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My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, From Living Rivers, In the Age of the Industrial Dark by David James Duncan (review)
- Western American Literature
- The Western Literature Association
- Volume 38, Number 2, Summer 2003
- pp. 215-216
- 10.1353/wal.2003.0001
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
BOOK REVIEWS 215 My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, From Living Rivers, In the Age of the Industrial Dark. By David James Duncan. San Francisco: Sierra Club Press, 2001. 294 pages, $24.95/$16.95. Reviewed by David Cremean Black Hills State University, Spearfish, South Dakota In this collection of essays sporting perhaps the longest subtitle in recent memory, David James Duncan establishes himself as one of the worthy heirs to Cactus Ed Abbey in the art of essays polemical and personal. The twenty-one pieces focus on the ecological and the literary, on place and philosophy, on the sacred and the spiritual— and, of course, since its author is Duncan, on the piscatorial. Previously best known for two fine novels set in the Northwest— The River Why, and the The Brothers K, which among other things use flyfishing and base ball at once as beautiful human enterprises and metaphors for life— Duncan enters an equally literary world with these essays. Yet, with typical crankiness, he professes to have done so reluctantly, voicing his preference for writing fiction. Perhaps more “haunted by waters” than even his spiritual mentor Norman Maclean, Duncan has left his native Northwest because it became for him a non-place: “a flux, an industrial by-product; an unending sequence of rapid, man-made changes” (49). He has instead grafted himself to the Bitterroot Valley near Missoula, Montana, and Maclean’s Big Blackfoot River. While several of the essays are predominantly personal, most focus on or deal with in some way environmental concerns relative to water in the West. The best of these are the angriest, and when angry, they are vibrantly so. In a time when much of the “lit erary” and mainstream environmental writing has grown relatively sterile, sani tized so as to avoid offense, it is refreshing to read Duncan's “rants” as he reclaims the polemical as literature. A vital note connects many of the essays: elements of Duncan’s spiritual-reli gious pilgrimage from a literalist-fundamentalist Seventh-Day Adventist upbring ing to a truly Western brand of mysticism. His statements in this regard tend to either suggest or locate connections between Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism and paganism, among others. In the process, Duncan embraces an adaptive spirituality without resorting to a stereotypically “Califomicated” brand of New Ageism. Such movement into the mystical, suggesting as it does a disdain for numerous of the dead limbs of institutionalized religion, tends to run through many western authors, from Maclean to Cormac McCarthy, Louise Erdrich to Willa Cather, Don Berry to Louis Owens, and beyond. It also enables Duncan to offer a living alternative to the following strident claim he makes in the book’s opening essay, “Valmiki’s Palm”: “Capitalist fundamentalism, I still believe, is the perfect Techno-Industrial religion, its goal being a planet upon which we’ve noth ing left to worship, worry about, read, eat, or love but dollar bills and Bibles” (8). 216 WAL 3 8 .2 SUMMER 2 0 0 3 Duncan is one of what he terms as our “River Soldiers,” fighting the good fight (216). His pen breathes fire and life-sustaining rain; as he states in “Birdwatching as a Blood Sport,” “The life that terrifies me and the life that I adore are one life” (47). This book more than merits the reading. The Cadence of Qrass. By Thomas McGuane. New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 2002. 238 pages, $24.00. Reviewed by Stephen Cook California State University, Sacram ento Just the mention of Thomas McGuane’s name is enough to start an argu ment in some circles, so let me be the first to say that I am fully aware of his defi ciencies, having read much of what he has written over the years. I once encouraged a female colleague who teaches a seminar in the literature of the American West to read Nothing but Blue Skies over the summer, and in the fall, she told me that upon encountering a section about midway in the novel, she had hurled the book across her living room. “Yup,” I said, “I...