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Truth
and Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Intertwined Bel Canto author Ann Patchett
has written a poignant memoir of her friendship with the late writer Lucy Grealy (Autobiography
of a Face). Their intertwined lives and deep friendship are revealed with
well-written disclosure, and the presentation of the joys and pains of lives
and relationships. There’s an abiding sadness on these pages, and a deep,
inner strength. If you’ve ever wondered about the complexity of friendship,
especially female relationship, Truth
and Beauty is a book to read to explore that wonder. Here’s an excerpt
from the beginning of Chapter Two, pp. 17-20:
Our responsibilities at the “Is it over a
hundred in here?” I asked. Lucy looked at
her shirt, which was already crumpled and damp. “We’re going to have to wear
something that doesn’t show sweat.” Two young girls
leaned in the door. They looked like the sorority Sisters who marched up and
down the sidewalk in front of our house all day singing rush songs, “I’m a
Kappa, we’re a Kappa, here a Kappa, there a Kappa, wouldn’t you like to be a
Kappa, too?” High blond ponytails swinging to the Dr Pepper beat. “Are you going to be in this class?”
one of them asked. We looked at them seriously for a
minute and then we both started laughing, the impossible thought that we
would have anything to teach these girls drove us into a terrifying state of
hysteria. We would have no supervision, no one to
make sure that we weren’t robbing the good children of The idea was, of course, that she would
get around to reading them before she had to teach them, but somehow it never
seemed to happen. She scanned the assignment while running to class, pages
pressed down beneath her fingers. She figured as long as she managed to stay
a few paragraphs ahead of the pack, she’d be all right. She maintained a
strict policy that no one was to ask about the end of the book before the end
had been assigned. “ With or without reading the assignment,
Lucy could power through a class on the sheer muscle of her oratory. She
could talk. She could talk on the nature of truth and beauty for hours, and
after all, what novel or poem or play in an Introduction to Literature class
couldn’t benefit from a truth-and-beauty discussion? She would often lie on
the desk, half curled up, with her arm pillowing her head. She recited the
ending of King Lear aloud, “Howl, howl, howl, howl! 0, you are men of
stones: I Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / That heaven’s
vault should crack. She’s gone for I Ever!
I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth.” Lucy loved Lear. She would have
just as soon spent the entire semester on Lear. “And then I would speak the two most
beautiful words in the English language,” she would tell me on the walk home.
“Class dismissed.” I bought The Iliad and Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark [she wrote to me from the Bunting
Institute at Radcliffe were she held a fellowship
years later]. The first is for a class I’m sitting in on, one taught by an
absolutely genius professor: he dazzles me. Last week he did “Romeo and
Juliet,” which used to be my least favorite play. He changed my mind. He
talked about how it’s a play about the arbitrary accidental meetings in the
street, arriving or waking up just one moment too late or too soon. From
these moments of arbitrary “real” moments are forged by the characters
through their own passions, which insist on taking moments in time and
conditions of emotion that will eventually pass: anger, grief, and transforming
them through actions into “forever,” irrevocable conditions, such as through
a curse on a family or a person, or by suicide. I still don’t think it’s my
favorite play, but I do have new feelings about it. Monday I’ll just have time
for class before leaving for NY, he’s doing the first four books of
Homer, so I have to start reading. I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read any
of that stuff, unless you count the one or two abridged pages shoved down my
unwilling throat in high school. My students, bearing up under the
weight of my neatly typed syllabus and ironclad attendance policy, were
certainly less enchanted than Lucy’s students, but they always got their
papers in on time. We were a pairing out of an Aesop’s fable, the grasshopper
and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in
the winter and the tortoise won the race, hut everyone knows that the
grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their
leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn’t
tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the
grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest
store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things,
gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and
tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the
ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you
as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day. Ann
and Lucy’s lives intersect and intertwine, and some readers may question the
health of the relationship. Nonetheless, through pain, love and devotion
endure, for reasons quite unknown. Truth
and Beauty is a finely written book that will leave you thinking, and
make you sad. Steve
Hopkins, June 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the July 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Truth
and Beauty.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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