Customer Reviews

Write Naked

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In a world full of technology, Victor is elated when he finds an old Royal typewriter at a garage sale. Doesn't matter that he isn't a writer.

Not one to hang out much with friends, Victor comes across an old book while going through items from his mom's hippie community living days. It recommends one write naked in order to find the "story within."

He figures he has nothing to lose...until he looks out the window to find he's being spied on. By a girl.

Full of voice and innocence, WRITE NAKED takes the reader on Victor's journey of self-discovery of a world he didn't realize existed, until he allows himself to stop and pay a bit more attention.

While I found myself annoyingly patronized by the theme of global warming and the "world-coming-to-an-end" lecture, I did enjoy the voices and the bonding of the two main characters.

Reviewed by: Angie Fisher

This is a book not to be missed. I kept thinking as I read, this is a book for young adults but I can't put it down. The world of Hobbits has that effect. Harry Potter does. But those are very different books. Write Naked is a simple love story about a very real boy and girl coming of age in a very real Vermont town. I live there. I'm in love. So I can vouch for the reality of it all. Well, to tell the truth, I came of age ages ago, but that is my point. This is a book full of enchantment and full of insight and so full of deep reality that it will enthrall young adults and anyone who is still alive to the mystery of our ever evolving and endangered world.

Have you ever found a special place away from the world of everyday, a secret garden, a cave leading to the Earth's depths (and maybe a troll or two). Kipling, who lived and wrote many of his best books in Brattleboro, knew all about the lure of such places. Victor's cabin is like that, a real place, a hideout deep in the woods where he can be out of the public's sight and mind, "below the radar," where he can write naked. What does that mean? Well, use your imagination. Victor does. He thinks a lot. And he shares his imagination, his thoughts, and his cabin in the woods with his new friend, Anna Rose. He writes on an old Royal typewriter. She writes with a real fountain pen. These are real tools, but like the magical wardrobe or Alice's rabbit hole, they lead us to discover the real world behind reality.

I don't want to spoil it for you, because this is such a fun and very funny story, but "Write Naked" is profound. Ouch, I said it. But, please, don't be put off, scared. Peter Gould has a lot to say, at all levels, and yet, as one would expect from one of the great mimes of our time, he speaks with a minimum of words and a maximum of charm. The implications of the book are very serious, but the love and delight keep shining, like foxfire. Ok, it is a book about love and loss and hope and tenderness, new love and family, learning at many levels, and the discovery of intimacy. Just imagine all of that brought to life with a gesture and a smile.

You might guess that "young adults" will take all this for its surface pleasures, missing the messages. I think not. Knowing several of them (and remembering my own "coming of age"), I am certain that this is a book that will entice and be revealing to readers of all ages. It's not a boy's book, not a girl's book. It is a wonderfully human book. Whether you are 12 or 82, in Manhattan or Stinson Beach, starting on page one you will be at home in Victor's woods. I loved this novel, every page of it. It is a book I want to share and yet keep and read again.

Usually, it takes five pages - sometimes as many as ten - before I know for sure that I'm going to fall in love with a book. But in the case of "Write Naked", I was only a page-and-a-half in when I fell head over heels - upon discovering that this is not just the story of a boy becoming enchanted with a girl (and vice-versa). The boy is also entranced with a typewriter. A "really old" Royal..."like a little word factory that's actually still in business, not boarded up like the old factories down in town. And it's noisy like factories used to be, with thumping metal...and the chime that goes off at the end of every line.."

I could go on and on quoting Peter Gould bringing just this one character - the typewriter - to life in the mind of Victor, his quixotic, brainy, empathic, nostalgic, wistful, witty, totally delightful and unforgettable teenage protagonist. Victor, you see, has a tendency to "do what Miss Roth my English teacher calls `personification'", a trait he shares with the bewitching Rose Anna, the girl of his dreams. And it does seem as if he's dreamed her into being at first. But what starts out as a magical mystery tour of Victor's and Rose Anna's imaginations and anything-but-everyday lives quickly travels into territory that's all too real (our endangered environment, the legacy of Vietnam...).

