Customer Reviews

How to Read an Unwritten Language

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Philip Graham's protagonist comes from a family that has been broken. Broken by a mother's mental illness, a father's silence and the grasping need of children to understand. By listening closely to the stories of these characters Graham is able to tease out the tragic logic within each of them. There are stories everywhere in this novel. Stories behind the people, stories inside the people, stories in everyday objects - and it is these stories to which the main character, Michael Kirby, clings. The stories told by teacups and dolls' arms and seashells tell of the longing and needs of their owners. And these tales become healing tales in the hands of Michael who uses them to reach out and tend to others, healing himself piece by piece with each outside life he touches. If you have ever felt that there are days when no word could ever say as much to the soul as one smooth cat's eye marble, or that the need for love creates its own powerful and diverse community, then 'How to Read An Unwritten Language' is the book for you

This book sort of jumped out at me when my husband and I were visiting our local college's library. I was thrilled to be in such a large place filled with so many books, and I saw this book's title and just had to read it. The author describes his mother's mental illness through the eyes of a child and how he has to basically raise his younger siblings in the aftermath of his mother's death with a father who is overcome with grief and seems emotionally distant. I absolutely love the writing of this book, the way it details the usually overlooked objects in normal everyday life to find their meanings and make them more important than they would be usually. I enjoyed this book very much.

The idea of building stories around found objects is an interesting one. How many times have we wondered "Who used to own this? What's the story behind it?" when encountering something that obviously used to belong to someone else. Unfortunately, the objects are merely a prop for the protaganist's self-indulgent self-analysis. Every time the story focused on the protaganist's thoughts and past, I found myself wishing the author had stuck to the objects instead. When readers don't care about what the author thinks they should care about, that's a serious flaw in a work, I think.