Fotografía de autor

Ella Leffland

Autor de Rumors of Peace

8+ Obras 361 Miembros 5 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Incluye el nombre: Ella Lefland

Obras de Ella Leffland

Rumors of Peace (1979) 159 copias
Breath and Shadows (1999) 80 copias
Mrs. Munck (1970) 24 copias
Love Out of Season (1974) 13 copias

Obras relacionadas

The Best American Short Stories 1970 (1970) — Contribuidor — 23 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Fecha de nacimiento
1931-11-25
Género
female
Nacionalidad
USA
Lugar de nacimiento
Martinez, California, USA
Lugares de residencia
Martinez, California, USA
San Francisco, California, USA
Educación
San Jose State University
Premios y honores
O. Henry Award (1974)

Miembros

Reseñas

Every once in a while, we can be pleasantly surprised – no, more than ‘pleasantly surprised’; we can be downright astonished!


I picked up a copy of Ella Leffland’s Rumors of Peace on a stoop here in Brooklyn one afternoon last summer, read “coming-of-age story” on the back cover, and thought it might make for a good little read for my daughter. This summer, I decided to first read it myself so as not to waste my daughter’s time if the book turned out to be some silly kind of YA Fiction.


A waste of time? Nothing could be further from the truth! If the name of Ella Leffland wasn’t already as well-known to me as that of Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor or Joyce Carol Oates, I consider that to be my failing.


Ms. Leffland’s prose is immaculate – and her character, Helen Maria (not the protagonist, Suze, but rather the protagonist’s older sister), has to rank right up there alongside Uriah Heep, Frankie Addams, Atticus Finch, Captain Ahab, and Don Quixote for being (to me at least) among the most colorful and memorable in literature.


At the same time, I found Ms. Leffland’s use of headlines (about the progress of WWII) as a literary device to be every bit as effective as John Dos Passos’s use of Newsreels in his U. S. A. Trilogy.


If I’ve always considered Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding to be the most accomplished coming-of-age story in American literature – and on a par with Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones in British literature – I now have to say that Ella Leffland’s Rumors of Peace figures right alongside it. Yes, it’s that good!


One of the more impressive aspects of Rumors of Peace is Ms. Leffland’s ability to show, in both thought and action, Suze’s growth – and to illustrate that growth in perfect syncopation with world events right up to and including the dropping of the A-Bomb on Hiroshima. While I realize that this is the objective of any coming-of-age story worth its salt – or at least its ink – I can’t recall ever having seen it done so effectively.


In any case, I have to wonder in this, the year 2014 (and beyond): will anyone still possess comparable powers of observation for things both near and far? In this, the year 2014 (and beyond), with most people – whether on foot or in some other mode of transportation – plugged in digitally, will anyone still be able to observe and describe the world beyond his or her own digital navel?

Somehow, I doubt it.


RRB
07/28/14
Brooklyn, NY

… (más)
1 vota
Denunciada
RussellBittner | otra reseña | Dec 12, 2014 |
Breath and Shadows is the second of Ella Leffland’s books I’ve read (having read and reviewed Rumors of Peace just a couple of weeks ago), and I have to say that I find her command of the language — not to mention her characterization and setting — virtually without peer. If Rumors of Peace was a consummate coming-of-age story, Breath and Shadows is a consummate multi-generational family story. I frankly can’t say enough good things about either of them.


Just as I ranked Rumors of Peace right up there with Carson MacCullers’s Member of the Wedding, I’d now have to give Breath and Shadows (given its structural organization) equivalent ranking with Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.


And having just read and reviewed Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from (the) Underground, I can unabashedly state that Ella Leffland’s Thorkild (“Hr. Counselor”) is equally as heinous as the principal (unnamed) character of Dostoyevsky’s novella. What makes Ms. Leffland’s Thorkild doubly interesting, however, is the complete conversion of his character (to that of a doting father) during the hallucinatory stages of his late-life insanity.


A bit of a non sequitur, but a trenchant observation nevertheless from Philip (who, ironically, owns a large business in photographic equipment): “(t)he clicking of cameras wherever you went, as if people thought that by recording every moment of their lives they verified their existence, when in fact they’d been handed a substitute for looking inward and remembering. A frenzy of mechanical duplication. An endless production and consuming of images. A crime against authenticity. A mindless, flooding fraudulence of bits and pieces” (p. 222).


Although this rumination is entirely in keeping with Philip’s mental state at the time he develops it, I suspect the germ of it is also Ella Leffland’s — and I couldn’t agree more as I watch people in droves click, click, click their cell phones like so many mindless sycophants recording the myriad non-events that pepper their empty lives.


And the thoughts of another of her characters, Paula, as Paula considers a painting in a small Swiss church on Christmas Eve are, if not necessarily also Ms. Leffland’s, really quite amusing: “(h)er thoughts wandered. She looked at a painting of the Annunciation on the wall beside her, dimly lit by one of the small candles. It was not very good, a humble little country cousin of Van Eyck’s masterpiece. She tried to see beauty in it, even though she did not believe in the Annunciation, and even though she herself would have been furious if, as an unsuspecting young girl going about her daily tasks, she had suddenly had a divine pregnancy thrust upon her. The nerve. The gall. It should be called the Presumption” (p. 231).


One of the particular strengths Ms. Leffland exhibits in this novel, given the time lapse of a century between each of the three generations, is a consistency and accuracy of thought, speech and action with the time at which her characters lived. As a reader, you can be easily transported across centuries by the deftness of Ms. Leffland’s pen, and nothing she describes or puts into the mouths of her characters ever sounds anachronistic.


I suspect Ms. Leffland is a cat lover. Why do I think this? The following is just one of many examples: “Olaf has lain down on the carpet of moss. From the rocky little spring there issues a limpid murmur. Overhead the beech trees rustle with the passage of birds, whose calls filter down through the greenness. He stretches his knobby spine and tucks his paws under his chest, and for a while he sleeps. Then his pale green eyes open, and he lies there waiting. His good, his uncrumpled ear flicks from time to time. He waits for a sound, a scent, a touch” (p. 303).


The conclusion of these three stories is, well, Scandinavian — and appropriately so to a body of earth that sees no sun rise above the horizon for six months out of the year.


Bravo, Ms. Leffland! Brava Lella.

RRB
08/13/14
Brooklyn, NY

… (más)
 
Denunciada
RussellBittner | Dec 12, 2014 |
These were too dark for me.
 
Denunciada
aulsmith | Jun 19, 2013 |
I remember this fondly, but haven't reread it for years
 
Denunciada
echaika | Aug 27, 2009 |

Premios

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Estadísticas

Obras
8
También por
2
Miembros
361
Popularidad
#66,480
Valoración
½ 3.7
Reseñas
5
ISBNs
22

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