As they write their way - he with his typewriter, she with her grandmother's golden fountain pen - deeper and deeper into communion with the universe and with each other, we meet one adroitly drawn character after another (Gould has an amazing ear for dialogue and eye for the tell-all quirk.). Among my favorites: Victor's little sister, Claire ("She's always wearing her soccer clothes...She sheds bits of dried grass wherever she goes") and (from Rose Anna's fertile pen) a trio of very highly evolved - and involved - newts named Oona, Amoss, and Solomon Andrew.

And my favorite line? "Grownups always bring along more stuff than they need." That's what Victor thinks as he observes Rose Anna's dad bumbling around in the dark with a flashlight when there's a perfectly good full moon to see by!

Readers who are themselves coming of age will be captivated by this story (or stories - because Rose Anna's newt tale could be a book - or movie! - in itself). But this is definitely a book for all ages - and for the ages.

A terrific summer read! You won't soon forget Victor and Anna Rose, two smart young characters. Victor is a thoughtful young man suddenly drawn to writing after acquiring an old Royal typewriter. Anna Rose is an independent home-schooled girl and an accomplished animal tracker keenly in tune with the environment.
She, too, is a budding writer.
When Anna Rose spies Victor typing away in a log cabin, the coming-of-age mystery really takes off.
They are a delightful pair grappling with serious issues with refreshing openness and honesty. Despite the somewhat racy title (a reference from a book written on a local commune where Victor's parents once lived), the book is innocent and exciting.
Gould may be at his best capturing the thoughts of Victor, a young man suddenly awakened to the "heat" of his first infatuation. In his acknowledgments, Gould thanks the many teens he has worked with as a youth theater director. He clearly listened. His captures the glorious internal turmoil of a first love.
Anna Rose deals with her own issues - personal and global - partly by writing an intriguing fanciful story that Gould intertwines with Victor's narrative. Very clever.
Great for anyone age 13 and older. Even those much older will feel inspired.

" 'Victor?'
"Oh my god.
"How does she know my name?
"You know how when you're playing hide-and-seek, you hear your name called, and you can tell by the angle of the sound that it's aimed right at you, they found out right where you are, no matter how good you thought your hiding place was?
" 'Are you gonna come down, or should I come up?'
"My mind races. Wait a minute; are these the only two possible choices? Surely there must be more, like, couldn't i just lie still and pretend i'm not here? Maybe she would miraculously not come up the ladder, just do whatever it is she came here to do, take as long as she needs, i wouldn't watch, and then she would leave? Or, better still, she and her dog could head back down the trail right now. Or: she could shut her eyes and let me slip out of the cabin. Dog shut his eyes too. None of these seems actually reasonable, though, so i have to admit she has pretty much summed up the options available to both of us at the moment. It's on me. i have to answer. Still flat on my back but trying to sound casual, mature:
" 'i guess i'll come down.' "

How does the teenager named by his ex-hippie mother in honor of the martyred Chilean folk singer end up in such a position? Actually, he has been making like Thoreau and heading for the deep woods near his Vermont home. Taking advantage of his uncle's empty cabin in the middle of nowhere, Victor is testing out the admonition found in one of his mom's old books from her commune days that, "You have to be naked to write." He is also trying to stay under the radar (That's why the lower-case "i."), by employing the old Royal typewriter which has fortuitously come into his possession:

"Don't get me wrong. i like computers. There's not much i haven't tried on a computer. i've done digital editing. i download some music. i like to check out webcams, i've played most of the games some of my school friends have. i've done some stuff i wish i hadn't.
"But it's hard to shake the feeling that someone in there is watching me, tracking what i'm doing, writing, or thinking, 24/7. i know they do that. And even when i'm not online, just typing on a computer, i still feel connected to that whole world of plastic, electric circuitry, global corporations, shopping, advertising, pollution.
"So if i go way off the grid and punch these antique keys up in a cabin somewhere, i'll be connected, but it'll be a whole different world -- a world that never went away -- of iron and steel, mechanical type, printer's ink, paper, silence, the woods, water running in a stream."

