Patrick Lawler
Autor/a de Reading a Burning Book
Obres de Patrick Lawler
Obres associades
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Gènere
- male
Membres
Ressenyes
Llistes
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 7
- També de
- 2
- Membres
- 24
- Popularitat
- #522,742
- Valoració
- 3.9
- Ressenyes
- 1
- ISBN
- 8
When the author chose the title Underground, he was not using a metaphor. For, as he states at the beginning of the interview with Paul Roth: "As a child I lived in a cellar for seven years. We had intended to live in a house like everyone else, but my father broke his back and only the cellar was finished." (5) The cellar (the beneath) and the father (broken) are the two primary concerns or motifs of the book.
I have a slightly different take on the cellar-house. When I was two or 3 (1951) I moved into a new house with my parents and older sister. The house was situated in the middle of the block between a large old Victorian and a partially-built house. Our neighbors had moved into the basement of that house, much as Lawler's family had around the same time (1950s). I thought the house strange, but not particularly scary or negative. Our neighbors, too, undoubtedly hadn't had the money to complete their house all at once. However, their basement was a finished one and completely functional. It was bit dark, since the windows were the small ones common to Midwestern basements of the time. I don't remember how many years passed before the upstairs or real house was completed and the family next door moved in (and up). The middle child of that family became my first real playmate. Curious the underground house was, certainly, but our neighbors were in no way cellar-dwellers in the sense evoked by Patrick Lawler. One difference, perhaps, is that Lawler's cellar was, as he notes, the foundation of his grandparents' house that had once burned down. In other words, it wasn't the basement of a "new" house, but a remnant of an old one. The roof had at one time been a floor, rather than being a roof that would someday become a floor. Directions (up/down, inside/outside) here are consequential.
There's much language in Underground that I found appealing & evocative. The following is but a sample:
"but my destiny was to be a root."
"I'd take out/ the thin insides of pens for veins."
"I leave the rivers running all night."
"I watched things die around my father's hands."
"The ashtray crisscrossed with songlines"
… (més)