Edward HoaglandReseñas

Muscled through reading this would describe my reaction. Lots of people wax lyrical about Hoagland's writing, but it was flat for me. He interviewed many people who had lived through the late 1800s and early 1900s in British Colombia and Alaska, and their stories should have been exciting, or at least interesting, but rather than let them speak in their own words, he interpreted for them and it is rather dull. He does have some good descriptions of the people and places, but manages to suck the life and spirit out of the adventure.

The author himself (this was written in the 1960s) has the attitude when speaking of women that they are OK for decoration, work & sex, but not much otherwise. I love that one of the old-timers he was interviewing told him that the major fault of his book was that he didn't interview any of the women!

I read this because I am interested about the area and the way of life of those who lived there, the natives and their interactions with the whites who came and what became of them. I think he was as fair-handed as one from his background could be at the time, without glossing over the condition.

Am I happy to have read this? Eh.
Would I read anything else by this author? Not voluntarily
Would I recommend it. Not unless you are obsessed with this type of story or this place.½

In the Country of the Blind by Edward Hoagland is a so-so novel set in the 1960's.

At 47, Press is losing his sight. Due to his loss of sight, he has already lost his job as a stockbroker and his wife, who doesn't want to care for him. He moves to a cabin in Vermont, near a couple helpful neighbors, a hippy commune, and, apparently, drug runners, while he, rather aimlessly, tries to figure out how to live the rest of his life. Carol, an artist and hippy who lives nearby takes an interest in Press and shows up unannounced and visits, takes him to the commune, entertains him, cooks and eats with him, teases him, and provides sex. Melba, a local woman comes to clean his cabin and provides conversation. And random stuff happens.

At age 83, Hoagland, himself, is going blind, which provides some buzz about his novel. It does allow him to describe the loss of sight and the challenges facing Press, but that doesn't seem to be enough to carry the whole novel. Press comes across as a foolish man who is purposefully choosing to be oblivious to certain facts and is making odd, rather self-destructive choices. Additionally, all the characters seem to speak in the same, hesitant voice which results in the conversations all feeling awkward, which were already awkward due to the content.

Even with some parts that were beautifully descriptive, this novel just never hit the right note for me. I finished it feeling dejected and desiring a better novel, or at least one with a plot and more focus.

Disclosure: My advanced reading copy was courtesy of the publisher/author.

In the Country of the Blind tells the story of Press, a man who has lost a lot. He lost his sight to a degenerative disease, and his losses accumulated, his job, then his wife and children as she tossed him out, fearful of care taking. Fortunately, his Vermont neighbors are friendly and oriented toward care taking. He has two sets of neighbors whom he visits, who feed him, take him to church, and welcome him into their hearts.

Even better, on a walk in the woods, he meets Carol. She lives at a nearby commune with her children. The kids enjoy his company and he feels a bittersweet fondness; his pleasure in their company reminding him of his children whom he misses. A visit home helps him realize that his kids love him and that he can’t lose them that easily.

I enjoyed the conversations among the characters. They have that unfinished and random quality of real life, conversations that happen without advancing a plot point. I loved the characters, their authenticity and complexity. Press was the main character and his infatuated relationship with Carol made her the second most important character. Frankly, they were less interesting than Melba, and several of the other minor characters. With Press and Carol, it was hard to tell who they really felt about each other and how much of their relationship was convenience. Press seemed the kind of guy who wanted a relationship with someone, anyone, without regard to which woman.

I am ambivalent about In the Country of the Blind. The idea that a 47 year old man who loses his sight thinks that is it, considers assisted living seems strange in today’s world. Blind people are not incapacitated. How is that someone as well off as Press has not had therapists teach him how to cope. He’s knocking food all over himself, for pity’s sake. I have known several blind people and that is so not typical. From that fundamental flaw, everything feels wrong.

