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Indlæser... The Complete Court of Memory2 | 1 | 5,214,938 |
(4) | Ingen | To the previous books of Court of Memory-Crossroads, The Stranger at the Crossroads, and Stories from My Life with the Other Animals-The Complete Court of Memory adds A Song of One's Own, composed of narratives created from memory that have appeared in magazines but not collected until now. From reviews of Court of Memory:"The genre in which McConkey does his writing has no name. He invented it. What McConkey does is to create meaning out of ordinary life...he'll create what is not exactly a story but a pattern in time." NOEL PERRIN, USA Today"The beauty and exceptional worth...of Court of Memory, an assemblage of...autobiographical meditations by a novelist and short story writer...is that it never ducks and runs. James McConkey is aware that any moment of pure and authentic feeling is an opportunity, provided it's held in custody a while for questioning...A book that's consistently challenging...Court of Memory should be marked must read." BENJAMIN DE MOTT, The New York Times Book Review"Each chapter is a first-person narrative that deals with a moment of particular importance in the life of writer and college teacher James McConkey...tiny fragments of facts that combine to create a rich and shimmering mosaic of emotion.... This is a remarkable book, rich, quiet, dense and honest, a rare combination." The Philadelphia Inquirer"Part memoir, part essay, part story, it takes up a scene in the present and illuminates it with moments from the past, often the smaller moments that other writers tend to overlook.... One can pay no greater compliment to this book than to say it almost makes palpable a moment of revelation that McConkey felt on a snowy evening some 20 years ago." DAVID GUY, The Washington Post"McConkey's mother, over the lifetime-span of this book, evolves from heartbroken young wife to a peaceful woman approaching 100, 'a small and white-haired child' who has given up believing in Heaven ever since the astronauts found nothing up there, but approaches her Nirvana all the same. The divine recurs and recurs here, even in its absence. To escape is to belong, to belong finally is to escape: children, furniture, the stars, a life, all combine here, brilliantly." CAROLYN SEE, Los Angeles Times"Court of Memory is among the most convincing and moving autobiographies ever written because it reproduces the rhythms of the way we really think about our lives." Newsday"Every page of Mr. McConkey's book has a fresh observation about the challenges and satisfaction of being human and humanistic.... Court of Memory is the most intrinsically American and one of the two or three best books I've read since Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It." HOWARD FRANK MOSHER"This is a wonderful book. McConkey makes of his own life...a powerful, thoughtful, and vivid work of art." ANNIE DILLARD"McConkey is one of our best writers; the gracefulness of his prose, the depth of his perceptions are often profoundly moving.... He invests commonplace events and artifacts with harmony and meaning.... The deceptively simple stories are built around the relationships between parents and children, between marriage partners, between good friends.... It is a spiritual odyssey conveyed with rare sensitivity and eloquence." Publishers Weekly"In Court of Memory, McConkey...encounters himself in 23 essays that are ruminative, humane and winning.... The book becomes a celebration of the enduring qualities of the human spirit.... Delightful reading." PATRICIA CLARK, The Houston Post… (mere) |
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▾Referencer Henvisninger til dette værk andre steder. Wikipedia på engelskIngen ▾Bogbeskrivelser To the previous books of Court of Memory-Crossroads, The Stranger at the Crossroads, and Stories from My Life with the Other Animals-The Complete Court of Memory adds A Song of One's Own, composed of narratives created from memory that have appeared in magazines but not collected until now. From reviews of Court of Memory:"The genre in which McConkey does his writing has no name. He invented it. What McConkey does is to create meaning out of ordinary life...he'll create what is not exactly a story but a pattern in time." NOEL PERRIN, USA Today"The beauty and exceptional worth...of Court of Memory, an assemblage of...autobiographical meditations by a novelist and short story writer...is that it never ducks and runs. James McConkey is aware that any moment of pure and authentic feeling is an opportunity, provided it's held in custody a while for questioning...A book that's consistently challenging...Court of Memory should be marked must read." BENJAMIN DE MOTT, The New York Times Book Review"Each chapter is a first-person narrative that deals with a moment of particular importance in the life of writer and college teacher James McConkey...tiny fragments of facts that combine to create a rich and shimmering mosaic of emotion.... This is a remarkable book, rich, quiet, dense and honest, a rare combination." The Philadelphia Inquirer"Part memoir, part essay, part story, it takes up a scene in the present and illuminates it with moments from the past, often the smaller moments that other writers tend to overlook.... One can pay no greater compliment to this book than to say it almost makes palpable a moment of revelation that McConkey felt on a snowy evening some 20 years ago." DAVID GUY, The Washington Post"McConkey's mother, over the lifetime-span of this book, evolves from heartbroken young wife to a peaceful woman approaching 100, 'a small and white-haired child' who has given up believing in Heaven ever since the astronauts found nothing up there, but approaches her Nirvana all the same. The divine recurs and recurs here, even in its absence. To escape is to belong, to belong finally is to escape: children, furniture, the stars, a life, all combine here, brilliantly." CAROLYN SEE, Los Angeles Times"Court of Memory is among the most convincing and moving autobiographies ever written because it reproduces the rhythms of the way we really think about our lives." Newsday"Every page of Mr. McConkey's book has a fresh observation about the challenges and satisfaction of being human and humanistic.... Court of Memory is the most intrinsically American and one of the two or three best books I've read since Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It." HOWARD FRANK MOSHER"This is a wonderful book. McConkey makes of his own life...a powerful, thoughtful, and vivid work of art." ANNIE DILLARD"McConkey is one of our best writers; the gracefulness of his prose, the depth of his perceptions are often profoundly moving.... He invests commonplace events and artifacts with harmony and meaning.... The deceptively simple stories are built around the relationships between parents and children, between marriage partners, between good friends.... It is a spiritual odyssey conveyed with rare sensitivity and eloquence." Publishers Weekly"In Court of Memory, McConkey...encounters himself in 23 essays that are ruminative, humane and winning.... The book becomes a celebration of the enduring qualities of the human spirit.... Delightful reading." PATRICIA CLARK, The Houston Post ▾Biblioteksbeskrivelser af bogens indhold No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThingmedlemmers beskrivelse af bogens indhold
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So I settled on this book, THE COMPLETE COURT OF MEMORY, which gathers his first three memoirs, along with some other autobiographical essays which make a fourth volume, all under one cover. It's a fat book, a heavy one, which seems appropriate, since McConkey tackles some pretty weighty matters in his writing. Mostly he ponders the mysteries of life itself.
