Customer Reviews

Hannah Coulter: A Novel

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4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
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Dear Mr. Berry,

I don't know if you will ever see this, but it is the only way I know of letting you know how much your stories mean to me. I read your books with a highlighter, as there are just too many meaningful passages not to be marked and referenced over and over again. You certainly have a gift for words. The melodious nature of your writing is as addicting as is anything else I have ever experienced. The stories you tell and retell about the citizens of Port William, are for me lessons of a sort. For those of us who sometime wonder what love is, what kindness means, and what it means to be part of something greater than self-serving interests, well, you provide an extraordinary example in your wonderful work.

Thank you so much, for the pleasure I get when I read what you have written.

This novel is superb. Oh, so Berry may not create hyper plots but then such plots usually numb more than they inspire. He writes from a deep well focusing on place, person, and love. Not love in some sappy, sentimental sense, but love rooted in knowledge.

The prose is luminous. It's like Berry found a way to turn his poetry into a novel.

This is a deep reading experience. You'll overhear the story of a woman who lost her mother, than her first husband, but found a place in which to make a world, a kind of new world, almost a new Jerusalem (it is sacred ground in the best, ordinary sense).

Wendell Berry has continued the story of the people of Port William and their common sense, appreciation of the meaning and fullness of community, and wiseness about their place in the world. The story is told through Hannah Coulter's eyes as she looks back on her life in the arms of that community.

People in Port William don't live in fear. "It was getting on toward dark, but I could see the car well enough, and I didn't recognize it. I hesitated a minute. The country is full of strangers now, and you hear tales. There are , no doubt about it, some people who would knock an old woman in the head more or less on speculation. But I thought "What of it?" and went on out."

Hannah's accounts of the two loves of her life and the deepness and fullness of that love are the best descriptions of mature, lasting love that I have ever read.

Hannah looks to the future of Port William with some sadness as the lines of generations of farmers have been broken. This is reflected in the paths chosen by her own children.

"But did we tell the stories right? It was lovely, the telling and the listening, usually the last thing before bedtime. But did we tell the stories in such a way as to suggest that we had needed a better chance or a better life or a better place than we had?

I don't know, but I have had to ask. Suppose your stories, instead of mourning and rejoicing over the past, say that everything should have been different. Suppose you encourage or even just allow your children to believe that their parents ought to have been different people, with a better chance, born in a better place. Or suppose the stories you tell them allow them to believe, when they hear it from other people, that farming people are inferior and need to improve themselves by leaving the farm. Doesn't that finally unmake everything that has been made? Isn't that the loose thread that unravels the whole garment?

And how are you ever to know where the thread breaks, and when the tug begins?"

Wendell Berry's writing is a gift and I am deeply grateful.

ok.. I read this a year ago and loved it! It is elegantly written and soulful and kind. BUT after reading Wallace Stegner's 'Crossing to Safety'..and re-reading a chapter of 'Hannah Coulter', I'm afraid this book falls downward into a whole other category of writing. In my mind, 'Hannah Coulter' lacks humor..detail.. and the complexities of marriage. While Berry doesn't sugarcoat or gloss over his characters, he doesn't go into as much depth as I'd like, leaving me wondering and frustrated as to what's really going on inside Hannah, Nathan, and all the other folks of Port William. There just must be a whole lot more than 'everything's fine' in bucolic Port William..

The beauty of Stegner's book is that he manages to write 300 some odd pages on 'very quiet lives' and I truly hated for the book to end. With 'Hannah', I was left wanting more, not at just the end, but throughout the entire read.

In the last few weeks I've read four of Wendell Berry's novels about the Port William Membership. They are all wonderful revelations of character and community, and character in community. But "Hannah Coulter" is the deepest, most intimate, most moving of them all. Like "Jayber Crow" it's a fully realized novel, not a novella, and it's the only one, so far, that's told by a woman. I was especially fascinated by Hannah's view of her role in the farm work--both as the person who manages the household and as her husband's partner in the fields.

"Hannah Counter" is also the first and the only (so far) of Berry's novels in which sexual love within marriage is portrayed directly. I have wondered why in previous stories he just skips over the intimacies of marriage; the only sex, even oblique, is between the men of Port William and the women of Hargrave! Now, in "Hannah Coulter," he writes Hannah's and Nathan's desire for each other with aching sweetness.

I don't know how Berry imagines his way inside his characters' skins -- especially his women -- but he does that with supreme skill."Hannah Coulter" is his most recent novel and his most subtle and skillful, and perhaps most poetic. I loved it, and if you are a fan of Berry's fiction and/or poetry, you will too!