The writing is beautiful, engaging and flows with this headlong pace that carries the reader forward without a break. It’s compulsive, but in the end, it is difficult to understand why Hoagland spent so much good writing on such a little story. There’s not much meat here, just interesting people having conversations and puttering around. Is there a resolution, does Press change over the course of the story? I wanted something more.

In the Country of the Blind will be released November 1st. I was given an e-galley by the publisher through NetGalley.

★★★

http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/10/12/in-the-country-of-the-blin...

“Disasters can swallow you up in Africa, and yet, the disasters too, get swallowed up, which may be why we rolling stones roll there.” Hickey, the narrator, sums up much of his motivation and behavior in the novel with this revealing statement. Hoagland depicts Africa as a beautiful, but dangerous and corrupt place. Hickey is a complicated, but likeable character filled with contradictions. He smuggles diamonds and gold, but tries to save children from disease, war and starvation. “The joke, if you can call it that, among us expatriates is that if you feel a hand grope for your wallet, the second thing to do is to try and save the life of the pickpocket.” He is a womanizer. “Her color is different from mine but that distinction has vanished. I carry condoms of course, but with an African woman, just thinking of the odds can distract and unman you, even if you theoretically have protection.” But risks everything to save Ruth Parker, a committed medical missionary, working for an NGO called Protestants Against Famine, who is trapped when the civil war breaks out in Sudan. Hickey stays at a place he calls the Arabs in Nairobi, just across the street from the Stanley Hotel. He bribes people at the Stanley to let him use their rooftop pool and café. He also has a strongbox there. He works at any job–some quite risky– to make money, like transporting supplies, guiding tourists, etc. He carries a lot of money on him in money belts.
The Africans are depicted in a balanced way. Some are corrupt, many are disease-ridden (especially with AIDS) and most are poor and uneducated. Hickey is empathic, and tries to help when he can, but often is faced with the reality of how big the problems are. He meets Ruth while delivering supplies to her hospital and quickly sees in her a level of commitment to the people that he relates to and may aspire to emulate. “Joy is what is partly needed, especially at first, and joy, I think, is like photosynthesis for plants, an evidence of God.”
Hoagland writes with long complex sentences dripping with sarcasm. Often there are abrupt shifts from things that are actually happening to memories and backstory. This can be quite confusing, and often required me to reread passages.
The CIA is a mysterious dark presence in the novel but Hoagland does not explore this to any great extent, except to lampoon a couple of supposed agents–Herbert and Craig–a couple of guys who reminded me of the intelligence officer in the TV version of MASH. The Russians, Arabs and Israelis also don’t escape unscathed.
The chaos starts slowly, but builds to a climax at the end of the novel that is riveting. While he is away, Hickey finds out that Ruth has been raped and left abandoned and naked to get back to her compound. He rationalizes that “Wartime rape is motivated by unexpended adrenaline and sadism, not because there are any ‘dolls’ around.” A friend, Ed, who is a pilot, dies in a crash while trying to transport one of Ruth’s workers. Father Leo, an Irish priest brings a little boy to the compound and Ruth develops an affection for him. A young man, Bol arrives at the compound, seeking escape to the West. He is multilingual and acts as a teacher for group of refugee children. Otim, a 10 year old soldier, who has escaped the army also arrives at the compound. The whole thing seems chaotic enough, but gets much worse when the civil war breaks out. Attlee, Ruth’s long-time assistant and friend is killed by rebels who attempt to search for someone during the night.
Hickey takes a number of children to Nairobi with him, especially 2 girls with eye problems, and Otim, but not before developing an intimate relationship with Ruth.
The latter half of the novel deals with Hickey’s return to rescue Ruth, but incidentally also many children. This is so harrowing that I can’t describe it without spoiling it.
This excellent novel is part noir and part thriller, depicting the complexities of Africa as it existed then, especially how the innocents were brutalized by the conflicts that involved tribal difference and manipulation by world powers. The evil was overwhelming.

