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The Spectator Bird

The Spectator Bird

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It is something--it can be everything--to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle." As to reading the journal. I don't know. I would think it would just hurt the other person if it was, as in this case, an infidelity. But Great Falls wasn't all bad; for the first time, Stegner lived near a public library. He started to read, but, he said, "It wasn't until Salt Lake City" — where the family moved a few years later — "that I began to be a real addict. I would go down to the library two or three times a week to bring away three or four books each time, without any direction."

As to not seeing any change in the narrator's demeanor, I think that might also be a problem. There wasn't a big change. If the narrator doesn't really grow/change....well where is the arc in the the main character's story line? He was sort of the same, from start to finish. The wife really, too. The ending chapters swept me away. These contained the treasure at the end of an arduous journey, and it was well worth the wait. I felt melted, shapeless and quivering with sorrow and love. It also felt like a natural culmination of all we - the characters and the reader - had endured, and it was one of the richest reading experiences I’ve ever had. One of the things that makes me more tolerant is that Joe had a rough childhood (as did Stegner) and I don’t think I originally made enough allowance for that fact. He is also unable to come to terms with the death of his only child twenty years earlier, who was described as an over age beach bum who died either due to an accident or suicide. Part of Joe’s grief can be traced to the fact that he and his son were in constant conflict and he feels that he was not a good father and thus was partly responsible for his rebellious son’s death. The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) published more than two dozen works throughout his life, including Angle of Repose, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. An early environmentalist, Stegner was instrumental-with his now famous "Wilderness Letter"-in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. I share a lot with the central character of the novel. I believe this is why I relate to the book as much as I do. The book is about Joe Allston, actually not just about him, but about his wife (Ruth) too, about the couple as a pair, about their relationship and their respective attitudes. The year is 1974. He is sixty-nine years old and very much aware of the fact that he is approaching old age. Health concerns trouble him. He is retired. Husband and wife have settled down in a rural community in California, offering the peace of countryside living and only an hour’s distance from the intellectual community at Stanford. They have lived in NYC and have traveled extensively. Literature is an integral part of who they are. Joe’s mother was of Danish descent.

This self under the scope was very thoroughly studied. Joe’s observational skills as a “spectator”, passively taking things in, were keen enough to recognize himself as a spectator, passively taking things in. This quote was telling: Catching me with my feelings showing would give her power over me, as surely as if she had collected my nail pairings or tufts of my hair." As I mentioned earlier there I related with the main character since I see some of my mother in him. Just going around life being grumpy, lamenting what has happened but never really doing anything about it. Taking the path as if you have no control over your life (to an extent). In addition I am an only child and growing up I hung around a lot with my grandfather and his friends, so some of the characters in a way reminded me a little of my childhood. I sympathize with Joe in the sense that we are all getting older and it is sometimes frustrating as you note the physical differences from being young. I now have to take medication for blood pressure, cholesterol have some aches and pains : ) There is a feeling part of us that does not grow old. If we could peel off the callus, and wanted to, there we would be, untouched by time, unwithered, vulnerable, afflicted and volatile and blind to consequence, a set of twitches as beyond control as an adolescent’s erections. I have had a bunch of Wallace Stegner's works in my library for a few years but never got around to choosing one. So, about a week ago I walked over to the library and this book sort of jumped out at me. And so at age 63, an age I think is appropriate for reading this book, I settled in for what was a very worthwhile and thought-provoking week of reading.This tour-de-force of American literature and a winner of the National Book Award is a profound, intimate, affecting novel from one of the most esteemed literary minds of the last century and a beloved chronicler of the West. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more thankful for a book in my life as in this moment! I could read it a dozen more times!! Joe Allston is a literary agent, perhaps polishing brighter stars. If he was in Denmark, one or more poets might call him “an attendant lord.” So it is not just chance that takes Allston in fact to Denmark. Well, it’s a postcard actually, a postcard that arrives now that Allston is retired. The postcard is from a countess he once knew in Denmark and it gets him to rummage through his boxed memories for a journal he kept of those days. His wife, I drifted into my profession as a fly lands on flypaper, and my monument is not in the libraries, or men’s minds, or even in the paper-recycling plants, but in those files. They are the only thing that proves I ever existed. So far as I can see, it is bad enough sitting around watching yourself wear out, without putting your only immortal part into mothballs. Once they arrived, the focus of the journal shifts to the countess. They learn that despite her elegance and good breeding, she was getting the cold shoulder from society types. Her estranged husband, unbeknownst to her when they’d been together, had been a Nazi sympathizer. Later into their stay they learn something else that explains the perceptions of her peers, but it would be a spoiler to say any more. I will say that you may or may not buy into this revelation. I decided that for me it was just a side issue, and that the far more important part of the book was Joe’s exploration of self.



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