In his nineties now, and retired from teaching for over twenty years, in many ways McConkey's life has been a fairly ordinary one. Born in the twenties, a child of the Great Depression and its hard times, McConkey attended Cleveland College on a work-study scholarship, married, and served in the infantry during WWII, where he was seriously injured in a jeep rollover in Normandy. He returned from the war to attend graduate schools in Ohio and Iowa, taught for several years in Kentucky, then at Cornell from 1956 until his retirement.
Perhaps the dominant theme in McConkey's four volumes of memoirs is his parents' divorce when he was eleven or twelve years old. Clayton McConkey, almost a dozen years younger than his wife, was something of a blue-sky dreamer of a salesman (Willie Loman comes to mind). He changed jobs and moved often, searching always for his "bracket." McConkey tells us that by the time he graduated from high school he had attended fifteen different schools in several states. His father's second marriage failed after a few years and the elder McConkey even spent some time in prison for writing bad checks, but upon his release he remarried his first wife and they remained together until his death from cancer. But during those four years that his parents were divorced, James and his mother went through some very difficult times, living with relatives and moving around, trying to make ends meet. His mother worked as a maid. Her older son Jack got a scholarship to General Motors Institute in Flint. James went to live with his father and second wife in Chicago for several months, then back to live with an aunt and uncle, finally ending up at Cleveland College, where he earned an accelerated pre-war degree and met his wife. These poverty-stricken peripatetic early years obviously left a permanent mark on McConkey, because it seems to me that he has spent the rest of his life trying to prove his own worth as a reliable husband and father (he has three sons). He even admits that he adamantly refused any opportunities to move on from Cornell for better paying positions, mostly because he wanted his own family to have a firm sense of permanence and stability, of 'home' - all of which were so lacking in his own early life.
McConkey didn't stay put completely, however. He traveled extensively, on sabbaticals to Italy and France, during which time he saw much of Europe, and he writes most eloquently of his time in the Greek islands, Paris and other places.
I found much to relate to in McConkey's memories, particularly in his close relationship with his aged mother, who lived with him for the last dozen years or so of her life (she lived to be a hundred). She told him she no longer believed in heaven, and I remembered how my own mother, also in her nineties, admitted she no longer believed a lot of the force-fed teachings of the Christian church. Indeed, McConkey at one point recalls something "from an otherwise forgotten book" - "Memory is what we now have in place of religion."
I was also touched by McConkey's musings on how our attitudes change toward animals as we get older, "with the inevitable ebbing of the once insatiable wanting that sometimes makes an unholy ... trinity of soul, sex and possessions." He remembers a dog he had as a boy and reflects on the many pets and animals he's had since then, and how many of them are an attempt to recapture that first important boy-dog bond that can perhaps never be replicated. Reading this caused me to think about how important my own dogs have been in my life, especially those that have shared our home since retirement. We lavish our love on these animals, unashamedly and fully. McConkey's "My Life with the Other Animals" is a fascinating look at this concept.
I really enjoyed reading this book, except for one thing. McConkey tends to repeat himself, reiterating many of the same anecdotes, about his parents, his children, etc. His long-time home in upstate New York, for example, is never just an old farmhouse. It's always his "1831 classic Greek revival farmhouse." After the first dozen or so times he describes it this way, I was tired of hearing it. I GOT it, Jim. It's a very OLD house. But then, these stories, anecdotes and descriptions were written at different times, often decades apart, so I should probably forgive him these redundancies. Bottom line: this is a fascinating, often thought-provoking look at a very long life. In some ways it's very ordinary, but McConkey has a way of reflecting on it all that makes it seem very Extraordinary.
If you enjoy autobiography, then this is a must read. Highly recommended. ( )