Reviews for Fathers and Crows

The average rating for Fathers and Crows based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-02-03 00:00:00 Jason Santiago And when are you going to Huronia? Is your ambition as dead as your sex life? Here it is page 403, my plot more or less in place, all destruction finally ready to happen (and what about the poor Jesuits, sidelined again? You're their friend and this is their book!) -- and you? You count beaver-skins for De Monts! --William the Blind Fathers and Crows is our Second Dream of the American landscape of a history which is better not to tell, told us by William the Blind, our Dreamer of these landscapes which we see around us covered over with pavement, but once, and still in our Dream, Under the pavement, ourselves! William T. Vollmann has undertaken a series of historical novels in which to describe a symbolic history of the North American continent upon whose lands The People encountered possessors of Iron-Power, an encounter whose result is our inheritance. The history is vetted and true. Liberties taken, and who will not take liberties in a Dream, are confessed even should that confession require burning. In these histories the victors and vanquished both speak with a kind of nakedness, a kind of surface representation which puts no one under a clinical methodology which would eviscerate the life of those whose lives disappeared down The Stream of Time. There are no sops for the soft-hearted and sentimental. Life was violent. It remains so even as the whores continue to stroll along Rue Sainte-Catherine. Friend Stephen P, in a comment to his review of The Royal Family, remarked upon Vollmann's voice, his ability to sustain a kind of voice rarely heard, across hundreds of pages. And I ask myself about this in conjunction with the question--and sometimes the accusation--of Vollmann's prose. Prose we think of often as style, a way of putting words down on the page in regard to both syntax and semantic choice. Sometimes we readers and reviewers speak of prose as if it were an independent set of decisions, that there is good prose and bad prose. But with only a little sophistication we reflect further that decisions about how to place syntax and execute semantic choices are determined foremost by the material, that form and content must align themselves in a unity; that form becomes itself content, and the content is reflected in those prosaic decisions. "Bad prose" can often be rescued by such considerations, that the content, what it's about, demands that it get itself expressed in a way which aligns with what it is. But I wonder if this view of prose as form for a pre-existing content is true, or if it is true, which it likely is, whether it is sufficient. And by that, I ask, what about voice? Can we for the nonce separate out voice from prose, separate voice out from content as if a character had a pre-existing manner of speaking which must then be reflected in prose? That perhaps voice is not just a matter of how something gets said, but is the formation itself of how something gets said. If prose forms content, can we think voice as the formation of prose itself? That prose is the material upon which voice goes to work, raising it above the dead letter on the page? Voice not as emergent, but as always already acting? One thing perhaps which Vollmann's fiction teaches us is not so much that the prose must be authenticated by the content, but that voice itself is not content nor mere prose. And further, that voice is not Vollmann's voice nor the voices of his characters, but rather of the work itself, of the book itself. Clearly, Vollmann has a voice which one recognizes with pleasure from work to work. But each work itself speaks of itself and from itself, and even our storyteller, William the Blind, who has seven voices, each of which he speaks in each of the Seven Dreams, is nothing but the voice of the work, the story our bard relates. Even if we separate out one from the other--content, prose, voice--they possess an internal unity, but that unity is stitched in the case of each work by a voice, perhaps a voice of conscience of the era in relation to the unity of that era with its people, its landscapes, its Power, its eventual fate. And when the voice is the voice of Dream, it is strange. May you listen. And by listening hear the voice of Fathers and Crows. ____________ The other part In which is related how I, Not-Regarded, made the Exercises and ascended to The Seventy Third Rapids The Seven Dreams are novels and should be read as such. The Seven Dreams are histories, and so shall we read them. The Seven Dreams are symbols, and we know what that means. I began at the beginning, a method which often works well but can at times deceive. Title page. Copywright page. Initial epigraph (from Father Francesco Giuseppe). The Dedication ("to all Canadians" and "against all dogmatists"). Contents (n.b., the box lower on this page pointing The Reader to Chronology, Glossary, Source Notes, etc). List of Maps. An Accurate Chart