Annie Proulx' Bird Cloud
The Clue
to Proulx:
I
haven't read enough Annie Proulx. That Old Ace In the Hole at
book club. The Shipping News is still waiting. Fearfully,
perhaps, having loved the movie. And hesitating, perhaps, because,
how could an American write such a Canadian novel? Now I know that
she lived there, and cares about the place and the people. Well, I
should have already divined that, knowing as I did that she had
insisted, with the sale of movie rights, that it had to be set and
filmed in situ.
In
situ, in place. I think that's
the clue to Proulx. She loves "place," and places, and even
though her stories all have plots and characters and themes, it is
often setting which dominates. Like the setting of Bird Cloud, the
monster house she built overlooking a rock bluff along a river in
Wyoming.
Reading
Bird Cloud
reminds me again how much I love creative non-fiction (as we call it
here in Canada, hyphen included). CN-F assumes that we readers are
intelligent sensitive people interested in many things. That we do
not need or expect to be manipulated by plot twists or emotional
traumas, or outdated rules determining what may be included and what
will not make the editorial cut. That nature and the simple passage
of time, carefully observed by another fully sentient human being
will interest us. That we will all find something or things with
which to connect. Because we too love the details - how to (or how
not to) envision, design, and supervise the construction of a dream
house. The details of the flora and fauna, the geology, archaeology,
history, the politics of the past as they infringe / impinge upon
today.
After
all, what is a love of "place" but a love of this Earth and
all she nurtures? All my relations.
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