Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
Western North Carolina writer Ron Rash is getting more high praise for his new book, Serena. I blogged the first rave review here.
This is one hot book, and Rash will be at Malaprop’s this Sunday for a reading.
From the new review, over at The Huffington Post:
As unforgettable as a haunting mountain ballad, Serena unfolds like a brilliantly conceived cautionary tale and mediation on the dark corners of unbridled lust to profit at any cost. Caught in between the competing interests of outside corporations and the federal government, of course, are the Appalachian mountaineers, whose land-based traditions and ways of life are seemingly stripped away with each felling of timber.
A Greek chorus of sawyers banters throughout the novel in the rich language and mythos rooted in Cormac McCarthy’s early east Tennessee work. On viewing their company’s destruction of the hills and streams, resembling the “skinned hide of some huge animal,” one mountaineer and World War I veteran declares: “Looks like that land over in France once them in charge let us quit fighting. Got the same feeling about it, too.”
“For a few moments no one spoke. A flock of goldfinches flew into view, their feathers bright against the valley’s floor as they winged southward. They swooped low and the flock contracted, perhaps in memory. For a few seconds they appeared suspended there, then the flock expanded like gold cloth unraveling. They circled the valley once before disappearing over Shanty Mountain, their passage through the charred valley as ephemeral as a candle flame waved over an abyss.”
Looking back on her own influences, author Dorothy Allison once recalled the importance of Toni Morrison and her novel, The Bluest Eye. “The novel gave me the idea that telling dangerous stories,” Allison said, “was the thing I needed to do. And that it could be beautiful in the telling.”
Serena might be the most dangerous and beautiful novel to hit the shelves this fall.
There’s also a nice review by Janet Maslin in the NYT.