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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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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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 ( )