Howard Norman – I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place

Once again a book that I bought inspired by the NPR’s Book Concierge for 2013 is Howard Norman‘s autobiographic collection of memories named I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place. Born to a mixture of Russian-Polish immigrant with Jewish background, he moved around between the US (Ohio, Michigan) and Canada a lot. He has published on a variety of subjects: children’s books, translations of Inuit folklore (he lived several years in this region and learned the language), novels, and, kind of, autobiographic short stories like in the current book.

The book contains five chapters in chronological order recounting episodes of the authors life. The first one, Advice of the Fatherly Sort is settled in the early 60ies in Michigan, the author being 12 years old, part-time working in a book-mobile and writing letters to people who have rented books, adding lots of personal comments, having his first erotic encounters, and accidentally killing a swan.

The second one, Grey Geese Descending is settled in Nova Scotia at the end of the 60ies, turning around his first(?) big love Mathilde who loved to go to the Saskatchewan, where she also died in a flight crash. Following this Norman develops a love for paintings of birds, which brings him into financial crises, but also gets him started writing about birds during a trip to the place of the accident.

The third one, I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place, settled in the Canadian Northwest Territories beginning of the 80ies, he recalls stories of his work time spent translating Inuit folk tales, most of them somehow connected to the death of John Lennon, and finally his encounter with a very unfriendly shaman that drove him out of the place.

The forth one, Kingfisher Days, recollections of a hot summer in their Vermont house, drilling a well, being pressed by his brother to be smuggled out of the States, and hallucinating due to fever about civil war soldiers.

The final one, The Healing Powers of the Western Oystercatcher, settled in one of the Norman’s family current residence in Maryland in 2003, recalls the probably worst time in the authors life: During the author’s family stay in Vermont a visiting poet, Reetika Vazirani, who was staying in their house as guests/house sitter over the summer, killed her own 2 year old son and herself.

While the first four chapters felt for me a bit lengthy and unconvincing, they still conveyed a interesting feeling about the background the author grew up, as well as all the strange things he has gone through in his life. Re-skip-reading the chapters for this blog entry I actually recalled many of the details and imagery which leaves me surprised, since during the actual reading I wasn’t so impressed.

In contrast to this, the last chapter is deeply moving. Not because it describes a horrible incident, but the sincereness and calmness with which Norman describes his own feelings, responses, actions. I seems that both, making an interview about this as well as writing this autobiographic book is a bit like an auto-purgatorium for him. And in this last chapter we also see the first four chapters combined, comparing his own youth with the one of his daughter. This made me reevaluate the first four chapters, and I now think that the strength of this book is the build-up throughout leading to this last chapter. A very strong piece.

Finally, one more thing that really surprised me on this book: It has been a long time that I had to look up many English words while reading a book. The author uses a very distinguished language, and again shows me that my level of English is still far below a really educated level. Words like “poised“, “sanctimonious“, “discombobulated“, “ebullience“, “anointed“, and “traipses” I don’t count to my active vocabulary.