Peter Grandbois

It caught my eye in the library. A softcover in the "New Books" section with a picture of a pile of brown dirt against a backdrop of blue sky. A hand holding a shovel can be seen throwing dirt skyward, which seems entirely appropriate for a book entitled Gravedigger. It was written by Peter Grandbois, and published in 2006.
It tells the story of a man in a small Spanish village whose inherited job it was to dig graves. The unusual part is that the recently deceased visits him while he is preparing the grave to tell him the story of their life, which he, in turn, passes on to the bereft family for their comfort.
We not only hear the stories from the dead, but also we learn his story, and that of his daughter. It's a well-written book telling an interesting tale.… (altro)

If I tried to summarize nahoonkara, I’d probably come up with something like this: a story told in the voices of several members of the Gerrull family, moving back and forth between mid-nineteenth-century Wisconsin and a mining town in late nineteenth-century Colorado. It would be a summary that wouldn’t necessarily inspire me to pick up this novel and read it, which goes to show that summaries don’t tell you anything about a book.

Even more than the (his)story of a family in a particular space and time, this novel depicts the chemistry and alchemy of a community. Surprisingly, the warmth with which it accomplishes this is not incompatible with the dreamlike universe of snow that emerges toward the end of the novel. In the town of Seven Falls snow falls for three months in a row and people start building tunnels in order to survive and move from place to place, thus creating an alternative, underground world where all the laws from the world above are abolished. This universe of snow that ends up covering the entire town is identical to the one Killian (the novel’s main voice) has seen, much earlier in the novel, in a trance induced by a mesmerist.

The novel has the flow of a rhapsody in which people and natural elements are equal characters. It requires the attention one needs to read poetry and it has the same entrancing power.

“All through the night, I held her close, hoping the pressure would solidify her, that the friction would smooth the rough edges, reshape the pieces that had not been abraded, but I was new to the ways of love, and I did not know that just because one soul wills something that intention cannot always cross the vast gulf to another.”… (altro)

You’re a world-class fencer, a Dungeons & Dragons aficionado, and a flamenco guitarist. You distance yourself, becoming an observer of your own life. Your “hybrid” memoir is written in the second person (“you” instead of “I,” you explain to those who skipped eighth-grade English); it demands your readers’ full complicity. You call it The Arsenic Lobster, because you’re Sacramento State professor Peter Grandbois and it’s your story of life as an outsider. No, it’s not that you don’t belong in a suburb; it’s that you don’t feel like you belong in a suburb. You nod at the B-52s (the title’s a play on “Rock Lobster”; the themes match) and go David Foster Wallace with the footnotes (less in number, but more relevant) in one section. You write a slim but substantial book. You don’t know jack about fencing at first, but you learn that, like sports and rock ’n’ roll, what counts is the killer instinct.… (altro)