Customer Reviews

String Too Short to Be Saved (Nonpareil Books, No. 5)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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Donald Hall is a writer beautifully tangent to and cognizant of the New England spine we all wish to immulate in our thoughts of the 'old American spirit', a spirit too seemingly on the wane at present -even on 4th of July celebrations this year. His most recent collection of short stories , WILLOW TEMPLE , was my introduction to this Whitmanesque, Robert Frost-like wonder boy of observation. In returning to his early work in the Nonpariel Books reissue of STRING TOO SHORT TO BE SAVED one wonders why he has remained in the background, and hasn't found the wide audience he deserves.

"STRING..." is a series of short stories of Hall's recollections of spending his summers with his beloved grandparents in New Hampshire. All phases of farming and maturing from a small child to a young adult are addressed in a wholly readable, poetic, illuminating fashion. Hall knows how to describe nature as well as anyone writing today. He also revives an appreciation for his roots that we could all study as journeys toward finding ourselves. "To be without history is to be forgotten" he writes."My grandfather did not know the maiden names of either of his grandmothers. I thought that to be forgotten must be the worst fate of all." Hall invites us to accompany him on his memories of haying, picking blueberries, visiting the odd group of people who have become indelible American daguerreotypes for him. "The farm was a form: not a set of rules on the wall, but like the symmetry of winter and summer, or like the balance of day and night over the year, June against December. My grandfather lived by the form all his life, and my summers on the farm were my glimpse of it."

Simple gifts, these. And the simplicity of Donald Hall's writing is what makes it so readable and so memorable. The book stands solidly on its own as a definitive New England memoir. In this new reissue there is an added Epilog which traces Hall's return to his Hew Hapshire memories and farm after many life changes. This Epilogue is worth the price of the book. If only this edition weren't tainted by the crudely inappropriate pen and ink pictures imposed on the pages of each new chapter. But that is the only unnecessary clutter in this otherwise tender book.

If you claim to like poetry or writing where the ink squiggles can actually allow you the experience of feeling the grist and sand of a place between your toes...take out any work by Donald Hall and you'll feel the tide of the New England coast coming in over your feet...Often mislabled with the churl quip, "regional writer", Mr. Hall is much more....
a master of making you feel you are where he wants to
take you...His characters come with the authenticity of having either been known, met, or viewed by Hall, or conjured from his collective memories and boiled down like a fine cider from actual sips of experience he's had with like individuals in his native New England...
...And what individuals he finds and has found in the ernest incredibly delicious confines and environs of the North East...In "String Too Short", Hall takes on the not inconsiderable task of fleshing out the rich hues of his own New England ancestory..You can smell his grandmother's kitchen, taste the dusty hay from his grandfather's barn, and feel the New Hampshire sun on your face via his entrancing and detailed prose...
Mr. Hall? Are you out there? As a one time correspondent known to him as "John-Tom" I hope all is well with the venerable "Don" of Eagle Pond...Mr. Hall has taken himself off the pony express of fans he has deservedly developed over the years...and as one who has come across his work and spent pleasant minutes and hours in fine examples of his work, recommended to other readers here such as " Their Bright And Shining Eyes", " Without", " Here At Eagle Pond", and lately, " The Painted Bed", Mr. Hall has well earned praise and a rest in the bright sun of poetry and masterful observations on life around us he has picked up through his well lived adventures and travel...ALL OF HIS WORK..highly recommended!

A very poetic and wise account of a fading world that the author was lucky enough to be a part of. Quite moving in places, funny in others. A very satisfying book.

Donald Hall first published this collection of short stories, set in the rural area of central New Hampshire, in 1960. Most of the stories reflect his summer-time experiences with his grandparents, on their farm, during the `40's. There is a Marcel Proust "Remembrance of Things Past," quality to Hall's reminisces of his youth, and the joys he experienced with his grandparents, just as Proust did, in a rural corner of his native France. A portion of that joy was the heritage that his grandparent's conveyed to him, going all the way back to his great-great grandfather who had participated in the Battle at Vicksburg. And the wonderful title, one that beautifully conveys the frugality of farmers who performed their life's work in a less than optimum environment for raising crops or livestock. It was derived from the label on a small box Hall found in the attic, after his grandparents were deceased, filled, as you might now guess, with small pieces of string.

But Hall is not uncritically nostalgic for a paradise lost. One of his more biting reflections is conveyed in the story "A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails." The story concerns Washington Woodward, the character who would retrieve nails from timber, and attempt to straighten them, so that they could be reused. At the beginning of the story Hall describes such people as: "So many of them lived a half-life, a life of casual waste." Hall's conclusion at the end of the story: "He has saved nails, but wasted life."..."... and his straightened nails had rusted into the dirt of Ragged Mountain."

But the preponderant aspect of his stories is nostalgic warmth, and for me, and possibly for the potential reader, the stories that may forever linger are the ones concerning a summer haying, or the picking of blueberries high on Ragged Mountain, with the attendant concerns about his grandfather's health; for his grandfather was "pushing" it to the limit. In "Luther, Nannie, and the Callers," Hall recalls the era before TV, when "The late light of the evenings of early summer invited people to ride in their automobiles, and they gave themselves reasons by paying visits." And, "He was older than my grandfather, and I remember him snatching flies out of the air with his fast hands when he was more than eighty."

Overall, Hall recounts the past that is not dead, and he says: "To be without a history is like being forgotten. My grandfather did not know the maiden names of either of his grandmothers. I thought that to be forgotten must be the worst fate of all," which was a passage that moved another reviewer. As he said in "Old Home,": "... but for many years I had daydreamed of a self-sufficient life in the country." Fortuitously, his daydreams never took the nightmare form that eventually consumed Hester in the same story.

The curious aspect of these stories is that his parents are almost completely missing, both in relationship to their parents, as well as to the author.

In the epilogue, Hall says that: "...I made that familiar confusion of personal loss with social decay; in the death of one man I saw the death of his people and his landscape." Yet life came full circle, and he decided that this particular piece of rural landscape in central New Hampshire, with its views of Mount Kearsarge, would be his final resting place. Departures, yet continuity. A solid, 5-star read of life, as it once was, in rural New England.

I loved every bit of this book; the descriptive writing of Donald Hall took me to another world and my only complaint is that it was too short. This book is memories of Donald growing up and spending weekends on his grandfather's farm and his experiences haying, blueberry picking and the people he spent time with. From my own farm experiences, I feel his descriptions are very true, especially haying. I read this book after Life Work which is auto-biographical, and they were terrific to read one right after the other. Next I just received Eagle Pond. If anyone has any recommendations of books like String Too Short To Be Saved, please let me know. Happy reading.