Hoagland's an old man reflecting on life and society. He's quite analytical and intellectual, but there are more than a few times that he slips into what seems to me to be knee-jerk old geezer territory. He routinely bemoans the fact that the Internet is keeping us from communicating authentically, and that cyberspace insulates us from understanding real Nature. I tend to disagree with these conclusions, but he does reason his way into them with conviction.

His paeans to his early days, roaming the face of the earth and being seduced by the glories of Nature, are sheer delight. His trips to third world countries are wrenching and interesting. His meditations on age and the Divine, on dying and humus, on global extinctions and personal ones, approach the transcendent. Since it's a collection of essays written over time but herein gathered, there's a fair bit of repetition that maybe could have been edited out. I only needed to read the bit about George Orwell saying that every man has the face he deserves by 50 once or maybe twice. Not every other essay. His essays reflecting on his wives and his travels are less wonderful to my eyes than the others. And the one about circus people is just... weird.

Quibbles aside, it's well worth reading.

Open this book and enter into a richly detailed landscape and an exotic society. Follow Hoagland's travels, from equatorial mountain forests to the Sahara desert; from small Sudanese towns in the south and west to short stays in the capital, Khartoum. Hoagland's eye for detail presents the reader with electrifying images of life in the Sudan - rotten diets, disease, coups and civil war, the traders, poachers, tribal headmen, and those who come to help

In 1966, Edward Hoagland, journalist, took a three month trip through the wilds of British Columbia. “I would be talking to the doers themselves, the men whom no one pays any attention to until they are dead, who give the mountains their names and who pick the passes that become the freeways.”

And so this book is filled with his encounters with these characters whose chosen home is life in the wild. Hunting, fishing, living off the land, making-do, trapping, homesteading, cooking, keeping warm, bringing babies into the world, their interactions with one another – native and white.

He sets his scenes beautifully. I can't get over the evenings – the balmy air, the late, late daylight. Life catches a perfervid quality, although nothing happens. The sky and the lake are the color of mercury; the moon is a slice of copper plate; the trees blow whimsically. The moments seem intense and precious.

I enjoyed this look back in time and place.

Edward Hoagland’s book Sex and the River Styx is a collection of essays about nature, travel, and what he has learned from life. He self-consciously situates himself as someone nearing the end of his life looking back and taking stock. This is the first Hoagland book I’ve read (which I got from the publisher on NetGalley), although I’ve read single essays of his from various collections before. It’s an interesting book and a number of things stand out about it, most obviously the quality of the writing, as in this passage, where he writes about his own death:

. . . accepting death as a process of disassembly into humus, then brook, and finally seawater demystifies it for me. I don’t mean I comprehend bidding consciousness goodbye. But I love the rich smell of humus, of true woods soil, and of course the sea — love rivulets and brooks, lying earthbound, on the ground. The question of decomposition is not pressing or frightening. From the top of the food chain I’ll reenter the bottom. Be a bug; then a shiner shimmering in the closest stream … or partially mineralized — does one need retinas and a hippocampus? Because I don’t particularly want to be me, my theory is no. A green shoot a woodchuck might munch seems okay. I believe in continuity through conductivity: that the seething underpinnings of life’s flash and filigree, its igniting chemistry, may, like fertilizer, appear temporarily dead, but spark across species like the electricity of empathy, or as though paralleling the posthumous alchemy of art.

His descriptions are so specific, so precise, that you can imagine exactly what he’s describing. even if you haven’t actually seen it with your own eyes. I also admired the strong sense of joy that runs through the book, alongside the equally strong (or stronger, perhaps?) sense of doom. As one who loves nature deeply, Hoagland mourns over all that we’ve lost on the earth and all that we will lose in the future. When he says he’s glad he won’t be around to witness the future destruction that is inevitably on the way, I sympathize.

Read the rest of the review at Of Books and Bicycles.

Though many of these essays have undoubtedly dated since their writing in the '70s, Hoagland is a scrupulous enquirer of the world he sees around him. He considers, investigates, and reports on his subjects with a meticulous eye for the circumstances.

