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Title: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry ISBN: 1-58243-160-4 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: 18 September, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.89 (18 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: I bought it for $--but this novel is surely priceless
Comment: I bought Berry's novel Jayber Crow in a sales bin for $--new, hardcovered and as fully intact as the wisdom within. Berry's nostalgia for what America once was is both lovely and yet realistically realized. There was no jumping into all too familiar pastoral ideal, but rather this novel is a treatise about sustainable life and land practices. For the introspective Christian reader, this novel is surely a rarety and a comfort. It is skeptical of common practices in modern religion and also searching for truths and hypocrisies while retaining loyalty and tenderness. For the non-religious or non-Christian reader that same introspection will surely be welcome. Berry is democratic, open, and above all, humanitarian. One finds the true meaning of care for others, for the environment, and for a "place" (the idea of the small town or community is lovingly rendered and displayed in terms of mortality and immortality. The idea of a barber who moonlights as town gravedigger/church custodian is a clever and enjoyable way to approach the small town of Port William's inhabitancy in its journey from cradle to grave.
Rating: 5
Summary: evocative, sensitive celebration of an uncommon common man
Comment: In his preface to "Jayber Crow," Wendell Berry admonishes reviewers against finding either a "text" or "subtext" in his beautifully crafted novel. Berry then warns reviewers who "explain, interpret...or analyze" his work will face exile on a "desert island in the company only of other explainers." Faced with these restrictions and prohibitions, this reviewer will lavish praise on the author's sense of place, his gorgeous use of language and his admirable celebration of the American character.
Borrowing thematically from Mark Twain's "Huckelberry Finn," "Jayber Crow" is a twentieth-century version of an American everyman's journey of understanding and self-acceptance. Twice orphaned Jayber Crow never makes much money, never owns his own home, never marries. Yet this gentle self-made spiritual giant who savors his life while trimming men's hair truly loves his Kentucky home of Port William. Crow is a living embodiment of a Jeffersonian sensibility towards land; the protagonist extols the linkage between a respectful, near-reverential stewardship of the natural world and a sense of human fulfillment and grace. Berry's Kentucky is not a cliched Arcadia. Nature is often unpredicatable and tormenting. What redeems and renews the relationship between humans and land is respect, modesty and connectedness, three qualities Jayber Crow exemplifies his entire life.
It is not an accident that the man Crow admires more than any other, Athey Keith, epitomizes man's symbiotic, custodial relationship with the living earth. Nor is it accidental that the person who most tries Jayber's belief in the human condition, Troy Chatham, represents not only human cupidity, but alienation from and exploitation of the natural world.
Berry's physical descriptions of water, earth, plants, animals and climate are sensual delights, lushly detailed and enormously evocative. Place mingles with the idea of home; the physical absorbs the spiritual; the specific event gains universal significance. Because Berry imposes a modesty on Jayber Crow, readers discern a profound compassion for human frailties and a renewed faith in the imperative of connection. The novel is at its best when Berry reveals our common needs and drives for attachment: to our spiritual essence, to our brothers and sisters, and to our fragile, forgiving planet.
Echoing Serwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," Berry's novel also selects a common man to serve as the unspoken but ackowledged subliminal repository of a town's secrets and identity. Jayber Crow, unassuming barber, shares and shapes the identity of Port William, either through his ministrations to men's hair, as gravedigger or as church sweeper. Regardless, the people of his community reveal themselves to him, and Crow perceives them as eminently human, flawed, incomplete and wonderful. The author's ability to represent the masaic of our national character through the people who form the boundaries of Jayber Crow's life is simply extraordinary. Nowhere is Berry's hopes for our national survival better manifested than through his depiction of Mattie Athey Chatham. Under the author's skilled handling, Mattie evolves far past a love interest into a symbol of redemption and reconciliation.
Wendell Berry holds an esteemed position as an interpreter of who we are, what we believe and what we hope to represent. "Jayber Crow" cements Berry's reputation as a celebrant of our democracy.
Rating: 4
Summary: Metaphor, Kentucky Style
Comment: I was skeptical when I started reading Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow". A Christmas gift from my sister, it was outside the realm of my normal sci-fi and fantasy, so I didn't give it much hope.
I'm writing to admit that I am a changed man. Wendell Berry's look at the life and times of the barber of Port William from the 1920's to the 1970s was entrancing and breathtaking. The work was a wonderful metaphor of the world as we know it, questioning the concept of "advancement", and wrapping us in both the pleasures and trials of a simpler time.
I was particularly taken with the final image of this book (which it appears Berry has a penchant for making powerful), and its implications for both the characters and the metaphor.
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Title: The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry ISBN: 1582430438 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Place on Earth: A Novel by Wendell Berry ISBN: 1582431248 Publisher: Counterpoint Press Pub. Date: 05 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Fidelity: Five Stories by Wendell Berry ISBN: 0679748318 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: September, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Two More Stories of the Port William Membership by Wendell Berry ISBN: 0917788710 Publisher: Gnomon Press Pub. Date: 17 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $10.50 |
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Title: In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World (The New Patriotism Series, Vol. 1) by Wendell Berry ISBN: 0913098604 Publisher: Orion Society Pub. Date: 01 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $8.00 |
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