Immagine dell'autore.

Lewis Nordan (1939–2012)

Autore di Wolf Whistle

10+ opere 983 membri 59 recensioni 10 preferito

Sull'Autore

Lewis Nordan was born in Forest, Mississippi on August 23, 1939. He received a bachelor's degree from Millsaps College, a master's degree from Mississippi State University, and a Ph.D. from Auburn University. He taught at the University of Arkansas and elsewhere before joining the faculty at the mostra altro University of Pittsburgh. He retired from there in 2005. His first book, Welcome to the Arrow-Catcher Fair, was published in 1983. His other works include Wolf Whistle, Lightning Song, Sugar among the Freaks, and Boy with Loaded Gun. He died due to complications of pneumonia on April 13, 2012 at the age of 72. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno

Comprende i nomi: Nordan Lewis, Lewis Nordon

Fonte dell'immagine: Bookcover

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Opere di Lewis Nordan

Opere correlate

A Good Man: Fathers and Sons in Poetry and Prose (1993) — Collaboratore — 20 copie
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1990 (1990) — Collaboratore — 18 copie
Delta Land (1999) — Introduzione — 15 copie
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1987 (1987) — Collaboratore — 14 copie
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1989 (1989) — Collaboratore — 14 copie

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Begins loose and zany; funnels down to tight, lyrical and tragic. Norton experienced a diffident, benignly neglectful childhood and grew into a man mostly comprised of self-destructive behaviors, but he tells his story with such honesty, humor, charm and total lack of self-pity that I felt absolved from any need to judge or worry and was just glad to be along for the ride. If you don't mind sitting next to that somewhat weird, yet bright, storytelling uncle at Thanksgiving who often makes you laugh, usually makes you wonder if he's exaggerating, and sometimes makes you wonder how he survived his life, you'll likely enjoy this. I did.

P.S. As with many of the memoirs I have read, it was helpful to have Google Maps nearby to explore the locations in the book. Poor Itta Bena has seen better days.
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MrsReily | 5 altre recensioni | Feb 10, 2023 |
The bulk of the stories in this collection feature a boy named Sugar Mecklin of Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. Sugar’s father is an alcoholic house painter with unrealized dreams of success in show business and no particular skill or talent. His mother supports Sugar’s father with love and admiration, so much that she was “ugly with love.”

Sugar fishes for chickens in his yard, until he actually catches a rooster and ends up wearing it on his head. He also shoots at his father through a window, missing twice, maybe on purpose. He feels sick and awful for months, until Big B.G., a useless boy’s dad, tells him “no man is going to get mad at his boy for taking a shot at him, Sugar.” Sugar is surrounded by love, dysfunction, and dysfunctional love.

In the non-Sugar stories a city couple unsuited for farming buy a farm and have issues with wild dogs – and create a terrible situation. A self-conscious young woman saves a physically perfect man frown drowning after a lamprey eel attaches itself to him, on their first (and most likely only) date. A high school boy’s eyes are opened to a wider world when he spends a summer as an attendant to a paralyzed man.

Lewis Nordan was a master of the humorous, quirky but deadly serious southern novel, and here, short story.
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Hagelstein | 3 altre recensioni | Jan 3, 2023 |
Questa recensione è stata scritta per Recensori in anteprima di LibraryThing.
The Publisher Says: Lewis Nordan’s fiction invents its own world—always populated by madly heroic misfits. In Music of the Swamp, he focuses his magic and imagination on a boy’s utterly helpless love for his utterly hopeless father—a man who attracts bad luck like a magnet. Nordan evokes ten-year-old Sugar Mecklin’s world with dazzling clarity: the smells, the tastes, and most surely the sounds of life in this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, Delta town. Sugar discovers that what his daddy says is true: “The Delta is filled up with death”; but he also finds an endless supply of hope.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review
: This book was such a joy to find, to get from the publisher, to read...it has been a perfect experience. It's the twentieth anniversary of the original edition, so I suppose the publisher of all Nordan's work saw a need to fulfill. They've brought out Wolf Whistle and Lightning Song, so why stop now?
Daddy said, "It's funny how you end up somewhere, and then that's your life."

