Souls of Wind

Can a novel be funny and wise, educational and entertaining, reflective, introspective, searching, piercing and action-packed all at once? You bet it can if it's SOULS OF WIND. Learn everything you ever wanted to know about brick, discover the beginnings of the motion picture, and enjoy Billy the Kid saving a damsel in distress by plying five douche bags with bullets in less than a minute. The seductive intrigue of experiencing Arthur Rimbaud meet Billy the Kid was reason enough to buy the book. Reading the book is reason enough to spread the word. In a book market glutted with the repetitively quotidian and transient, John Olson has rewarded us with pure gold. Read It!

As I write this review it's late July here in California so I'm thinking maybe you are looking to read a nice summer novel, but one with something extra. Souls of Wind has what you need for a perfect day or three of reading while reclined on a chaise lounge around the pool, sitting under an umbrella at the beach, or relaxing in your easy chair at home, ceiling fan whirring as the humid twilight fades into Magritte. Or, for those in the southern hemisphere, say in the upper reaches of Chile, this novel has what it takes for those late nights when you're cuddling with your sweetie while the wind howls and snow drifts just outside and those massive angel-blue icebergs off-shore create havoc in the shipping lanes. Souls of Wind has locales and settings. After some early scenes in New York and Saint Louis, the book settles into the Old West and the story arc mostly follows a professor who travels out looking for dinosaur bones. As you turn the pages dust, creosote, and sage blow through as does the stink of fresh horse piss and smoke from campfires. Souls of Wind has action too: fights, including with guns, trains, a dog who gets kicked, a touch or two of sex, an attempted sexual assault, and card games, among other things. Then there are the characters. The main guy has a first name of Arthur and a last name of Rimbaud and yes he's one and the same as the French poet that you love or, if you don't, should. Olson has a heck of an imagination to get ol' Rimbaud out and about in late nineteenth century America. But also: Rimbaud meets up with America's number one (with a bullet, if you'll forgive the pun) frontier outlaw, Billy the Kid. That's about as wild an idea as a chance meeting between an umbrella and a sewing machine. Yet Olson manages to keep it pretty dang real, mostly by putting in plenty of details about the two, so that it comes to pass in one's mind that Arthur and Billy actually did have a go-round back then and out there. And then to stretch one's imagination even more, there appears "Alias," a character who'd have felt quite at home out on Highway 61, if there had been such a road back in those days. Atop and within the narrative and characters, you'll find interesting bits about photography and the mind, travel and reverie, Walt Whitman, words and language, steam locomotives and poetry, reading and writing, the sun, the flow of thought, people who are brutally alive, and the hunger for the marvelous. These wonderful passages are so good, you probably will want to clip and save `em, or at least use plenty of bookmarks so you'll know where to look when you need another hit of truth and beauty.