In this fast-paced and apparently ever-changing world we inhabit, many of the subjects he broaches are surprisingly very relevant today - on nature, environmentalism, private lives, and the quest for personal fulfilment, these are constant topics for discussion still in the 21st century. One or two of the essays in this collection lost my interest along the way, but on the whole, the way he expresses his enquiries and the subject matter he covers was of great interest to me and mostly very thought provoking.

Edward Hoagland has been hailed by the "Washington Post" as "the Thoreau of our Times." This collection of essays lives up to that name as a naturalist now looks on his life as an old man. Mr. Hoagland uses his personal relationship with nature and memories of his history to force us to see the tragedy that will happen if we keep destroying the very land we walk on.
In "Small Silences", he chronicles his life as youngster and then adult noting that human beings and animals are connected. An example, people lock their doors and barely know their neighbors: the same for the animals who no longer trust man but fear him. Since we are all here and connected and, according to Mr. Hoagland, this is heaven on earth we are in dire straits indeed.
In "A Country for Old Men" the author comments if you are in middle age you are what you will end up being and since people aim too low there can be no improvement in us.
Each essay gives the same message using different aspects of his life and, though I agree with him, this is too repititious. The reader doesn't see a life dedicated to keeping nature on an even keel but rather, in the author's words, "a grumpy old man" on a harangue.

On ne peut achever "Sept Rivières" sans avoir le sentiment de ne pas avoir soi-même participé à la péripétie des protagonistes et avoir laissé une partie de ses rêves au fin fond d'un canyon des Montagnes Rocheuses. Ce roman est fondé sur cet esprit américain de pionnier qui a marqué la conquête de l'Ouest, mais laisse des traces de sang et de boue. Ce n'est plus le rêve américain qui se réalise, mais un cauchemar éveillé, le retour au réel.

A travers une nature admirablement décrite par l'auteur mais qui est d'une sauvagerie sans égale, Edward Hoagland nous trace une partie du destin de Roop, Sutton, Roy, Charley, Margaret, Lizzie, s'attachant à travers ses descriptions à projeter sur le lecteur les rêves et les angoisses des protagonistes.

Le rêve, c'est sans doute cette recherche effrénée de cette âme du monde, vierge et sauvage, que l'on pourrait saisir et modeler entre ses doigts et qui, finalement, s'échappe en mordant et griffant.

L'auteur nous emmène sur les traces des indiens Sarsi, Thoadlenni, Sinkink, mais également sur celles du légendaire Bigfoot que l'on finira par croiser en se demandant si cela est réel ou imaginaire.

Commencé dans la compagnie sauvage des hommes qui firent l'ouest, le roman nous mène dans une nature plus déserte d'homme mais non moins sauvage, avant de nous ramener, exsangue et fourbu, parmi les Visage-pâles.

L'auteur ne tire aucune leçon de ce récit mené tambour battant. Au lecteur de voir si la réalisation des rêves vaut le flot d'échardes et de souffrance que cela impose. Cela s'appelle la liberté et cela a un prix.

Once in a while we need to be reminded why we read and write for Cybersmurf. It’s not just for the screen shots of Pokénude and sex advice from Nina Hartley. It’s because everything else sux! But I’m reviewing this volume of essays published by Houghton Mifflin (devil spawn!) because in a few months its going to be on the remainder table at your local indie, and I thought I’d save you the trouble of reading the table of contents.

First of all, there’s no need to panic. Nothing much has changed in mainstream writing while you were drunk last year. It’s still as if James Joyce had never lived and written. So this volume is about what you’d expect: a few truly thoughtful pieces mixed in with a lot of waterlogged detritus floating downstream from the American Dream. That’s right, put down the pipe, and take note: I did indeed say that there are a couple jewels in this tree corpse.