The sheer gorgeousness of the book's prose is no surprise to anyone already familiar with Author Nordan's work. Sugar, our kid narrator, isn't the artificial kind of kid that infests family stories. He's got the fire of a smart, frustrated kid, one who understands just enough to know he's not getting all the story. In the 1950s Mississippi Delta, there's more subtext than anywhere outside Japan.

Above all else, though, is the subject matter...the drunken daddy whose life has kicked him in the balls one too many times...the wearied, nibbled-at soul of a man who didn't get far and couldn't see where else to go. There's a good reason he doesn't really connect with anyone in his family. It's not one you'll find out early in the tales (these are braided stories telling a novel-sized plot) and, when you do find it out, you won't entirely understand the why of some things. I'll say this for Author Nordan's choice here: If these are lightly fictionalized autobiographical sketches there's a darn good reason he drew that veil.
A thousand times, when the train slowed or stopped, I thought of jumping off. I wanted to die in a ditch. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a different history and geography. In rhythm with the wheels I said I want I want I want I want I stayed on the train.

The whole of a person's life is set in childhood, much though we resist that knowledge. The way Sugar loved his Daddy and was not loved in return is the way his own family will turn out. Anyone who's had that kind of family pattern blast its way through our own lives recognizes the unstoppable force of Family History. It takes intentionality, focus, powerful motivation, and a pile of luck to keep the past from repeating itself.
The sound of the rain was without thunder. It was as constant as the feeling of loss that suddenly I felt inside me, that now I knew had been with me all along, a familiar part of me since the beginning of memory.

I would recommend this book to anyone who feels hemmed in, pecked at, torn, or simply needs a respite from daily life. The book is pretty much a perfect meditation on the cost of living an unexamined life!
I wish this story ended more happily than it actually does. All this happened a long time ago, and now I'm middle-aged and have been going to Don't Drink meetings for a good long while myself. There is a good deal of wreckage in my own past, a family I hurt in the same way my father hurt me, and the same way his father hurt him. I tore my children up as fine as cat's hair, you might say.
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½
 
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richardderus | 33 altre recensioni | Dec 7, 2022 |
There is great pain in all love, but we don’t care, it’s worth it.

At times I was at a loss to know how to feel about this collection of interrelated short stories that center around the life of Sugar Mecklin, a boy from the Mississippi delta. The first story was rather funny, I particularly liked that Sugar’s friend was named Sweet Austin. I mean, only in the Delta would you find kids named “Sugar” and “Sweet”. But as the book progressed, the humor gave way to a kind of poignant sadness, and a feeling of the desperate hopelessness of a life in this town at the edge of the swamp.

By the time I reached the epilogue, I felt the sunny hopeful life of this boy had been drowned in the rising waters that come in the aftermath of the hurricane Sugar and his mother endure. It seemed a metaphor for their life with Sugar’s unpredictable and sometimes violent father. I was left with the fear and conviction that Sugar had indeed become his father or his blind grandfather, a spiteful and sinister old man.

There is something deeply disturbing about two young boys sitting at the top of a staircase that leads into the cellar and watching the rats swimming in the flood waters. There is something terribly troubling about a mother telling her four year old son that he will “always be white trash.” There is something sad and crippling about a young girl whose mother spends far more than she has to throw a birthday party that no one shows up for.

In the end, I felt this book was far and away more sorrowful than uplifting and the music coming from the swamp would have been more mournful than sweet. By the end, I was casting back to the beginning, the joy of life that Sugar was experiencing when he heard his first Elvis song and the songs of the black church members that floated up from the river baptism. shall we gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river, but this is indeed not a river, this is a swamp.

Perhaps the pain was worth it, but I kept thinking the miracle was that there was any love to recall.
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mattorsara | 33 altre recensioni | Aug 11, 2022 |

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Opere
10
Opere correlate
7
Utenti
983
Popolarità
#26,196
Voto
3.9
Recensioni
59
ISBN
28
Lingue
1
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