What Begins with Bird, by Noy Holland, is both an investigation of family relationships and a sophisticated study of language and rhythm. Holland creates an exhilarating tension between the satisfactions of meaning and the attenuated beauty of lyric, making her fiction felt as deeply as it is understood. An unstable sister whose misconceived pregnancy replays the endless nightmare of childhood siblings and a wrecked marriage occasioning the misery of a horse: these are the frozen events around which Holland's words congeal. The poetry of her images, powerful but immediately absorbed, can bring consciousness to a standstill: "By then I've reached her: Sister spluttering, spitting out the plug of snow. Her mouth is bleeding. Her face is the grotesque of a face, a soul in flames, some rung of hell, and she is sobbing, spit puddling under her tongue." The Faulknerian echoes of Holland's prose invoke a dreamscape, a panorama enclosing barns and men and guns and Mother, as she trudges the cold hills in her nightgown. This writing is exquisite, a gorgeousness as unforgettable as a stabbing pain or the after-image of a howl in the pitch of night.
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Though the dank, tremulous underside of motherhood and familial love is the ostensible subject of this daring but distancing collection of six stories, its real focus is the electric force of language, revealing and obscuring reality and creating beauty out of even the most distasteful truth. National Book Award–nominee Holland (The Spectacle of the Body) is as besotted with words as she is disillusioned with the tropes of parent, child and sibling relationships, and she brings her fierce powers to bear in these malice-laden stories. In the title story, a new mother reluctantly welcomes her mentally disturbed sister for a visit, while recalling the abortion her sister was forced to undergo by their father years ago. A man takes the stage to introduce a poet at a reading in "Time for the Flat-Headed Man," but describes the wonders of his small son and his damaged infant daughter instead. A frank child narrates "Rooster, Pollard, Cricket, Goose," which makes the horror of her beloved father abusing a decrepit horse as her mother prepares to leave them all the more poignant and strange. Holland's baroquely bleak prose sometimes obscures her plots, but she is undeniably a writer's writer, and language lovers will thrill to her jittery rhythms. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Noy Holland is the author of two collections of short fiction, What Begins With Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). Her stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Ploughshares, Open City, NOON, and others. She is an Associate Professor in the MFA program for Writers and Poets at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she co-directs the Juniper Initiative. She is married to the writer Sam Michel. They live in a quiet hill town with their two young children.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
the quieter, the stronger,
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This review is from: What Begins with Bird: Fictions (Paperback)
Noy Holland's second collection of short fiction shows a stronger level of character empathy, revealing characters who are deeply troubled and looking for solutions that may not always be permanent but will allow them to survive through to the ends of their stories. Whether they are barren women looking to connect with a child, any child, or a first-timer in front of a crowd revealing a little too much about himself in the process of introducing a speaker, Noy Holland's characters in this book are thick, meaty and substantive. Anorexics and belligerent veterans in wheelchairs are both touching characters in the end, who act out in ways true to their natures (or the natures they have been handed).
While Noy Holland's writing style gets a little too much in the way in selections like the title piece, her writing at its best moments is very direct to her characters, enclosing you under a tent that's really just a sheet propped up by a table in your living room. The tones are warm and inviting, and though the characters are a little scary, Noy settles them down enough to let you watch them without wanting to run away. But sometimes the quietest characters are the ones who will shock you the most, so be on guard.
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