The Ancient Minstrel - aging writer eats and drinks, obsesses on women. Well trod ground.

Eggs - Excellent, worth the volume. A woman's life, and chickens.

Howling Buddha - similar to Minstrel, but closes with an unexpected punch. ( )

I received an ARC copy of this trilogy of novellas from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for and honest review.

The Ancient Minstrel is a collection of novellas that reflect upon each other in interesting ways although plot-wise, there is no relation. I found them to be quite deep and insightful and at times abruptly or at other times quietly disturbing, like a calm pond that discloses something ugly just below the surface. Something that snaps and bites.

The first novella—The Ancient Minstrel reads like a humorous autobiography of Jim Harrison. A reader of his work will recognize themes explored in other novels and novellas. While enjoying the self-deprecating humor I could not help but thinking that Mr. Harrison and Hemingway would have gotten along personally as well as enjoyed each other’s work. The aging literary lion acknowledges his own weaknesses as such and makes fun of himself, yet at the same time displays his substantial talent and insight.

The second novella is straight fiction and my favorite of the bunch. “Eggs” tells the life story of a self-reliant woman who we cannot help but admire. We are taken full circle from her childhood on a farm, her time as an adolescent in WW2 Britain, and her later years back on her farm and are treated to the work of a mature master that again reminded me again of Hemingway’s “tip of the iceberg” deepness in a seemingly a straight-forward narrative tale. I do have to say that Harrison is in no way derivative of Hemingway—they just both happen to have a similar simplicity to their writing that belies the depth of meaning and subtlety.

The Case of the Screaming Buddha’s brings back retired Detective Sunderson from The Big Seven yet this time the focus is turned to an aspect of his character that I found disturbing in the earlier novel. Without giving anything away as far as plot, I will say that the character’s flaw that merely taints him in The Big Seven comes to the forefront here and we watch the play of denial, rationalization, and ultimately devastation in all of its aspects. I found this story to be profoundly disturbing to the point that I initially hated the story until I was able after a couple of days to distance myself and realize that hating it was, probably, the whole point.

5 stars. Harrison is one of my favorite writers. ( )

Three very different novellas, each captivating and masterful. The title story, “a memoir in the form of a novella,” is a beautiful piece about an aging writer, his life in writing, attempts to reconcile with his wife, farming, eating, drinking, fishing, with descriptions of Montana, Michigan, Arizona and France.
“I feel absolutely vulnerable and recognize it’s the best state of mind for a writer whether in the woods or the studio. Your mind feels a rush of images and ideas. You have acquired humility by accident.”

Eggs is the story of Catherine, who has had many choices in life, but choses to live on her late grandparents farm in Montana and eventually have a baby to raise on her own. She has seen her own family go off the tracks and avoids it. Farming, animals, dogs, and nature are what she loves. “To Catherine the magic of life was in the spectacular assortment of species.”

The Case of the Howling Buddhas features Harrison’s Detective Sunderson, who has a weird case to investigate, and problems of his own. “Good people don’t have it easy, he reflected, though he wasn’t really a good person.” ( )

Jim Harrison has been among my favorite writers. He passed away in March at the age of 78. This was his last work. It contains 3 novellas which was a vehicle that he used very well over his long career. The book's style is typical Harrison, long narratives that start with one subject and get off into many tangents and philosophies. The books that Harrison wrote over the last part of his career seemed to deal mostly with an aging character like himself and how he dealt with his drinking, lusting over young women, and generally bad behavior. If you have never read Harrison, then you might want to try this book but a better place would be Dalva, The Road Home, and True North. These are my favorites among the many books I have read by Harrison. Got to meet him at a book reading in San Francisco. True to his character, he had an open bottle of wine that he drank from throughout the evening. He was an original. ( )

Novellas are that relatively uncommon literary form that always seem a little bit awkward to me because they are obviously too short to be called novels and are too long to be called short stories. When reading a novella, I can never keep myself from wondering if the author started out intending to write a novel and ran out of story, or if he started out to write a short story and things got out of hand. With Jim Harrison, though, you don't have to wonder. The Ancient Minstrel is his eighth novella collection and he is perhaps still best known for his first such collection, 1979's Legends of the Fall. Harrison obviously loved the novella form almost as much as he loved writing poetry.

The Ancient Minstrel includes three Harrison novellas, “The Ancient Minstrel,” “Eggs,” and the shorter “The Case of the Howling Buddhas.” There is an author's preface to “The Ancient Minstrel” that calls the novella a fictional addition to Harrison's 2002 memoir Off to the Side. Just how much tongue-in-cheek the preface might be is up to the reader to decide for himself because Harrison takes its main character to rather dark places and strange obsessions. The poet/novelist of the story has just turned 70 and his lusty womanizing past seems to be behind him for good. He is married but he and his wife have separated, and although they are still living on the same property, they are living very separate lives. Our writer knows that he should be working on the novel that his publisher is anxious to get its hands on, but he has fallen in love with the idea of raising pigs on his farm – an obsession that has now pushed the novel he was writing right out of his head. Harrison offers here one version of a writer approaching the end of a long, productive career – how closely it might resemble his story is hard to tell.

Catherine, the main character of “Eggs,” is the daughter of an unhappy British woman who was conned into marrying the World War II soldier who promised her a new life on his family farm even though he never had any intention of adopting that lifestyle after the war. As a child, Catherine did spend time on her grandparent's farm, along with her mother, during which she developed a lifelong fascination of chickens. She is a strong, self-reliant woman who has no desire or intention of every marrying but she badly wants to have a child, and she knows exactly how she will get that done.

“The Case of the Howling Buddha's” is the shortest of the three novellas in the collection but there is a lot packed into it, including an undercover assignment to kidnap a wealthy man's daughter from a cult and the ugly sexual seduction of a teenage girl by a decades-older man. The main character of this one is a 66-year-old divorced detective who, even at his age, cannot control himself around teenage girls. And when the fifteen-year-old neighbor girl who weeds his garden not only responds to his attention but demands that their sexual affair continue, the man finds that he is too weak to end it despite the fact that it will almost certainly end badly for both him and the girl.

The Ancient Minstrel proves two things for Jim Harrison: the novella works beautifully when it is in the hands of a good writer like him, and he was still very much at the top of his game when he died in March 2016. ( )