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Music Books > John Berry > Item 5
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Jayber Crow
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by Wendell Berry
Sales Rank: 15194
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List Price: $15.95
$10.85
At Amazon
on 12-29-2007.
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Features
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Counterpoint; New Ed edition September 18, 2001
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1582431604
ISBN-13: 978-1582431604
Product Dimensions:
8.9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
Product Review
The questions who and what and how and why are no doubt useful and occasionally even noble in their place. But for Wendell Berry, whose spare and elegant prose has long testified to the rural American values of thrift and frugality, four interrogatives must seem a waste, when one will do. Where is the ultimate qualifier, the sine qua non, for both the author and his characters. Place shapes them and defines them; the winding Kentucky River and the gentle curves of the Kentucky hills find an echo in their lilting speech and brusque affections.
Jayber Crow is another story of the Port William membership, the community whose life--and lives--Berry has unfurled over the course of a half dozen novels. Jayber himself is an orphan, lately returned to the town. And his status as barber and bachelor places him simultaneously at its center and on its margins. A born observer, he hears much, watches carefully, and spends 50 years learning its citizens by heart. They were rememberers, carrying in their living thoughts all the history that such places as Port William ever have. I listened to them with all my ears, and have tried to remember what they said, though from remembering what I remember I know that much is lost. Things went to the grave with them that will never be known again. Jayber tells the town's stories tenderly. Gently elegiac, the novel charts the tension between an urge to isolation and an impulse to connectivity, writ both small and large. As the 20th century moves inexorably forward, swallowing in great mechanized gulps rural towns governed by agricultural rhythms, Port William turns in upon itself. And as Jayber admits quietly, "Once a fabric is torn, it is apt to keep tearing. It was coming apart. The old integrity had been broken." Integrity, both whole and shattered, is key to the stories of Burley Coulter, Cecelia Overhold, Troy Chatham, and above all, Athey Keith and his daughter Mattie, to whom Jayber pledges his undying and unrequited love.
Berry's prose, so carefully tuned that you never know it is there, carries us into the very heart of the land itself; his exquisitely constructed sentences suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world. Jayber Crow resonates with variations played on themes of change, looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found. --Kelly Flynn
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Jayber Crow, town barber in Port William, Ky., recounts his life journey, which parallels the decline of sustainable agriculture throughout rural America. The agrarian threads also run through the novel's romantic triangle, in which Crow pines for the heart of the gracious and beautiful Mattie Chapman, whose ambitious agribusinessman husband, Troy, embodies the antithesis of Crow's sacred devotion to nature. Veteran narrator Paul Michael effectively portrays Crow's complexities and contradictions as both an insider at the hub of community life and a self-sufficient loner who eschews the material comforts and conveniences of the modern age. As Crow and his friends feast on fried catfish and corn pone at a water-drinking party, Michael's whimsical imitation of the good, good, good sound of a moonshine whiskey jug evokes a wistful connection to the joyous simple pleasures of a contemplative existence. Michael's deliberate pronunciation of hard consonant sounds as Crow repeatedly scoffs at the machine-like momentum of the war and the economy may seem heavy-handed. Yet Berry's activism informs his storytelling, so listeners familiar with his body of work should not be surprised by the political edge. A Counterpoint paperback (Reviews, July 31, 2000). (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
This review is from: Jayber Crow: A Novel (Hardcover)
I have read Wendell Berry's nonfiction, but I am a newcomer to his fictional Port William community. Reading this book is like a visit to a simpler life in rural America. Set in 1986, this novel tells the life story of Jayber Crow (1914- ), orphan, doubting preministerial student, bachelor barber, grave digger, church janitor, and progressive pacifist. Although an ordinary man, Jayber is a truly memorable character who, from his later years, reflects upon his life with clarity and poetic insight. "I am a pilgrim," he says, "but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a staight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order" (p. 133). This book is about many things, but should be read mostly for the sake of experiencing Berry's really fine writing. It is the story of Jayber's unrequitted love for a married woman, Mattie Chatham. It is a fictional memoir about faith, loss, farming, and finding one's place in the world. "I will have to share the fate of this place," Jayber writes about his declining community. "Whatever happens to Port William happens to me" (p. 143). It is also about bearing witness to dying farms and small businesses. Jayber's memoir is filled with page after page of profound insights. For instance, about growing old and loss he writes: "I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of the loss) found everything, and is ready to go" (p. 353). Examining marriage, Jayber says: "I saw too how a marriage, in bringing two people into each other's presence, must include loneliness and error. I imagined a moment when husband and wife realize that their marriage included their faults, that they do not perfect each other, and that in making their marriage they also fail it and must carry to the grave things they cannot give away (pp. 193-4). About the pace of modern life, he observes: "The people are in an emergency to relax. They come for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above their motors. The look neither left nor right. They can't slow down" (p. 331). Although somber in tone, Jayber's story reveals that wonders do happen in life. Jayber learns we live our lives with questions, the answers to which must be lived out "perhaps a little at at time" (p. 54), or which may take longer than a lifetime for us to find. "This is a book about Heaven," Jayber explains. "I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see through the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like a reflection of the trees on the water" (p. 351). This book is Berry at his best, and one of the best novels I've read this year. G. Merritt
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Jayber Crow
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