Customer Reviews

The Lost Upland

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This book, by one of America's great poets, contains three written pieces, which are difficult to place into any particular genre. The inside flap refers to them as "narratives", but they don't tell a story - unless one reads them in a rather oblique manner. Jane Kramer calls them "stories" in her blurb, but they seem to be somewhere between fiction and memoirs. The first and third are written in the third person; the second in the first person.

While they have extraordinarily lengthy and detailed descriptions of the physical settings, it is the characters' actions, rather than their external appearances, which are observed closely. The actions are described in a detached and impassionate manner; any character judgements are implicit in the descriptions of their behavior and depend upon the reader's sensibilities. They are further nuanced by the character's age and social status and the morés of the geographic location (which is in an area of France between Bordeaux and the Rhone river - rich in history, but poor in natural resources).

I think I would classify the pieces as meditations on the depopulation of a rural area of marginal productivity, and its peoples' resistance to the harshness and waste inherent in the efficiencies of more modern techniques being imported by the corporate interests of the cities. The overall themes would be poverty (both material and spiritual), inertia, decay and mortality. Needless to say, there are not a lot of laughs.

The pace of the writing is as slow and as nuanced as the life of the rather insular inhabitants. It is also subtle, complex and beautiful in an austere way. However, when you are finished, you feel rather drained by the bleak existence to which you have been exposed - rather similar in feeling to studying a book of the photos Dorothea Lange took during The Great Depression.

Highly recommended for those not susceptible to dark moods.