the Borinage area of Belgium, and finally, to his transition art, initially in Holland and later in France. Throughout, there were sojourns in Holland where he chafed at social constraints and clashed frequently with his bourgeois parents. In Russo’s view, which is hardly original, Van Gogh was a lonely, misunderstood, allegedly unloved child, who grew into an adult incapable of functioning without storm and stress. The implied corollary of this thesis is that the seeds of Vincent’s madness parental lie in the cold soil of maternal emotional abuse. The question is, really? Van Gogh’s parents lived in a society where conformism was a virtue and good parents were those who ruled with an iron hand. If every Dutch child who had stern mothers became a self-mutilating painter, would the Dutch Stock Exchange have survived? Who would have planted tulips?

Possibly, the reason that Russo veers from historiography to wild conjecture and nebulous notions of conspiracy, is that novelists who choose Van Gogh as subject, face a crowded field. Many have sifted his ashes in search of the key that might unlock, once and for all, the secret of his genius, as well as the cause of his mental instability. Medical savants seem to have been unable to reach consensus on the matter. Each issued a different diagnosis according to which he suffered from syphilis and alcoholism, that he went mad from  consuming too much thujone--a component of the absinthe he drank all too frequently--that he was plagued bymalnutrition, porphyria, that he ate oil paint, and he often stayed out in the sun long enough to get sunstroke. What else can be added to this litany of possibilities that  that might tempt prospective readers to shell out for a new book on the subject? Could one attribute Van Gogh’s ill health, his prickly personality, his poor social skills to a new single cause? Why yes,enter Momzilla.

Where the medic savants hesitate to pinpoint a single cause for Van Gogh’s problems, Russo seems to favor a simpler explanation—his mother, Anna Cornelia Carbetus, is the root of it all. That is, from the she named her son after another Vincent, who had died in infancy, Anna established a pattern of rejection that would blight Vincent II’s life. Conventional, controlling, straight laced Anna seems too convenient a target, but then, this is an author who does not blush to hint that it might have been Gauguin* who lopped off a portion of Van Gogh’s left ear with a sword, no less. If this not sufficiently speculative, she invites the reader to consider an obscure teenager for the role of prime suspect in Van Gogh’s death.

But what of the women mentioned in the title? There most vivid presence in the novel is that of the narrator, Johanna van Bongen, wife of Theo, Vincent’s beloved brother and staunch provider of emotional and financial support.There are those who believe that it was her marriage to Theo plunged Vincent into a maelstrom of apprehension and insecurity that eventually, led to madness. Supposedly, he feared that that Theo’s new obligations would drain his limited resources and that his commitment to Johanna would leave no room in either his heart or his budget for impecunious Vincent. That proved to be a misapprehension. Not only did Theo continue to provide for his brother, Joanna did not stop him from doing so. After Theo’s death, which followed Vincent’s by a few weeks, it was Joanna who continued to promote his paintings, who organized exhibits of his work, and who translated many of his letters.

Unlike Johanna, none of the women who figure in Vincent’s in Vincent's seem to have led  noteworthy lives. What saved them foim obscurity was having posed for him. Ultimately, all of those he loved. spurned him. Eugenie Loyer, with whom he fell in love while living in her mother’s boarding house, in London, was already engaged to someone else when he became infatuated with her. This was a detail she kept to herself until Vincent proposed marriage. Dejected by this revelation, Vincent left the boarding house. His model, prostitute Sien Hoornick, left him. Kee Strick Vos, fled from him. This pattern of proposals and rejections fits neatly into the premise of the novel, according to which, each failed relationship replicates his dysfunctional relationship with a mother who found him to be an inadequate replacement Vincent, the baby she had lost. The suggested inference is damning in its simplicity--Vincent II did not measure up to the dead baby, therefore Mommy became Momzilla. That, is in a nutshell, the source of all his pain and suffering.

Armchair psychoanalysis by laypersons has little value. Russo’s portrayal of Anna Carbetus Gogh as a villain, is one of the glaring flaws in this novel. The clumsy syntax that makes the text read like a bad Google translation, is another. Readers might consider other books such as Derek Fell’s Van Gogh's Women: His Love Affairs and Journey into Madness, October 13, 2004.. Debby Beece’s The Van Gogh Woman, March 2022, Caroline Cauchi’s Mrs Van Gogh, September, 2023. They may not be as lovingly and laboriously researched, but they cannot be more deficient in grace.

 

Note--The sword slash by Gauguin has been debunked by experts.

RICHTEXTS REVIVAL

Art by Adrien  Jean Madiol

           After a long hiatus, richtexts will return by Halloween 2023.