skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A glimpse at three characters sharing the Library "Name of the Week":She wore the prettiest sundresses, white and yellow and covered with blue and purple flowers. All wavy and loose. Sometimes she'd wear her hair up, to give her neck some air she said, and she looked nice that way. But then when she'd take it down, the way it tumbled off her heead and rolled across her shoulders in waves, and colored like fire, the way fire is not just one color but about seven, all becoming one another over and back again: that was her hair.
There was something that she did to me, just looking at her, knowing she was close. That was all I did, of course: look, pass her in the hallway on the way to supper, smell the scent of her in my room after she'd cleaned it, her presence everywhere, in this house, on my mind, her note in my pocket.
Now here she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing at farmng but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.
Temptress and Madonna, these Lucys. Or maybe simply Eve. The former two are the magical women at the heart of Daniel Wallace's The Watermelon King; the latter is the stable daughter of a unstable academic in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, my current read and next book club selection.
My "books to read" list - at least the one I currently use - dates back to Christmas 2002, when Michael purchased me an adorable book-tracking book. It has served me quite happily. So no entry on the list is even four years old. Yet I cannot for the life of me remember the circumstances that led me to put Daniel Wallace's The Watermelon King on the list. But list it I did, and this past weekend, I actually got around to reading it.It came as a bit of a surprise. In addition to a quirky title, it had a quirky design. (You can see the cover here.) And this is when I discovered that it was by the author of Big Fish, the 2003 film directed by Tim Burton and starring Ewan McGregor. I watched this movie with my parents (it is right up their alley); while I found it sweet, I couldn't imagine seeking out works by the author. And yet apparently I had. Anyway, on with the book...The Watermelon King is set in the same fictional town as Big Fish - Ashland, Alabama. And in both stories, a young man is in search of a parent's past; in both, the father figure has created a world of fabulous tales that cannot be believed. But perhaps they should be. Wallace's characters are mostly caricature, and yet roughly plausible, even when the events befalling them are not. In TWK, our hero Thomas Rider spends the first half of the novel allowing them to speak for themselves, and make their case about their role in his mother's life and death. And once he takes over the narrative, events again converge in a way that sweeps everyone in the town along with it. The journey's end is mostly predictable; the past that leads you there is not quite.I enjoyed reading TWK. It passes quickly and has a strong forward momentum. I started it while lying on the beach, which may be why I would label it "beach reading." More accurately, it's for a wicker chair on a veranda (a porch will do) on a sticky afternoon, with a pitcher of lemonade by your side.