of Goals, Straits & Obstacles to Be Found in the STREAM OF TIME, Keyed to the "Spiritual Exercises" of Ignatius of Loyola. At this point, on the cusp of Crow Text, The Jesuit Relations 1610-1791, A Historical Note, I skipped across the wide breadth of the Atlantic, returning to France for the winter, and found myself on page 869 face to face with a concluding epigraph from Père Biard taken from a letter of 31 Janvier 1612. Thus I spent a few hours in the library at Paris, also known as End Matter (those two words are mine, Not-Regarded's) of This Dream. Glossaries. The note on page 874 contained valuable warnings. This is followed by Orthographic Notes; I read these two pages in their entirety. But the following--Glossary of Personal Names--I merely skimmed, taking note of a few things that interested me, such as, "Fernando and Isabella [Spanish] 'Their Catholic Majesties.' It was under this royal pair that Columbus discovered America. They unified Spain, reconquered the province of Granada from the Moors, and expelled apostates. Bully for them." I did the same for Glossary of Orders, Isms, Nations, Races, Hierarchies, Shamans, Tribes and Monsters. Here's the entry for Christian, "Originally followers of CHRIST, they later grafted various other tenets to His, dividing into factions in the process. In seventeenth-century Canada, they thought to coerce, and so combined with their beauty of purpose an ugliness of execution." The Glossary of Places I passed over. But you shouldn't. As noted earlier in this Relation, there is a list of maps at the beginning of this Dream. They should be consulted occasionally and as the Spirit moves. Glossary of texts I read in detail, but it's short and most of you won't be reading any of the 73 original Jesuit Relations. Glossary of Calendars, Currencies and Measures is the kind of thing one always requires when encountering the strange habits of people past. Next I encountered the 6th Glossary, this one called General. Here is where you will learn several Frenchified means by which to call someone a sonofabitch. Once I had traversed the Glossaries in a rather non-meditative fashion, I encountered A Chronology of the Second Age of Wineland. This I read in detail and with a fair amount of attention in order to get the lay of the land, so to speak, and to have somewhere to hang my hat as the plot was likely to leave me more than a little out of breath on the bottom of le Fleuve Saint-Laurent where GOUGOU would surely take me in his hairy arms ... And kill me! The Chronology is indeed exhaustive, beginning when "A SKY WOMAN named AATAENTSIC falls to the watery earth" and ending in 1989 when "William the Blind visits Kateri Tekakwitha's relics at Kahnawaké." After this whirlwind through Time-Power I read what Arthur C. Parker, from his book of 1923, Seneca Myths and Folk Tales, has to say about poets. That was page 934. On page 935 came an important Note which introduces William the Blind's Source Notes. These Source Notes I read accordingly as they sourced materials from each individual chapter, which, otherwise expressed, would mean the I read them in parallel with the novel itself.* I mean the Novel, the thing itself, not all this extra pretentious junk that some writers can't help indulging themselves in. I mean the novel with its plot and characters and prose. Be damned! your indulgence with historical facts and accuracies and representations. Dream already! And whether you each decide for the Before or for the After, do not avert your eyes from the Acknowledgement page found as a coda to the bulk of this Dream. Even here, in my own humble Relation, I would like to give you two names which you will encounter over and over again, two people who wrote in the margins of the manuscript of this Dream. I mean of course, Mme. Ruth Holmes Whitehead of the Nova Scotia Museum (Halifax) and Professor Bruce Trigger at McGill University's Department of Anthropology (Montréal). At this point in making the Exercises, I shot the rapids down The Stream of Time to Crow-Text. Crow-Text followed by Fathers and Crows and its first part, "Kingdom Come or, How the Black-Gowns Sailed to Canada." As I swam and climbed back up through The Stream of Fathers and Crows I met many Canadians and many who would become Canadians and many who would die. When everyone who mattered was dead, I read The Six Glossaries as if they were my very devotions upon which my life would one day hang. * Those dogs who would spurn and chuck aside a footnote or an endnote or a Sacred Source Note shall themselves be chucked aside where their bodies will rot and their bones will not be recovered to be mingled with all the bones of the People and thus such dogs who feel they may dispense with the Source shall forever be expelled from the Source itself which (as we all know) is the People, and their bones shall not mingle. They shall be like the moose whose bones have been cast in the water, like the beaver whose bones are hung in the tree.