'The lost landscape' by Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates ‘The lost landscape’ was the first book I read by this author, ‘one of the world’s most prolific and prodigious’ who has published 58 novels, 14 non-fiction books, plays, novellas and countless short stories.
A friend had been raving about Joyce Carol Oates for more than two decades. Yet it took a bargain bin in a tourist town for me to finally buy my first 2 Joyce Carol Oates books.
‘The lost landscape’ is Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir, or rather “an accounting of the ways in which my life (as a writer, but not solely as a writer) was shaped in early childhood, adolescence and a little beyond.“ Compiled from a series of essays and published when she was well into her 70s.
The book opens with a photo, a description of the photo, and a description of what happened at the time – World War II is raging, her father fears of being drafted. A description of the people who are visible in the photo, and the photographer who is not. A description of all the viewer can not see in the photo. A naming of the camera they were taken with. A reflection on what it meant at the time to take photos, how many they took, how few survived. Of what photos meant to the author, not just photos of her own but family photos of strangers, and her desire of writing those strangers’ stories.
The first chapter is written from the perspective of a chicken, the little girl’s pet chicken. How the chicken observes the little girl. Chicken calls her little girl, and ‘little’ is a word often repeated –the first, three-quarter page of the chapter has 11 repetitions of the word ‘little’. Not always to describe the girl, but the ‘little farm’, and the ‘little girl’s mother’.
Details. Whatever the situation the author is brilliant in providing details to make situations and places come alive. We get an insight into life in the 1940s, into how she perceives her immigrant grandparents, of poverty, and the unsettling events she observes and only later fully comprehends. It’s a mix of childhood observations and adult comments.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and went straight on to her next one…