Customer Reviews

Motel Chronicles

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4 star:		(3)
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2 star:		(1)
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Motel Chronicles is a fine example how aubiographical stories can be well written and it is an excellent trip through real America: the long roads, the Indians, the Cowboys, the desert... Sam Shepard is an excellent playwright and he also writes scripts for movies. It is a surprise for all who are used to his "hard prose" in theatre and in cinema reading the softness of his prose and the almost "delicacy" of these chronicles. After this book, I do recommend you all "Cruising Paradise".

One of my favorite collections of playwright-actor Sam Shepard (the others being CRUISING PARADISE and HAWK MOON). This is a collection of short stories, poetry, rants, observations, etc., from Shepard's own life. Each section is separated by date and city (though NOT in any particular order, as sections skip from the '70s to the '80s and back again to the '70s); my favorite is "9/24/80, San Francisco, Ca." (in my edition, pp. 43-46), a short story detailing a boy's train ride to his grandparents' home in Chicago, during which he meet a beautiful barefoot girl who looks like Tuesday Weld.

Some of the other stories in this collection formed the basis of Wim Wenders' 1984 film PARIS, TEXAS, which Shepard wrote, and which happens to be one of my all-time favorite films. MOTEL CHRONICLES would be a wonderful introduction to Sam Shepard; I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered about the desert, the road, and America (the beautiful & the ugly).

I had always been drawn towards Sam Shepard's plays but this collection of short prose and poetry went one further step for me. The beauty is in the telling of the story, the conjuring of an image and the creation of emotions that almost transport one to the desolate and shifted locations where these scenes take place. I have taken this book with me to many places, have constantly thumbed through it and never fail to find joy in it.

I was drawn to this book more than a decade ago because of its link to that precious, spectral, surreal, fundamentally American film, "Paris, Texas." If you liked the film, this book will recreate and deepen the experience. If you know nothing of the film, or little of Shepard's work, and seek the realism of someone like Bukowski, without the same depth of cynicism, then you'll like this book. More of a short, powerful montage than a cohesive whole, it combines prose vignettes and poems with cryptic black and white photos to achieve an effect best described by the author (quoting his favorite poet, Cesar Vallejo) near the frontspiece: "never did far away charge so close." A good little book for those struck by that special sense of dislocation, silent sadness, and heavy joy that define the Western American spirit, or maybe those who just spend a lotta time in motel rooms.

Somewhere between a diary and a journal, this book is a must for Shepard fans. Loaded with well-written passages, memories and observations. His reactions to Hollywood are especially insightful and telling. The geography is all over the map and sequence of events shifts, but the quality of the writing stays true. It deserves a much larger following, but it did inspire Wim Wenders to make "Paris, Texas."

MOTEL CHRONICLES was recommended on a website devoted to journal writing. It is non-sequential and many of the entries have the shape of honed work but all the same it is a good example of a writer's sketchbook, one used for practice and inspiration. More importantly, it is a window on Shepard's frame of mind in the years immediately following the Pulitzer Prize for BURIED CHILD. The seeds of later works can be found in this book.

The entries swim back and forth from 1978 -1982, mapping the writer's peripatetic movement around the country, mostly in California and the west. It captures bits of his early identities, military childhood on the move, waiter, cowboy, actor, writer, friend, lover, husband, father. It is framed by portraits of being a child, the first entry is one of his earliest childhood memories in his mother's arms; the last is the adult caring for a mother felled by a brain aneurysm. This is no confessional or revealing autobiographical piece, however, just a writer at work pulling out inspiration from experience. Shepard is highly articulate, his portrayal of the contemporary west is priceless, and his poetry is not bad at all. The writing has an honest, non-star-turn quality to it.

For years I've loved movies with Sam Shepard and yet never read any of his writings. I decided first to read Motel Chronicles, as a play and movie were based on this book. It gives one some insight to author and actor. Plus it is good writing, and some poems, about every day experiences and reminiscing(?). I ordered this book on Amazon and it was a used copy in good condition.

I purchased this book because I had just finished Shepard's more recent "Day out of Days." What I found most interesting is how Shepard has aged so damn well as a writer. "Motel Chronicles" was a great read yet is really just an excellent rough draft compared to his more recent work. "Motel Chronicles" starts to shape Shepard's great feel of the modern day lonesome dessert highway. What does stick out in this book is Shepard's humor. Muhammad Ali was once asked why he was always being so funny. He explained that he never tried to be funny. He just told the truth. Shepard does the same. In between tasting the dessert and feeling Shepard's despondent characters in freeze-fame so well, I found myself laughing out loud. Shepard makes no attempt at well-crafted jokes. He just tells the truth. And sometimes its damn funny. It's a quick and worthwhile read.

Chris Bowen
Author of Our Kids: Building Relationships in the Classroom

I knew of Sam Shepard from seeing him act in movies, and was aware of his plays. Deciding to read some of his work, I picked up Motel Chronicles and found it deeply moving. His writing is very calming and free...just straight-forward without artifice. This collection of poems, short stories, observations and vignettes was published in 1982 and reminds of simpler times and places--but with hard-edged realities (as Shepard offers reminiscences of his childhood as well as his adult travels and experiences). Read this for its serenity and down to earth prose.

I never finished this book. Perhaps my expectations were too high as I like Shepard. Perhaps I'll give it another go later. Maybe not.