First, when I started reading this book, I knew that most of the rhetoric would be profoundly saturated with beauty and delicacy. It started out as such, being taken away to some foreign continuum where people and places can perceive language and complexity beyond the surface. The gossamer dialogue betwixt the two lovers conveyed insatiable desire for each other throughout their lives together, as well as apart, this Jean and Avery. Throughout this book I was taken to war-torn Poland, romantic Canada, and in the archeology and arcana of the Nile River. What made this rhetoric transcend these romantic concessions was that it was all part of one vein, one filament – and that was to make connections with the world. When you live, make connections with those that want to hear you intimately or indirectly, and give way to those that judge you. In death, make connections to what has been provided for you, your friends, your experiences, your surroundings, so that your burden becomes a part of you.
The Winter Vault took us beyond the regularity of life, and transposing a world where every detail is an explosion of meaning. Even in setting, at one moment we are finding the love of Jean and Avery, followed immediately with the experience of living in the Congo – with life and death in this tragic venue. Michaels adds spectacular insight to flora and biology to combine nature and imagination to this beautiful story. Now don’t get me wrong, at times, the weight compounds with the losing track of the story because of the language, and you can become frustrating – the sinews of her syntax breathes very heavy at times. Once that happens, take a break from it. Like Yeat’s Byzantium – it is a place where you are welcome, once you accept your welcoming. This winter vault, where the dead rest, will be remembered for some time.
Overall, I did enjoy this book – but it’s a type of book where mood plays a major role. The story takes a back seat to the encapsulating, blossoming world that the characters are weaved in. The tangential tone is that much more fulfilling, and the language plays a vital part. Can you dig it? I knew that you could!
1 comment:
I can dig it. It is a beautiful and poetic (no surprise there)book that does indeed take place in some other more emotion-saturated plane of reality. (Not sure "emotion" is exactly the word I'm after but I'm not in the mood to hunt down the exact word or phrase, whatever it is).
I especially liked the way that each character voiced their perceptions and feelings through their own particular passion (botany, painting, engineering) - and more than that perhaps that passion was the way they were ABLE to view the world, so they were seemingly born to that vocation. Sometimes one would speak and the other would reply with what might otherwise have seemed a non sequitur, but it's their way of putting it into their own terms. I think we have all had those conversations, though sometimes it becomes annoying or confusing to one party if they don't have an understanding of the other's view/passion/vocation sufficient enough to see past the apparent lack of conversational continuity in their response.
Lovely, lovely book.
Nathan
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