Lewis NordanRecensioni

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.

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.

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.

½

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.

memoirs by alcoholic writer of boyhood in Mississippi w step dad

Fun short stories loosely connected about Sugar's childhood, in particular his relationship to his father. It gets rather strange at times, but it all kind of comes together with the Epilogue. The stories are set in a Mississippi swamp community.

Lewis Nordan was one of the great writers of Southern literature. This book is a delight. Every page is a treasure. This edition by Front Porch Paperbacks is well done and an affordable option for sharing this little novel with friends.

Perfect title: Nordan makes me hear the sounds of the stories as if I was there. The writing is very lyrical and easy to read, the details are just right and stimulate all my senses (not just the sense of sound), and the stories are so absorbing that I forgot the outside world while I was transported to Sugar Mecklin's. One of the reviewers here called it 'magical realism' -- well, sort of, but firmly rooted in the South, or more specifically, in Mississippi. After I finished the book, I thought of the film 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' -- in both, I felt as if Mississippi was another character in the story, and the sound of music -- whether man-made or sung by frogs in the swamp -- is also like another character in both this book and that film. And like the film, this book has the feel of an epic story, although Sugar's journey throughout the story is a subtle one with past and present braided together.

My review doesn't do the book justice. It's no wonder this book has won awards! I'm definitely going to re-read this one, which I don't often do with my books just because I don't have that much time on my hands.

~bint

A sad, beautiful, funny and lovely book! Highly recommended! We're a lesser people now that Buddy Nordan is no longer with us.

Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan is a series of interconnected stories about Sugar Mecklin's coming of age in Mississippi. While the lyrical prose was beautiful, the book never resonated with me the way it has for other readers.½

Redneck order-keeping in the seg south. White trash history with a laugh or two as a black young man is killed. A tour of a poor-as-piss Mississippi delta town.

In Boy with Loaded Gun, novelist Lewis "Buddy" Nordan, who relishes in the dark flavors of all forms of human folly, chronicles his own wayward deeds in his candid memoir of an "odd child" who grows into a tragically perverse adult. With hard won introspection, Nordan does not flinch when writing of his shortcomings, including adulteries, alcoholism and homelessness. Even in the midst of this pain, Nordan's characteristic wit rises to to the top of his prose, though it is more stingy and acerbic than the redemptive humor found in the majority of his novels.

This memoir is compartmentalized into three parts, with the first chronicling his childhood in Itta Bena, Mississippi. If you are not familiar with the author, I would recommend this work as a splendid introduction, as many characters in his novels are ripped right from the author's own childhood experiences and sublimated into his literary black comedy with a profound moral center. There is chapter on his reaction to Emmet Till's murder that serves as inspiration for his most well known novel, Wolf Whistle.

This work is infused with grief and loss from the beginning, as Nordan's father died before he could even form any tangible memories of the man. However, there are moments of sheer joy and humor that the reader can delight in, such as young Nordan's addiction to mail order subscriptions or an incident where he finds himself locked out of his hotel in NYC, naked of course.

Through all of his missteps, the alcoholism, failed marriage and deaths of his sons, Nordan focuses on the redemptive nature of writing. Given the veracity and lyricism of his fictional prose, I can not imagine Nordan ever being at a loss for words. But, as a child, he longed for "words that came from so deep inside me that when I heard their sound, perceived their meaning, I would become possessed of a new self, somehow, one that might someday leave Itta Bena and exist, nay thrive, in another world." And it is through his writing that Nordan escapes both Itta Bena and his own string of follies and regret.

Read Boy with Loaded Gun to laugh, and also read it to weep, for in its pages every range of emotion is illuminated.

If I were to choose three words to describe Nordan's work, it would be haunting, hilarious, and tragic. Usually such elements are a recipe for disaster, or at the very least a digressive narrative train wreck , but Nordan seamlessly weaves together elements of humor and tragedy, the grotesque and absurd with verdant beauty. Wolf Whistle is a novel whose images will linger with you long after the reading has ended.

Wolf Whistle is based on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, whose life was taken because he allegedly "wolf whistled" a white woman. This event would ultimately catalyze momentum for civil rights activism in the decade. Jordan sublimates this memory of the tragic event, which impacted his own childhood, into a collective meditation on the nature of Southern culture in the 1950s. Set in the fictional one horse town of Arrow Cather, Mississippi, no facet of society remains unexamined. Irony, satire and caricature are applied to all of his characters, except to Bobo, the murdered boy, who remains the pure and moral center of the novel. It is around Bobo's murder that the complex racial and cultural relations of this novel pivot. The murder reverberates through each character, no matter how major or minor. Each chapter oscillates from a different character's perspective/ reaction to the tragedy. In result, the reader is able to experience the true ethos of the era: the struggle of the white working class, intense racial segregation, the failings of the justice system, and of course, the cathartic power of the Blues.

