Eyestone

In these starkly evocative stories, the isolated rural community of farmers and fishermen, housewives and homesteaders in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, comes poignently to life. An elderly spinster spends an evening drinking rum, a solitary memorial to her moch-adored dead brother; an artist from Boston, hoping to find peace and inspiration on a remote seaside farm, discovers that the reality of utterly alone is at once fearsome and pleasurable; an eighty-year old man, knowing he will soon die, tells his son of the harshness and rough comraderie of life on the sea, painting an indelible portrait of the forces that shaped his life. The people in Eyestone, like those in Dubliners, belong to a specific place and time; their stories of loss, loneliness, despair, and delight illuminate the essence of the human experience, any ime and in every place. In astonishing and unsparing tides of emotional vitality, the depth and mysterious force of the sea washes ashore the inconsequential triviial vicissitudes of daily affairs with terrifying wisdom that becomes the very salt that the earth absorbs, and the wealth of the wisdom therein hidden. The writing is poised, lyrical, inscrutible, affirmative, nostalgic, hopelessly gorged with an emotial latency that sparkles, not so much as to dazzle, but to make percious the simplicity adn the langour that we must contend with as we recourse to the mundane predilections of habit, the folly of conventions, and the search for meaning where meaning seems to elde us, mock us and goad us on... Beautiful, perspicacious, wise and precious. A wonderful read to savor, treasure and read with a loved one.