Customer Reviews

The Inland Island (A Story Press endangered classic)

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This is my all-time favorite book. If you like "Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek," be sure to read "Inland Island" by Josephine Johnson. She has the same unromanticized view of nature's uncompromising rule (whatever survives, works), and she has the mind of an agnostic poet expressed in prose. Example: I think it is disgusting to praise God for making us acknowledge His presence by a poke in our eyeballs with His sharp stick.

And: All day, a rain of life and death goes on. A catbird crashed against the pane and fell gasping. Then it gathered itself in a narrow canoe shape and lay there patiently waiting to recover or die. Awareness is a name of agony. I wish there was something to pray to for its life. But one must not get excited. One must not grieve. Nature, Mom, all-powerful, monstrous and monolithic Mother sits and chooses.

The whole book is wonderful! I wish I could read it again for the first time just for the pleasure of its discovery.

What a strange little book. Reading at times like a nature primer, a stream of consciousness practice, and an anti-war rant, Josephine Johnson's month-by-month tribute to her patch of land and the animals that inhabit it is a literary piece badly in need of an editor.

Rambling, unfocused, and sometimes meandering off in directions that have no resolution, it's not an easy book to read. There are moments of real beauty, as in the following passage:

"The feeling of all this unknown creature-life that passes and repasses here brings on a curious dreamlike feeling of enchantment. It is the seed of fairy tales, the seeking of lost valleys. Timeless pockets in the world of time. Either I should not ever leave, or I should not return again".

Now that's lovely, and the book is sprinkled with more of the same. However, Johnson decided that it wasn't good enough to write about the natural world. Instead, she added strange references to the ongoing Vietnam war (this book was published in 1969), oblique references about the quality of life in the elderly, a couple of agnostic/atheistic moralizations with some pagan wisdom thrown in for good measure. It needed only the addition of: "Kumbiya, my Lord, Kumbiya", and I'm just about ready to throw on my tie-dyed sundress, throw a flower in my headband and run barefoot through the mary-jane scented fields at Woodstock. Nothing wrong with any of that per se, but WTH does it have to do with chickadees, deer, muskrats and racoons?

A book ruined, IMO, with observations that had nothing to do with the scope of the book. She should have written another book to address her anti-war activism and left this book alone.