In an interview with the author, Nordan states that his novel is ultimately "a serious story about death and grief and broken hearts" but that it exists on "a plane, sometimes comic, even burlesque, just askew of the real historical universe." And it is in his sensuous, evocative prose that we are taken into the surreal setting of the Delta, where elements of magical realism are melded with historical fact. By mythologizing this event, I believe the reader experiences the tragedy all the more profoundly. Nordan will truly be remembered by this haunting and remarkable piece.

I'm from the South and really wanted to love this book, but it was too dang wordy for me. I couldn't make it even halfway through. I can see why some people may love the writing, but there were too many trivial details for me.

I received a copy of Lewis Nordan's Music of the Swamp compliments of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program and appreciated the opportunity.

This is a fictional story of 10 year old Sugar Mecklin whose life in the Delta is a sad, but promising tale. Wanting to win over the love of his father, whose alcoholism and "bad luck" are a barrier to a typical father-son relationship. Sugar is aware of the poverty and dire circumstance of his surroundings, yet does not allow it to take away from his determination and hope. His imagination cannot be deterred.

The author paints a realistic portrayal of life in the South, the settings, conversations and humor. His writing is poetic and thought-provoking. There is an underlying sadness that is difficult to endure, it lingers and never goes away. This coming of age story evokes a sense of innocence and resilience. The reader cannot help but to rally behind Sugar and hope that his future is brighter and that he finds what he has never had.

I rate this 3/5 stars.

Highly recommended. Lewis Nordan has created quite a magically brutal world in Music of the Swamp, told through the eyes of Sugar Mecklin. A tragic comedy of a boy growing up in the southern US, with parents who are maybe not so good at parenting, or living, but are good at surviving. So many descriptive, beautiful, crisp poetic moments.

Built from childhood humor and skepticism, this is one of those books which can transport readers back to a child's version of the world, as wonderful and horrible as that may be at different turns. Although it pulls together in what feels more like a series of sketches and anecdotes and understandings than a single full story, the work as a whole revolves around a boy's attempts at understanding love...as a result, the work ends up being surprisingly cohesive, surprisingly touching.

Nordan's worlds are memorable, and constantly believable, as are his characters. While he may not write about easy subjects, his books are easy reads, and lovely journeys into a world that can at least work toward helping us understand the craziness of the world around us.

Recommended.

This book follows the boyhood episodes of Sugar Mecklin's life in the southern U.S. He lives a pitiful life with adults who are hurting and who hurt him even as they love him. The relationships are painful yet realistic, and the love, when it does surface, is breath-taking. Sugar is gifted with some insights that are truly profound, and with humour that helps us bear the smothering sadness that infuses everything. Lewis Nordan is a gifted writer who immerses us in the mind of a boy losing his innocence one step at a time.

I really wanted to like this book more than I did. The prose is wonderful—beautiful without being elaborate. The young boy who's the central character is imaginative. Somehow though, I never got caught up in this one, which I think probably says more about my tastes than the writer's abilities.

*****

I wanted to add that there are several scenes where violence against animals is used as a pot device. If this kind of cruelty upsets you, I would think twice about reading the book.

Music of the Swamp is a wonderful book filled with lyrical prose and a truly unforgettable character in Sugar Mecklin.

Sugar is ten years old and has a lot of stuff to deal with because of his deadbeat father. But he makes up for the bad parts of his life by using a vivid imagination and unending sense of hope and wonder.

Sugars descriptions of the swamp and his surroundings are so beautiful. I loved the book and highly recommend it.

Sugar, the main character in Nordan's "Music of the Swamp," is a quirky, sensitive, imaginative young man. We experience Sugar's world, which includes a less than ideal home life, through Sugar's beautiful, haunting imagery, metaphors and similes. The Mississippi swamp which centers in the story may very well be an extended metaphor for Sugar's experience of childhood and his trajectory toward adulthood, where he will find he resembles the demons he once knew. Like the swamp, Sugar's boyhood is filled with terrifying creatures (an alcoholic father, a loving, but inadequate mother and lots of dead and dying things (including Sugar's innocence). Yet, the tone keeps from dragging one into the horrific depths of the swamp because Sugar is so matter-of-fact about the horror and even finds a strange sort of beauty in it. This is, perhaps, the books saving grace and what keeps it from becoming a smelly swamp beast that one would rather not encounter. In fact, if Sugar were a flower he'd be lotus: something that may grow in the murky, smelly water, but which, in spite of this, blooms to a beautiful, breathtaking flower. And the reader who is brave enough to wade into the murky depths with him will not be disappointed.