I have read many books over the years but can't remember one that has touched me so deeply. Although a city girl, I appreciated the description of farm life and the closeness of those who work the land. However, the details of the feelings and life of Hannah and her husband, Nathan hit home with me. I was at the beach with my husband of 28 years celebrating my 55th birthday while reading the book. Several times I handed the book to him so that he could read the author's view of the beauty of mature love. It was also meaningful to him. The sorrows and eventually, joys, of empty-nesting have never been described so accurately. What an accomplishment of a male writing from a woman's outlook! This is the first book I have read by Wendell Berry but it will not be my last. Thank you, Mr. Berry, for making my birthday so special.

Of the eleven novels by Wendell Berry in the Port William saga, Hannah Coulter is probably the best. It is a complete life told with great sensitivity of a poor girl and an outsider to the families written about in the other novels of the saga. Hannah has great determination and ability to overcome her limitations with the help of her grandmother and the Feltner, Coulter and Catlett families. The story covers the period from 1922 until the turn of the century. It is an epic tale.

Wendell Berry is perhaps one of the most masterful storytellers writing fiction in America today: it is truly a shame that his work is not more widely recognized. Time and again he crafts simple yet complex, almost elegiac tales that are odes to a time past and a present and future forever affected by the passage of time. "Hannah Coulter" is a focused memoir of a woman who has known both love and loss, joy and pain, and what it means to keep on living.

Readers familiar with Berry's works know that his stories center around the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. They will also be familiar with the bare bones of Hannah's story - the young bride who lost her husband to WWII, left widowed with a daughter who will never know her father, a soldier forever "missing in action". Eventually she learns to love another, Nathan Coulter, a WWII soldier himself who never speaks of the atrocities he witnessed and Hannah never presses him. They live out their life together, starting in debt on a worn-down farm, having two sons of their own, scratching out a life for many years before they can establish themselves, relying on the "membership" of the community around them for love, guidance and support.

Hannah's narrative is the most far-reaching of Berry's novels and stories of Port William: she is still alive in this century, having outlived both of her husbands and witnessed the loves and losses of her own children and grandchildren. The author has a keen insight into Hannah's loss and grief, offering a thread of connection to tie grief to living and loss to love. His words and ponderings are truly alive through Hannah's experiences, as she ponders the changes that life brings. The common theme among Berry's works, the deterioration of community, is ever-present and deftly examined through Hannah's eyes.

In his Acknowledements, Wendell Berry makes note of the fact that this novel has put him "more in need of help than any of the previous six." Indeed, this novel touches on the very real experiences of the young men who fought in the Battle of Okinawa and he places himself in debt to those who helped him in his research. But it is fair to offer the opinion that we as readers are indebted to Wendell Berry for his novels; for the hope he manages to offer in the face of overwhelming despair, for his poetic way of describing life, for crafting a fictional world that is remarkably alive and real to any who read it. The literary world owes a great debt to Wendell Berry.

I must admit that "Hannah Coulter" sat on my shelf until the day I knew there was another Port William novel I had not read. I dread the day when that is not a possibility, but relish the fact that any story I read about Port William will be an experience of coming home, whether it is a new story to me or one I have read and cried over and rejoiced over in the past. That is the power a great storyteller has - to make an imaginary world come alive for a reader, to make words feel like home, to offer healing and hope in the darkest despair.

This is one of the most eloquent and beautiful books I have read in all my 50+ years. My copy highlighted. I have given copies as gifts to friends, both other men and women, and the feedback has been uniformly positive. Having read most of Berry's other fiction, I think this is one of the better starting points: It encompasses his views on community & friendship, the combined themes of loss and faithfulness/redemption seen in other works, family, redemption, his views on rural life and agriculture, and others. I would not ordinarily describe prose as "shimmering" myself, but in this case, it is.

Wendell Berry is a wonderful writer. Due to his training as a poet, his prose often reads like poetry with every word in its proper place. "Hannah Coulter" is a soft-spoken narrative of the life of a small village woman who loves the land and people that she is so close to. It is a novel about change from life before WWII to life after WWII. Berry has captured it well. He points out that not all the change has been beneficial.

What seems to be an agrarian literary work has universality, because everyone is touched by love, grief and death the way Hannah was touched, whether he lives on Fifth Avenue in New York City or on Elm Street in Port William, Kentucky.

It is a gentle book of deep meaning for people who realize they are living in a hectic age, without the roots they lost among the years. Less introspective readers will simply wonder what the author was smoking.