Burnt Toast

From back cover: "'Burnt Toast' is a power vision - and the novel named for it is a mythic evocation of Peter Gould's life on a farm in southern Vermont, where he lives with some of his friends and his dog, Old Pal. " He wrote this first novel at age 25.

Mr. Gould's prose is a thoroughly charming blend of the sensuous and the surreal. The story is full of digressions, and leaps around chronologically quite a bit, but that only adds to its charms; the story behaves like one of Gould's multitude of elaborately-named dogs (i.e., "Katy Crewl, the Roving Jewel"), sniffing around for extraordinary meaning in ordinary life. "Burnt Toast" brings up such evocative images of October in Vermont that it is, in fact, one of my autumn rituals to re-read it every year. I only wish that Mr. Gould had written/ published more. I rest my case.

Oddly enough, I really can't remember the direction this book took. There was a horse named King-Something-Or-Other; a monkey who stole a chimney; and a love story about a boy who loved a girl living on the other side of the lake--only to find she had never existed? Fragmented memories of a book I read so long ago--yet the fascination remains. I would love to read it again--just to understand why the title remains etched upon my brain--something I can neither remember, nor forget?

Like Trout Fishing in America, but sweeter and more poingant. I've been looking for this book since 1976. I am anxious to read it again with adult eyes. You can't go home again, but some reads take you close. The combination of the rustic and ordinary with the surreal in this tale, and the original characters, made this a memorable reading experience. The only book I've read since then that stayed with me this long was Song of Solomon.

Haven't read this book in 20 years, it still haunts me. Like "In Watermelon Sugar", the story is of passages with friends through a dream-like ordinariness of mystery. I lived in the country at the time, and liked to sit in an old weed-locked truck when it rained and read. This book made you feel like you might understand some message whispered through blowing fields, or see a future light filtered through the barn doors.