Through interconnected stories Music of the Swamp is a coming of age story of Sugar growing up poor in the Mississippi Delta. Beautifully written Sugar's life revolves around his alcoholic father,a frustrated mother and an assortment of neighborhood characters and relatives frustrated with the realization that their lives did not turn out to be what they wished for. As I read this I was bombarded with a myriad of emotions- laughter sadness and a realization that our parents aren't perfect yet the bond between parent and child is strong. I really enjoyed this and recommend it highly

As my faithful readers may recall, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill is my favorite publisher of contemporary southern fiction. I have several books by Lewis Nordan, and I decided to dip into one of his for a marathon session of summer reading. Music of the Swamp tells the story of Sugar Mecklin and Roy Dale Conroy, two friends who live on the delta in Mississippi. I am not sure of the time period of the story, but the lack of cell phones, computers, and cable television, push it back to the middle seventies. Sugar’s dad drives a Ford Pinto, so that points to the middle to late 70s as well. I actually enjoy solving these little puzzles while I am reading.

As the author’s note informs us, Lewis Nordan is the author of seven books of fiction including several acclaimed novels. He also wrote a memoir, and received many awards for his writing. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2012.

Lewis Nordan has filled Music of the Swamp with some jolts and shocks, and a healthy dose of humor to go along. Sugar describes Roy Dale as “white trash,” although from the description of Sugar’s father and family life, they are not so far off that mark either. However the two boys are close friends, and they navigate the dangerous waters of alcoholic fathers and mothers who care little for housekeeping.

The humor concerns the boy’s view of these difficulties and their attitudes toward their parents. Neither seems to have any other friends. Sugar has a vivid imagination, which makes him an unreliable narrator. Sugar loves to tell stories, and he frequently confesses his exaggerations. Nordan writes,

“I suppose there is one more thing to tell. For many years, after I was grown and no longer lived in Mississippi, I told this story to my friends. And when I told it, I always added one detail that was not true. // I always said that after we had settled down and had drifted off to sleep beneath the canvas roof of the tent, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of [his sister] Dixie Dawn’s sweet pure angelic voice in song. I said that beneath the bright stars her voice was a crisp spirit, a lyrical hopeful pause in the terrible drama of our narrow lives. I said – and even as I invented this I believed it – I said that in the foreign-language music of her song my ears and my heart opened up to a world larger and more generous than the world of my parents and our geography. // Now as I tell this story again, I forget I ever made up such a thing. It is not true, of course. Dixie Dawn did not wake up that night, so far as I knew. As far as I know, she lay in her bed in a hard deliberate sleep, where song had put her and from which song could never draw her out” (45-46).

Lewis Nordan’s Music of the Swamp has a number of heartbreaking and heartwarming episodes. He makes a reader laugh and cry, sometimes on the same page. The tender moments of a young boy growing up under what I can most kindly describe as difficult circumstances make this short novel a pleasure to read. 5 stars

--Chiron, 7/30/14

Music of the swamp by Lewis Nordan is a book of interconnected short stories describing Sugar Mecklin's coming of age in Mississippi with an alcoholic father. Though I didn't particularly relate to the story I did appreciate the lyrical prose and the light, humorous telling of rather dark material. The book is not autobiographical as explained in an interesting essay at the close of the book.

Music of the Swamp is a deeply sad novel. One that explores the terrain of severely dysfunctional families. The story is set in the late 50s or early 60s in a backwoods town in the South. It's essentially a swamp town inhabited by classic white trash families burdened by lack of education, little work, extreme poverty and alcohol and drug addictions. The main story follows a young boy named Sugar Mecklin who both adores and hates his barely coherent alcoholic father.

Nordan is a very strong writer. I didn't truly "enjoy" this book as much as The Sharpshooter Blues, but he continued his demonstration of powerful writerly skill. The characters are peculiar and impenetrable but believable. The settings and sense of place is incredibly rich and vivid. The setting is perhaps even more interesting than the main character. I did find it hard to empathize with the main character despite his general innocence. I couldn't quite find a way in to him, to recognize him. Even so, there was a sense of raw honesty in his struggle to grow up surrounded by such bizarre failures and creeps that populated his life.

The overarching theme is that of the missing father. The absence of a strong yet intimate relationship between a boy and his father. The failure of a marriage also due to alcoholism and a lack of intimacy. The pain of the absence. The pain of a hole in one's life. The book rather lacks any exploration of what happens later. The adult experience of a childhood ruined. It's touched on briefly, that the relationship dysfunctions and issues with alcohol are often inherited in their own way. But without great depth. That is perhaps the greatest weakness of this book. But as a study of the pain experienced in childhood from an absentee parent, it succeeds powerfully.