A Favorite Son

[thisnewday]

A favorite youngest son dies in the battle of Ypres, blinded by mustard gas and cut in half by German machine gun fire. His heart is cut from his dismembered body and sent home, preserved in candle wax and encased in an ammunition canister. Several weeks later, it arrives back in the States, accompanied by an older brother who is a non-combat casualty of the same battle.



                                                                                        Early the next morning, a brilliant spring morning with the fresh green pastels of budding
                                                                                        aspens and new grass, they buried Samuel's heart up in the canyon near the spring....
                                                                                        One Stab watched Decker fill the hole from up on the hillside. When everyone left he
                                                                                        walked down the hill and looked at the stone but could not read the words.

SAMUEL DANT LUDLOW 1897-1915
WE WILL NOT SEE HIM
BUT WE SHALL JOIN HIM

[Quoted from James Harrison's Legends of the Fall, Kindle Edition, Location 2616.]

LPK
LiveJournal
4/21/2016

                                       

Comments

[egg-shell.livejournal.com]

By coincidence we watched the movie Legends of the Fall just last night. I bet the book is better.

[rosegardenfae.livejournal.com]

That gave me shivers...

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. Harrison's prose is at times very compelling, very engaging. At other times he can be pretty hard to follow as he lapses into these deeply introspective passages which are often very insightful but can also disrupt the flow of the narrative. And the movie, in part because it's a primarily visual medium, steers us around all of that.

I also felt, near the end of the novella which gives the book its title, that the writer was rushing through a whole series of events, almost like he was simply looking to "get it over with." And again, I don't remember any sense of that in the movie.

But those are just a couple of things that I noticed and you might have a different feeling about it. There's really a lot to like and I guess this is just me trying to get it into some sort of perspective.

As I sort of obliquely said above, the "Legends" novella is only the last third of the book and the first two share some of the same pros and cons (the second is HEAVILY introspective) but none of the storyline or characters...

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

Me too! Harrison definitely has his moments, lots of quotable passages. And maybe those make it worth slogging through the other stuff. Or maybe that's just me. Old, cranky, impatient. And maybe a little lazy...

[rosegardenfae.livejournal.com]

Old, cranky, impatient... me too. I really started to wonder about myself when I dug out Sylvia Plath last night, but hey I have an electric oven, :)