We must keep our priorities, however, and chew with the mandibles of proper Cybersmurf style. In other words, here is what sux about this collection of “best” essays. First of all, there’s not one essay by Thomas R. Frank, and the only piece from Tom’s zine, The Baffler, is a smucked-up piece of tokenism. The editor of the 1999 Best, Edward Hoagland, apparently wanted something more Michael Moore-ish (you know, toke-head, that dorky-stocky Roger and Me guy), so from The Baffler he accepted a humor piece, “American Heartworm,” by Ben Metcalf. Frank and Company being known for their thematic approach to magazine publishing, this piece probably jigged right in with the issue theme, but here it just seems drole, funny in a white-trash biting kind of way.

The other worst thing about this collection is the continuing spread of “memorism.” I’ve nothing against memoir, per se, except when it’s written by somebody with nothing to say. Arthur Miller, sadly, is the shining star of that faux pas in this volume. But then his three-pager, “Before Air Conditioning,” is from The New Yorker, so wha’dya’spect? But Mr. Miller might have walked a couple blocks — or maybe taken a cab and been driven by — and seen the people who still live in the “BAC”-age. I guess he’s never heard a bum begging for a quarter for air conditioning…

If I were a tree, this creeping memoirism thing would really scare the pulp out of me. And considering this volume contains a memoir (in suitably pseudo-intellectual finery) by Joyce Carol Oates, the post-Cartesian anti-Imagination herself, you might want to pass, or piss, on this volume entirely. It was a faith-shaking blow to this writer’s stamina to note that this essay was originally published in Granta. In a forthcoming essay I’ll talk about creeping memoirism and late capitalism, but for now I need only point to most of the rest of Best 99 to show that it is creeping, at an alarming rate, into the practice of young writers.

Why the hell teach memoir writing to kids who haven’t had a life yet is beyond me, but maybe its all part of this “cognitive process” conspiracy taking place in college comp classes. Yeah, that must be it, the idea that, for some reason, “expressing oneself” is somehow “the thing” to do. And that the way to express yourself is by digging through memories of childhood and adolescence that are probably still too painful to be put in any kind of perspective. Whatever. Regular readers of this column know that I’m a heinous butt-head about the creative apprenticeship thing, but for once I’m not picking on small press writers and publishers. Best o’ 99 is from big bux-paying publications, like Harper’s and The Washington Post Magazine. The shades of difference between the source magazines have to be measured in nano-angstroms. (The selection from The Baffler proves my point.)

So what’s so cool about this book to make it worth a couple bux on the remains of the day table, and a thousand words in Cybersmurf? 25 soul-searching, smart pages by Annie Dillard and Patricia Hampl. The “American Dream,” writes Hampl, “our natural habitat,” “inflates the soul. Fills it, rather than fulfills it.” Hampl might go a little too far, and be a little high class white, with her deflation of her great grandfather’s “(who was a Modernist)” advice to “only connect.” “Order is not our thing,” great gramps added, and Hampl takes that old debate to a new level. She uses the concept of worship as a metaphor for living in the world, as a way of being. It’s an old idea, but one not terribly popular in disembodied Euro-America. And I like her definition of worship: “It is the practice of the fiercest possible attention.”

I’ve always thought that Dillard’s writing– the little I’ve read — picked itself up by the bootstraps at the same time as luxuriating in the mud. Her piece herein, “For the Time Being,” reminds us that “Once the holy sparks are released, evil, having lost its life-giving core, will cease to exist.” I’m confident I know nothing about good and evil, but the Torah that Dillard is quoting might well. What I do know is that we have to keep on letting the sparks fly. Fierce sparks of attention.

