Stanley Crawford (1937–2024)
Auteur van Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine
Over de Auteur
Stanley Crawford is co-owner with his wife, RoseMary Crawford, of El Bosque Garlic Farm in Dixon, New Mexico, where they have lived since 1969. Crawford was born in 1937 and was educated at the University of Chicago and at the Sorbonne. He is the author of nine novels, including Village, Log of the toon meer S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, Travel Notes, GASCOYNE, and Some Instructions, a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage manuals ever produced. He is also the author of two memoirs: A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small Farm in New Mexico, and Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico. He has written numerous articles in various publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Double Take, and Country Living. For more information, please visit stanleycrawford.net. toon minder
Fotografie: New West
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Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (2012) — Medewerker — 67 exemplaren
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So so good. Why is this not better-known? Reminds me of Wittgenstein's Mistress.
I may not have been in the best place reading this book, so I am loathe to attach a rating. Perhaps I will revisit it someday, and give a much more charitable review. It's certainly a complex book, a cross between Life of Pi (for the fantastical & nautical nature) & Wittgenstein's Mistress (the monologue of the last woman on earth).
Pretty much a complete bore and a book a person with absolutely nothing better to do with one's life would read. That person is not I. A disappointing read that never got me out of the ditch. And if the book did get better later on perhaps old Stanley should have started there.
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It is to Crawford's credit that his linguistic wordplay and astute psychological portrait of his narrator cause even pages upon pages of catalogues of mundane and often petty chores aboard an ever-adrift barge and in-depth accounts of the animals and plant life living in the gardens on said barge to never grow tiring for the reader. Instead, we understand that life on the sea is their world:Even their marriage is consecrated by telephone:Although there are some mentions of dances and teases that Mrs. Unguentine gives to customs officers they meet along the way while sailing the high seas, there are no other characters encountered—as such, it is telling that their marriage begins with no physical party present to pronounce them man and wife, because the increasingly claustrophobic and insular relationship that is presented to us in her narrative is really the tale of how Mrs. Unguentine's identity has become subsumed beneath her husband's, "the silent stranger I now so selflessly serve ... not even wondering why anymore, that being the way things happen to have worked out, God knows how." For forty-plus years, she has catered to his dream of living aboard a barge always on the sea, never in sight of land; and, of course, it is a life of which Mrs. Unguentine is becoming increasingly resentful:Crawford's use of the barge as both a microcosm of the larger world—again, a world which we (and because of this, the two main characters) never see—and also as a metaphor for the constrained lives the two Unguentines lead after they are married is very skillfully done here. Their work on the barge is their attempt to keep their life together intact. And, in spite of Mrs. Ungeuntine's silent seething with regard to her husband and the control he has over her life, it is with an understanding of his own loneliness that she has, in the forty years of drifting on the seas with him, come to terms with his flaws and also come to realize that the two of them are interdependent: two shared lonelinesses comprising one singular relationship, again one that emphasizes loneliness.
But there is also a bitter comedy in Crawford's precious prose, too, that revels in how marriage—and all relationships of such a duration and in such solitude—builds strong ties of intimacy just as it does enmity. Indeed, the extremes of love and hate, of empathy and psychical violence, are all at play here, with the background a tragicomic barge that is as much a commentary on sustainable living as it is on marriage, interpersonal relationships, and the work that is required (and the sacrifices necessary) to keep the barge afloat, drifting calmly, toward nowhere.… (meer)