#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr

#464 The Hunter’s Wife- Anthony Doerr

This is an indescribably beautiful piece of writing. Doerr has a quality in his writing, a quality found in very few writers (Haruki Murakami comes to mind as perhaps the only equal) where you stop reading and it feels like you’ve woken from a day dream. The emotional depth in this story is at once strong enough to feel like a thick blanket keeping you warm against a blizzard and still so fragile that by even mentioning it, it might blow away in the wind. It’s magical, and yet grounded-in-the-earth real. Particularly strong is Doerr’s descriptions of the natural word (a quality we saw in his story, The Deep- (#39 in this blog).

The Hunter’s Wife is a seer, one who can tap into the eyes of dead beings, see where they go and what they feel. She lives with the Hunter in his cabin deep in a Montana Valley.

“Both of them lived in the grips of forces they had no control over—the November wind, the revolution of the earth.”

“When he looked out the cabin window he saw wolf tracks crossing the river, owls hunting from trees, six feet of snow like a quilt ready to be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under the roots against the long twilight, their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras.

            With love still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of spring.”

Being stuck in the snowed-in Valley all winter (for five years) she was able to hone her skills by touching animals either in hibernation or frozen by the cold. She can see their dreams. By Spring, she gets bored with the wild, as all the animals wake and she can no longer see their dreams.

“More clearly than ever she could see that there was a fine line between dreams and wakefulness, between living and dying, a line so tenuous it sometimes didn’t exist.”

She is a woman living in the winter, while he lives in the Spring and Summer. Yet, he is the one that seems frozen, solidly set in one place at one time, never changing and never thawing. She must leave the Valley and explore the world and share her gift. He stays behind to tend to his hunting and dreaming of wolves.

“He had given up on finding a wolf in that country although they still came to him in dreams and let him run with them, out over frozen flats under the moon.”

Read this story!

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total=40

#169 The Myth of Bears- Rick Bass

#169 The Myth of Bears- Rick Bass

Trapper and Judith are married and live deep in the forest, isolated rom the world, relying only on each other. But Trapper is bordering on insanity, or a prolonged version of cabin fever.

“In Trapper’s nighttime fits, he imagines that he is a wolf, and the others in his pack have suddenly turned against him and set upon him with their teeth; he roused in roused in bed to snarl and snap at everything in sight.”

She decides to leave him, and run away. But where? She is a forest woman and doesn’t want to go to town, she is like the Northern Lights. For now she is just glad to be free:

“The sadness of leaving him being transformed into the joy of freedom, and the joy of flight, too.”

He is a trapper, so naturally he goes hunting her. She feels comforted by his pursuits but doesn’t relent. “It’s not that he is a bad man, or that I am a bad woman, she thought. It’s juts that he is a predator and I am prey.”

He thinks about trapping her with gold chains and sugar. He has no introspection. Everything to him is about the hunt, finding ways to catch what he wants. “The mistake last time was that he didn’t hold her tight enough.”

As he pursues Judith, he is being pursued by the wolves, symbolic of his growing insanity.

“The wolves that have been following at a distance draw closer, knowing they are safe when a fit wells up from within him; at such times they know that he is not a man but one of them.”

She is incapable of fully leaving, his pursuit is what gives her identity: “It’s terrible without the thought of his out there chasing her, hunting her. It’s horrible. There’s too much space.”

This is a very strong story, full, earthy, animalistic. It makes me want to go watch Jeremiah Johnson.

Rating: 8-8-8-8 Total=32

#54 Beauty’s Sister- James Bradley

#54 Beauty’s Sister- James Bradley

This is a fantastical tale with witches, and spells, and towers and a beautiful maiden. It’s a re-imagining of Rapunzel, the girl in the tower with the long hair. In this version, she has a sister Juniper who lives near by with their mother, both wish to see her sing from the window.

As Juniper gets older and befriends the witch, Jinka who keeps Rapunzel trapped away from the world, the sister’s become acquainted. Juniper slowly grows into an independent woman and sees herself as some of the town does, similar to the Witch.  But unlike, Jinka, Juniper doesn’t seek power or spells:

“I wonder now exactly why I gave myself to Jinka. Was it for Rapunzel’s sake? For my own? Or was it because I saw in her a way to harm my mother, to make her suffer for coldness, her lack of love?” “Beneath it all, though, I suspect she was just cruel, and took pleasure in people’s fear of her, in the power that it gave.”

Beyond the things they all covet, each character gets what they deserve in the end:

“We want what is forbidden, yet we have to take what is available.”

Notable Passage: “…it was that there seemed to be an absence in our lives, a space that could neither be identified or acknowledged.”

Rating: 9-8-9-7 Total= 33