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-16 00:00:00 Kevin Gravina where the stream of time opens up and pours into the great endless ocean mist rises through the spangled air like reversed rain (or is that bright brume the souls of the saved soaring to PARADISE?), and indeed thundering clouds are there on earth bellowing from pools where the stream of time commingles with the ocean, so that earth is sky and sky is earth, for if we have come to the end of the stream of time then it must be the end of the world; so we can only ascend toward its source (that is our only choice); and at the end of the world the air is filled with the roar of rushing gusts from the mouth of Aeolus who kills us when he speaks, but being dead already, this is of little consequence to us; at the end of the world the ocean encircles earth and in its depths the serpent Jörmungandr sits swallowing its own tail and waiting to destroy shallops that have been cast afar by the breath of Aeolus; so we begin the Exercise of Ascension and dive into the stream of time but at the end of the world the water is ice cold and our limbs are benumbed and begin to turn blue and our vision clouds in the gray-green glacial current that pushes back toward Jörmungandr's snatching jaws and death; but making the Exercises gives us strength and endurance (we ask HIM for ENDURANCE now as this is a very long book we are wading into- we must remember the Current of Patience) and our joints are stiffening and our ears are ringing but we move our arms and legs and slowly the blood begins to warm and flow again and we creep forward but still we have not caught our breath; we are only starting; this is the First Rapid (or is it the Forty-Second?); and here thousands of cataracts scream in our ears, rapids running skyward up up over bedrock and flying upward over the lip of the gorge, and behind where the water meshes against the canyon we see through the curtain of rippling quicksilver upturned eyes of wooden saints (who has placed them there?); and the push of the water is strong and our bodies are punished by effort but this is good and sends us ever nearer the Cross (for every suffering we endure allows us to understand THE PASSION all the better, and thus brings us closer to HIM); [and here so close to the end of time strange things rest on the riverbed- canisters oozing green goo that kills everything it touches- clouds of agent orange and radiated cribs and large discarded ovens- casings of two-ton shells upturned like the feasting cups of the Jötunn- the burnt and twisted skeletons of metal birds and iron Glyptodons]but by HIS Power we scale these obstaclesand find ourselves in the calm of an eddy, where the bed of the stream of time forms a kind of bowl or chalice, and the water is still enough that a blue-green moss has grown smoothly over the rocks there, and the effort of swimming eases, and we break the surface for a badly needed breath and find the river narrowing into a boreal forest, the bone-white birch trunks spindle upward like skeletal fingers; the air thickly scented with leaves and running sap and decaying bark (but what is that curious whiff we catch at the tail end of our breath, coming off the wind from the west, like singed hair or roasting flesh?); the dim light also is blue-green as the moss in the stream of time, filtering as it does through the canopy; and the cacophonous noise at the end of the world has ebbed away to a whirring breeze and we hear geese laughing and crow-calls from above; Dante's frogs watch and croak from lily pads (Brekkekek Kekkek...); and as we feel that we are being watched from the shadows of the forest (there might be glinting eyes) we dive back into the stream of time and continue our ascent; but as we climb through the still water of the eddy we see a bleached-white form curled up on the silt of the riverbed- the bones of a beaver cast back into the water, so that it might return from the Country of the Dead (but who will drape my bones from the limbs of a weeping pine in the depths of the forest so that I might return?...); and its skull seems to turn and watch us pass farther upstream (it is already beginning to live again!); and we swim more strongly now, and the treetops pass more quickly above, and the clouds are red-tinged, and from the dark places beneath ragged tree trunks we hear what might be far off songs or the overlapping whispers of many voices, but again it might be the wind brushing branches or the babbling of the brook; and then, though our attention is directed to the effort of making the Exercise of Ascension, above the forest roof we think we spy very tall strange trees made entirely of stone and glass- weird angular forests of Cathedral Trees there on an outcropping, and strangely clad men surmounting them- but this can't be, and though we hear the whispered song again (kewec kebec kewec) we understand we must be hearing only the rush of the stream of time; then the current again begins to gain in strength and push against our arms and kicking legs so we dive down where it might be smoother swimming