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Sto caricando le informazioni... Taking the Wall (1999)di Jonis Agee
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 Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro.  blackdogbooks | Dec 28, 2013 | 
"...a stellar collection about blue-collar folk, their plucky and despairing relationships and their dreams of speed and glamour.... If this book were a movie, it would be a noisy midwestern starring Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, and Sissy Spacek, with Martha Plimpton as the feisty young grease monkey working at the Glory to God garage, across from the Curl Up & Dye salon." Premi e riconoscimenti
As the engines roar and the green flag waves, these stories tear across their rural landscape with the energy of a Winston Cup race. Like W.P. Kinsella's minor league ballplayers, Jonis Agee's drivers, pit crews, mechanics, and their families live in small towns, eat at truck stops, and have a hard time keeping their dreams from destroying their lives. From the garage to the kitchen table, from demolition derby to nascar, Agee's hapless heroes open our eyes as they take the wall. The wildly popular sport of auto racing is a backdrop in these stories for exploration of the creative and destructive aspects of obsession. In farmhouses, mobile homes, and roadside trailer courts, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters all try to figure out how to keep their families running as smoothly as their cars. Taking the Wall is rich with details about racing and rural life, and richer yet in insight into that part of the human spirit that just doesn't know how to quit. Agee takesa personal and compassionate look at a grab bag of individuals linked by obsession. Reviews Novelist (South of Resurrection) and short fiction (Bend This Heart) writer Agee's collection of bittersweet stories dissects the rough world of auto racing from the working-class perspectives of drivers, pit crews, fans, family and other hangers-on. While "taking the wall", crashing into it, is the worst possible scenario, Agee's characters secretly wish for the excitement, horror and suspense it offers: will the driver walk away from the fiery wreck? Domestic life unfolds around the racetrack throughout the collection. "The Pop Off Valve" is a monologue in which an unnamed narrator recounts her naovet in marrying a man obsessed with racing, and the wake-up call she received on her honeymoon 15 years ago at the Motor Speedway in Irish Hills, Mich., when not even a terrible accident could thwart her husband's devotion to his hobby. Her description of the crash is chilling: "the rescue workers used the jaws of life to pry what was left of the driver from the shattered burnt shell ofthe car." Nonchalantly, she adds, "We grilled steaks on the hibachi at dark, unable to see the bloody raw meat until we cut into it." Agee's parsimonious language is sta Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classificazione LCVotoMedia: (4.33)
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1
Most of you won’t have ever heard of Jonis Agee. Yet three of her books were chosen as New York Times Notable Books of the Year: [Bend This Heart], 1989; [Sweet Eyes], 1991; and [Strange Angels], 1993. Her milieu is the American Midwest and the characters of her books are the people who populate the small towns there. She gives voice to the frustrated narrow existence of the common people and finds the beauty in their simple, noble lives.
[Taking the Wall] focuses on race car driving, not NASCAR and Winston Cup, so much as dirt tracks in fields and demolition derbies. This is not a world that I would have ever wanted to read about, but Agee is a favorite author, so I dipped into the stories and found I couldn’t get away. Even though the stories describe races and cars, they are really about the lonely and broken people sliding through life one corner at a time, trying to avoid another encounter with the wall. Agee’s stories are riveting, largely due to her ability to tap into a common longing in the human soul. These people dream of better, even if it is out of their reach or they are incapable of seizing it. And when paired with Agee’s near perfect prose, the result is stunning. Let me let Agee speak for herself:
“You have to dream your way back to beginnings, that’s why stories start in the middle, like a fingering away from some rock you can’t see but imagine has to be there. Everything lives in a bowl the size it requires. The bucket of night that holds our melting sleep. Even the clar hard soil of Esparance’s farm found ways to use the burnt sticky liquor spilling from dreams. I know Blu’s gone on ahead of me now, so I stop in Missouri.”
Bottom Line: Sherwood Anderson for the racing fan – more about the unseen lives of common folk than about racing, Sherwood would have been proud.
5 bones!!!!!
A favorite for the year!!!!! (