In the Gathering Woods |
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Author:
| Bernardi, Adria |
Series title: | Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize Ser. |
ISBN: | 978-0-8229-4131-6 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2000 |
Publisher: | University of Pittsburgh Press
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Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | USD $24.00 |
Book Description:
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2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Winner Selected by Frank Conroy
In the Gathering Woods contains a cast of characters who hail from the same Italian ancestors, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth century, with a narrator's boyhood recollections of gathering mushrooms with his grandfather--a narrator who seems still haunted by a terrifying local legend that tormented him as a boy. We skip backward...
More Description
2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize Winner
Selected by Frank Conroy
In the Gathering Woods contains a cast of characters who hail from the same Italian ancestors, but whose stories come at us unbounded by time and space. The book opens early in the twentieth century, with a narrator's boyhood recollections of gathering mushrooms with his grandfather--a narrator who seems still haunted by a terrifying local legend that tormented him as a boy. We skip backward to a young shepherd-artist in the Apennine mountains in the 1500s, who yearns to be discovered, as Giotto was. Later, a preverbal baby accumulates bits of the conversation carried on by adults at the table above her head; a neurologist from Chicago returns to the Apennines to deposit shards of glass at a grave.
Whether they speak in the lost dialect of an immigrant, of infancy, or of an adolescent girl's school lessons, these stories call up fragments of language in a struggle to understand and attempt to console through the act of reassembling. The language of these stories is both lyrical and comic, providing insight through the details of Bernardi's writing.