through this Rapid, but ahead a black heap undulates slowly with the movement of the water, a mass of dark fabric sunken where shafts of water-light only barely break on it, and the current lifts the material of this black gown and beneath the waving hood a denuded skull peeks and hides- poor martyred Père Nicolas, the last wisps of his beard caught between the seams of rocks-but those wisps of beard begin to thrash and reach from the riverbed long translucent venom- filled tentaclesand from the blackness the black body of the martyr Père Nicolas has become a thing many-armed, with the razor-sharp beak of a DEVIL BIRD and now GOUGOU lunges toward us, but some dark magic or OKI has given us great speed and strength, and past the whirlpool and the wreckage of a canoe we dart and feel the faltering grasp of GOUGOU give so we swim again at ease, wondering if that sea monster was but a nightmare caused by a bit of indigestion brought on by our last long ago meal, a paltry birch kettle of corn flour mush, spittle, and dog marrow; but perhaps it wasn't a dream because something has sliced us on the ankle (though it might have been one of those many stone and iron hatchets rising from the river floor like tube worms- there are many bloody hatchets discarded in the stream of time); we are bleeding; the stream of time is flushed red with blood; but the red of the water is too much for the little we are bleeding to account for; it is as if the stream of time itself has turned to blood once we passed the place where the whispers sang kebec kebec...; and frightened by the reddening water we pray Lord I thank you for your light and grace because our fear and tired limbs and suffering minds bring us closer to HIM and for that we are thankful; but we feel we need a rest and so we limp ashore on our bleeding ankle and rest on a rock jutting above the water; and smelling the cool air and feeling the autumn on our backs we recline and peer into the stream of time; our wavering mirror image is many-faced; the brown wash waves against the stone; the sky is reflected like a toothy grin on the surface of the water, the water-sky is hemmed in by purple reflections of waving tree tops; something flits there in the water and we are startled but it is only a mirror-thing in the reflected sky, a crow has unfolded its wings like a book and ascended into an alder; we study our many-faced reflection on the surface of the stream of time; there we are, all of us readers of the Crow-Text; and there looking sideways in dark silhouette is the story-weaver William the Blind (he is distracted just now); there is Champlain filling in the white leaves of his map-pages with the black script of fleuves and rivieres, patterning the void; there is Robert Pontgrave, somewhat father of our tale; there is Amantacha, where the raspberries are dreaming; and Born Underwater, wampum gifts dangling from her ears and her eyes like deep brightblack wells lost in seeing-ahead; and there is Père Brebeuf acting out THE PASSION; and Pontgrave the elder swollen with gout; and what might have been the slick black back of a carp in the depths is Him Whose Face Is Darkness; and there the story-shapers Ruth Holmes Whitehead and Bruce Trigger give well-intentioned admonitions; and Membertou waves an arquebus triumphantly from the Country of the Dead; and over our shoulder Jean Duval's skull grins from atop a pike; and Tekakwitha is supplicant below a Cross; the stream of time is silent and smooth here, but on either horizon the hum of Rapids rises; the forest buzzes and we remember MANITOU the eater of man-flesh lives there in blackness; and as this is the stream of time the seasons are rapidly changing, and autumn is becoming winter, and we do not wish to be caught out all the long cold season within the reach of MANITOU's mandibles; so back into the stream of time we dive (the chapters begin to succeed with quickness and narrowness of intent); and we wish to reach Ville-Marie (which along another branching riviere has come to be known as Montreal) before the Fleuve Saint-Laurent becomes a ribbon of ice (who was it that brought the FROST to this Country anyway?); (and what is a frozen river but a road that no longer walks, hours that do not toll, the end of motion and thus our lives, a voice gone silent, a closed book?); and we have many rapids to ascend before we reach the endless expanse of the Sweetwater Sea; but there in Montreal when we finally leave the stream of time, unseen locusts will be singing the song of eternity; and The Eagle will kill The Fox; and St. Catherine Tekakwitha will be frozen too like our fleuve, but in the amber liquid light of stained glass; and the cathedrals will be the new forests; and whores will walk the street which was given her name; and our Pères and Saints will be stone and metal; and we will have ascended the 17th Rapids (which is LOVE); and the 73rd Rapids, and beyond the 15th Rapids (Burial) we might come to rest on the 2nd Isle of Prayer- which any good reader will recognize as The Meaning of Words