Such is perhaps the case with Joyce Carol Oates. To see a writer be rediscovered by others-or encountered for the first time-is a thrilling thing.Ī third way a book can go underappreciated is to be written by a writer so hardworking and productive that new readers don't know where to begin. Now, after almost 40 years, the collection has been reprinted by Pharos Editions with an introduction by Cheryl Strayed. As this was all long before the Internet, it was as if she vanished without a trace. The author's life was sad, if not tragic-she died quite young (at age 42) of cancer. Julie Hayden's The Lists of the Past is a lyrical, brainy, moving collection of stories that was published in 1976 and then went quickly out of print. And the novel bears up beautifully upon rereading-it more than renews any respect for it that one might have shoved into the back of the mind's china cabinet.Īnother way a book can be underappreciated is to have no real success at all. Its brilliant recasting of King Lear to the pathologies of Iowa families and farming transforms the barren Goneril into a sympathetic woman whose haunted heart controls the narrative of the book. Sometimes (though not often) a literary novel can be too fortunate: Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and sold very well, but I sometimes think its true artistic achievement got lost in all that success. There are different ways a book can become underappreciated. It turned a great read into an unforgettable day. I could look up from the page into the same gorgeous, ghastly white that Shackleton faced. Shackleton's story would be compelling in anyone's hands, but Lansing got the pacing exactly right.
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Nearly 40 years before the Caroline Alexander book of the almost identical name, long before Kenneth Branagh donned sealskins for the TV movie, there was this perfect account.
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Then Ralph Harvey, the lead researcher, came over to my tent with an early Christmas gift: a copy of Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, Alfred Lansing's account of the explorer's harrowing slog to safety after his ship was crushed by pack ice. It was late December, and it was looking like I might not make it home for the holidays. The ice fields are stunning when you can see them, but when you're confined to a tent camp with no toilet and Tang-marinated chicken for dinner again, and no book to read in that 24-hour light, even Antarctica becomes the tiniest bit trying. A Twin Otter dropped me off, but was days late picking me up because when weather blows in and the pilot can't tell ground from air, he has to turn back. Nothing gets delivered there but the occasional research team, their stuff, and the even more occasional journalist coming to interrupt their work. Yet I always feel buoyed by itīecause I get to watch something amazing: a strong old woman teaching aĪmazon does not deliver to the unnamed ice fields of Antarctica. Childhood is also short, and grandmothers don't This book is shortīecause summer is short. Most important people in each other's lives.
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Vie for control, alternating tenderness with aggression. Grandmother as a pair of well-matched powerhouses who provoke each other and Jansson does not regard children as innocents,
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Tough as her surroundings-and so is Sophia. The setting is mythic: This is Viking territory,Īfter all. With her grandma on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. Kid-a 6-year-old Scandinavian named Sophia, who spends the summer alone You may know of Jansson from her Moomin children's series,īut The Summer Book is decidedly not for kids, though it is about a Jansson, an obscure little novel that features my favorite grandmother in all This is why I adore The Summer Book by Tove They seemed better to me than other adults-wiser,Ĭalmer.