Edward Hoagland is best known for non-fiction environmental writing, but his first book in 1955 was a novel based on his experiences in his early 20s with a traveling circus. Most circus literature is about the performers while the crew are so much background ambiance. In Cat Man, Hoagland flips the picture and foregrounds the working guys while the circus itself fade into the background. There are two types of circus workers: performers and support crew. They have separate dining halls, buses and trains: the "first train" people are the guys who put up the tents, feed the animals, run the machines - the "second train" people arrive later. The performers are highly paid rare talent while workers tend to be down and out low-paid alcoholic drifters - "winos" with missing teeth, long hair, ratty clothing and a homeless odor. Times were different back then, rougher, and Hoagland's world is a dirty, smelly, low-brow violent place. Yet, as ex-clown Stephen Brennan said, Cat Man is "the best, the truest circus novel I've ever read." The plot is almost non-existent, other than about a young drifter who runs off the join the circus, and it even lacks a chronological progression with chapters jumping back and forth in time and place. Some of the chapters would stand alone quite well as short stories, vinaigrettes. Rather it is almost entirely a character study and hyper-real detailed description of day to day life working behind the scenes in a circus. One critic in the New York Review of Books compared it to Moby-Dick because of its encyclopedic detail.

I really enjoyed the novel although at times found the prose so dense with detail and so slow in action that I would scan over sections waiting for something to happen, in particular the descriptions of the big cats. But like a war novel, it captures the essence of long periods of inactivity and sudden bursts of action, usually violent and dangerous. As realistic documentation of the rougher side of circus life Hoagland's Cat Man is a timeless classic.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd

The 1995 humanitarian crisis in Sudan, told from the 1st person POV of an itinerant, American NGO worker who is a decent man but far from saintly. A painful, complicated, difficult story that I couldn't stop reading.

"You don't have to be a doctor to help people who have no aspirin or disinfectant or malaria, tuberculosis, dysentery, or epilepsy pills, no splints or bandaging, and no other near facility to walk to in the brush....
"What I'm explaining is that, even if I'm not of their exact denomination, directors of small missionary programs in a pinch for personnel may see fit to hire me for jack-of-all-trades assignments. I can do the basic mechanics if we break down on the road, and I know when to speed up or - equally important - slow down when figures with guns appear to block our passage.... The big groups, such as Doctors Without Borders, CARE, Oxfam, and Save the Children, have salaried international staff they can fly in from Honduras, Bangkok, or New Delhi to plug a momentary defection or a flip-out - dedicated career people, like the U.N.'s ladies and gentlemen, with New York, Geneva, London, Paris, Rome behind them, who've been vetted: not much fooling around. But there are various smaller outfits, whose flyers you don't receive in the mail back home, that will hire 'the spiritual drifter,' as Al [the narrator's boss] put it to me, to haul pallets of plywood, bags of cement, first-aid kits in bulk, and sacks of potatoes or bayou rice, cases of your basic tins, like corned beef, tuna fish, salmon, peas, what-have-you, and trunks of medicine to provision the solo picayune apostle out doing Christ's appalling work in the hinterlands." Kindle location 272-288

The narrator is between jobs when "... as if by telepathy, the phone at the Arab's [hotel] soon rang and it was Al, sounding me out about another trip to Ruthie's [clinic in a remote area of Sudan] to resupply her with medical kits, toddler formula, cornsoya blend (CSB), her Christmas mail, and spare treats like chocolates and canned crabmeat. The bad news was that a World Food Program delivery of bulk grains was going to be late, and she might like to think about either leaving temporarily or else keeping me for protection and company till it came.
"'Put your money where your mouth is,' Al joked when I hesitated, being, like me, a sort of knockabout....
"'They have gold there in the Kit River, near Opari, you know,' he added, as if that should be an incentive to me. I was startled - glad we were on the phone so he couldn't see my face. Had one of the drivers told him I was smuggling a few diamonds when I had the chance?
"When I went to visit him the next day, we struck a deal about direct deposits to my bank account if I stayed awhile (I tried to wangle some term life insurance as well)...
"Al is a sandy-haired Scotch-Irish Bible believer, but funny (he'd now begun calling me 'a diamond in the rough'), who said that children are diamonds, too, and knew so from the front lines, having witnessed the successive Ethiopian and Somali famines and the Sahel droughts of the Kababish country in northern Sudan; he knew that you can be nearer my God to Thee without sectarianism. One Christ, many proxies." location 555-573