Victor thinks nobody is watching him. But he is wrong. Rose Anna, the wonderful teen who interrupts his writing process and then comes to be the most important part of that process is a home-schooled daughter of another communal graduate. Victor's and Rose Anna's moms, in fact, have some vital history in common.

"A salamander scurries into flame to be destroyed. Imaginary creatures are trapped in birth on celluloid." -- Genesis

WRITE NAKED is the story of a boy and a girl; a cabin and a dog; a typewriter and an old fountain pen; intertwined stories, a shared journey, and the future of our planet.

"i stopped at the kitchen mirror on the way up. Did i look different? i mean, could anyone tell by looking at me what was going on? It's funny to think that what you're absolutely sure everyone can see may not show at all."

Hysterically funny and achingly honest, Victor's internal monologue is something that has got to be experienced. I'm always into learning something about the author of a book I've really enjoyed, but with his creating such an amazingly sensitive, innocent, (and terrific big brother) character like Victor, Peter Gould -- like his endearing protagonist -- is now someone whom I'm dying to know.

this book wasn't about sex. it was something deeoer than that. it was a different way to tell people that the should express themselves, and to tell the world we need to make some changes.

As the man sang, and time was when I might have been puzzled by Peter Gould's choice of genre--Juvenile Fiction--to make his return to the novel, but "I am younger than that now," and who else but two sixteen year old narrators--who can experience the delirium of freedom only in segments, between the demands of parental units, and thus experience in full the urgency of freedom--could reaffirm certain values we once upon a time discovered as pearls, only later to cast before swine for whatever dubious material reward received, before we grew old enough to realize that not only "thinking young and growing older is no sin" (changing songwriters in midstream, Dylan to Goffin-King), it is absolutely essential, unless one's goal is to petrify into fossil.

Through the relationship of characters Victor and Rose Anna Write Naked seems to suggest adolescence brings not only sexual but also spiritual awakening, the two, in fact, intertwined. Young readers will appreciate an author who acknowledges the spiritual complexity of their peers, old readers might relive their own first discoveries, and thus stave off the aforementioned fossilization. The metaphor Rose Anna uses is time as a rubber band, and Write Naked bounces back and forth quite supply.

For collectors of the Total Loss Farm library, who perhaps, like me, made first contact via Gould's Burnt Toast yea some going-on-four decades ago (his first book, on the dust jacket for Write Naked described as a "back to the land novel" and within as "communal" literature [I have seen it described similarly elsewhere, but for me Burnt Toast is more a vision quest set against the eternal theme of father and son, with a heroic dose of that wondrous non linearity learned in psychedelic experience]), before discovering the Home Comfort collection, Raymond Mungo's books, Verandah Porche's poetry and Steve Diamond's Trees, for those readers rest assured: Write Naked is a welcome addition to that library, the spirit of these other three, of Total Loss and its brethren, all present if not accounted for.

Also: this is the perfect summer read (so much so, I fully intend to re-read it this winter).

This was a magical yet realistic journey into the world of teenagers who just have to write and be heard(even if they think they need to stay under the radar). Victor finds a very old typewriter at a yard sale that he just happens by. The owner let's him take it for free telling him "there's a story in there". Victor hauls the heavy machine on his bike and eventually up to "his" cabin in the woods. His mother used to live on a commune and in one of her books there's a picture of a naked man and it says "You have to be naked to write". Victor decides the only way to find out if this is true or not, is to write naked. A girl happens upon him while he is writing and they end up friends. This story holds a very New England feeling and anyone who grew up here can really picture the woods and atmosphere. This is a great read for teens who are a little different and want something better than all the mainstream crap.