The House of Breath

This is an amazing novel. It is very difficult to get into because of the thick prose-poetry. (Often, there is parenthetical material, (sometimes with more parenthetical materical nested inside other parenthetical material.)) But the use of language is dazzling: thick, dense swirling prose-poetry of a young boy in a poor family, who (unlike everyone else) has a creative mind and a desire to escape. We have several narrative voices telling us about one poor family's life in a tiny town in East Texas. The principal narrator has an extraordinary vocabulary that might send you to the dictionary. Other narrators are his poorly-educated relatives, so their wordchoice is folksy and quaint. The most interesting narrator is, quite unexpectedly, the nearby river, which talks back to the main narrator. There is a lot of pent-up sexuality in these pages. Everyone is frustrated. One uncle ran off with a traveling circus and pursued a gay life. One married man never consummated his marriage with his child-bride. The narrator clearly has desires, but can't act upon them, perhaps because it's such a tiny town, the kind of town with no secrets. But it is the evocation of nature that is stunning. (Annie Dilliard WISHES she could write this kind of dazzling "I see and comprehend every aspect of nature in my neck of the woods" prose!) Once I realized the prose was not totally unreadable (after about 6 pages), I started relishing the many inventive Proustian flourishes, the gorgeous phrases, the glorious philosophy of the interconnected web of family, nature, life, and escape. If you want a serious literary experience, this is it!

I was reading about this book in "Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote." In a June 14, 1950 letter to Goyen, Capote wrote: "I feel, not unaccountably, as though I'd had a nearly religious experience. Dear God, Bill, I wept, trembled, and as I turned the final page I might have frozen from the chill along my spine. It is a novel of unearthly beauty!...." Well, based on these and a few other comments I ordered the book. This truly is like no other book I've ever read. It is a wonderfully articulated prose novel. This is the story of a house and the family that once lived there. Each member of the family gives an accounting of events and secrets and feelings. The story Berryben tells is especially moving - "All I know is that there was a change in me and, discovering that change in me, I would do anything to keep it unchanged, I would not let it die in me." The story of Christy and Otey is heartbreaking. This isn't an easy book to read. The story isn't told in a linear fashion. It's full of long, languorous passages of incredible beauty. I was reminded at times of both Virginia Woolf and Capote. This book deserves to be rediscovered.

'The House Of Breath' reads like a sacred text, as they turn the pages the reader feels like they are blowing the dust from a casket of long hidden jewels.Narrated by a man returning after a prolonged absence to his long abandoned family home in Charity (a small, river-bound Texas town) the book invokes the ghosts of the past to tell the tales of desire, loss & melancholy that make up the (largely secret) history of that family.Weaving a dizzy spell over all is the richly evoked river delta landscape. Goyen uses the most mesmerizing, lush descriptive prose to magically and brilliantly conjour up a sense of time and place. The overall effect is like living through a waking dream. You choose to read slowly to soak up the atmosphere and prolong the poetic experience: "(the river) was ornamented with big drowsy snapturtles sitting like figurines on rocks; had little jeweled perch in it and sliding cottenmouth water moccasins. It crawled, croaking with bullfrogs and ticking and sucking and clucking and shining..."Comparable to Cormac McCarthy at his most lyrical, readers of Calvino, Banville, Flannery O'Connor & Faulkner amongst others, will swoon over this southern masterpiece.

A simple story of reflection and rememberance, The House of Breath is a remarkable, evocative and poignant recollection of a youth's life in the house where the tumult of childhood is remembered. The narrative has passages that are as beautiful as any ever written. Numerous readings can only make these passages more stirring to your soul.