North Woods - August CC Book Club Selection

Parent Cafe
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@buenavista, thank you for your review. I didn’t love it, but I love the reasons why you did love it!

Here are the last 2 paragraphs from the article @Mary13 posted I think this is a good summary in favor of the book.

*The secret of “North Woods,” its blending of the comic and the sublime, lies in the way Mason, deftly toggling between the macro and micro, manages to do both. He not only acknowledges cosmic indifference but celebrates it, even as he pauses to recognize the humans who experience jubilation and heartbreak as they wend their way toward oblivion.

*This is fiction that deals in minutes and in centuries, that captures the glory and the triviality of human lives. The forest and the trees: Mason keeps both in clear view in his eccentric and exhilarating novel.

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I just finished the book about hour ago, enjoy reading the posts,and just read Mary13 link to NY Times review.

I’m with @buenavista I liked, loved this one, with some reservations.

I didn’t find this too dark, and enjoyed Mason’s humor.

This is perfect book discussion, it’s dense, like others, it seemed like disjointed short stories, but somehow a thread kept it cohesive enough. There’s a lot to unpack, hence the pull to reread it.

I marveled at Mason’s writing, could have edited the lists of birds, and minutia about trees and flowers, could have been pared down, but his insight about schizophrenia, the nerdy way he spoke about the mating beetles, juxtaposed with the cabin lovers, stunning,

I didn’t know he is an assistant prof of psychiatry, but suspected he had medical expertise with such precise description of Robert’s condition.

@Caraid kudos for posting those paragraphs from NY times, which summarize how I feel about this book,

*The secret of “North Woods,” its blending of the comic and the sublime, lies in the way Mason, deftly toggling between the macro and micro, manages to do both. “

Hodge podge, is also mentioned in NY times, apt description, but somehow this kaleidoscope of time, characters, history, nature, ecology, made Northwoods an enjoyable journey.

The world is a tale of change …………
We start with scalping and slaughter, we meet the gay lovers, living repressed lives, we fear for the run away slave, hate the bounty hunter, I was amused by the clairvoyant, feared a gruesome lobotomy, and impressed with medical advances, therapy and pharmaceutical that helped Nora the diabetic.

I’d say human kind is evolving …….( although I do have my doubts lately ). The heavenly ending with the ghosts living in restored Eden, seemed pleasant enough.
Until the dry winds and fires came, burning the yellow houses, .alas climate change may win out. That’s not so hopeful, as Colorado and California are burning as I write.

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We are all a bit addicted to misery :slight_smile:

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Oh yeah, I forgot Morris who got a ride with the “nice” twin ghost in a stolen car, dying I assume from a massive heart attack painlessly.

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Mason called that a “grief hallucination”

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Now I’m doing what I usually do after reading, searching for interviews with authors,
I just watched this,

Mason inspired to write book during Covid when he returned from California. To live with in laws, in Massachusetts, he became immersed in nature seasons.

Mason said the letters between artist and author , may have been influenced by the letters between Herman Melville and Nathanial Hawthorne,

The twins, he knew about real life twins, never married, lived together and had some rift, so they wrote notes to each other about daily things, didn’t talk, family discovered all these notes. he didn’t know how he would end the twins chapter until he just sat down and wrote it, he didn’t know before hand.

Lillian, pen pal program, he knew a literature prof who taught in prison said it was most rewarding experience,

Interesting he wrote the nature scenes, staring with month of June, then sequentially each chapter was written during next month, so he could write about nature more easily.
He ended the final chapter in June ,

The original house was inspired after he visited an historic house in Deerfield , Mass.

He said psychiatry interested in clairvoyance.

https://www.google.com/search?q=northwoods+daniel+mason+interview&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:e3cc4a6b,vid:NF4d98qho_s,st:0

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@jerseysouthmomchess Historic Deerfield is about 10 minutes from my hometown; mandatory field trip in 4th grade! (In fact, H and I had our wedding reception at the Deerfield Inn.) The parts early in the book about the forced march and the woman who married/lived with an Indian definitely reminded me of the Deerfield Massacre (1704). In/around my hometown, the book “The Boy Captive of Old Deerfield,” is a well known novel based on the actual events in 1704.

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Wow! I just finished the book and feel like I need to sit with it for a while. While I went through two-thirds of the book at a good pace enjoying the lush narrative about nature and interesting,albeit strange, inhabitants, visitors, and ghosts residing
in the yellow house, the book increasingly became dense and a bit incomprehensible to me. I confess I finished it for the sake of finishing it. The last few chapers left me a bit befuddled and unsatisfied. I may need to reread some parts.

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I feel like a book is similar to a college essay in that if I have to read it more than once to appreciate the nuance and theme, you’ve lost me ; ).

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Sorry, I can’t recommend this book as it’s just too weird to me. It’s just got too quirky a vibe to me. I’m not a fan of gratuitous violence.

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Check under the floorboards!!

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I love visiting historic houses and hearing about the occupants. So the basic premise of the book really appealed to me, thinking it would be stories about succeeding generations and how they struggled, coped and celebrated. I should have paid more attention to the odd cover perhaps. I felt like I was reading it through a hazy lens at times, but kept going, even though I cringed at creepy and violent parts, because I wanted to find out what happened. I can’t say I really liked it. But it was definitely different, made me say “wow, what a storyteller” annd “who would have thought of that outcome?” And I liked the interwoven history and the way each time period was written as if in that time period.

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I’d recommend the book, just with some caveats. I’m pretty sure both my SIL’s would like it a lot. They both read more literary fiction than I do and one really likes magical realism. I do think there’s just so much interesting stuff to talk about. I never noticed the month by month thing, but saw it referenced in a book review. (Wasn’t there something similar going on in The Luminaries?)

I did think the nature writing was stellar and particularly enjoyed the shout outs to the native plants. Something I’ve been involved in preserving in the last few years.

I was sorry the apple trees pretty much got dropped, though I think there might be a reference or two near the end. Instead we got the big detour into Dutch Elm disease. Actually a subject near and dear to my heart as a local park has a similar issue, but with beech trees. All our trees are sick and it looks like we will lose about 60% of the total trees in the park in the next ten years or so. We are planting new things like mad.

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Once he introduced ghosts, I was done. I finished it, but – ghosts? Really??!

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Personally, this style of storytelling does not appeal to me. As soon as you start investing in getting to know a character…poof…they are gone! By the end I was caring about the new characters less and less. I know there is a “ghostly” thread connecting everyone, but still…

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Heads up that I’m heading off to a few days with limited internet, but I will pop in as I can!

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I don’t care for short stories either, as a general rule, and that’s basically what we had in this book. Except for the ghosts, which supposedly tied things together.

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What makes this a good book discussion selection, are the various opinions, likes and dislikes expressed thus far.

Question 6 interests me

  1. What is the significance of the catamount?

The cougar, or mountain lion is on the cover of the book. Am curious about your views about the significance of this!

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I’ll join the few folks who loved this book.

I enjoyed the interwoven stories, the magical realism, the trip through centuries, the beetle sex, the dark humor. I agree the characters were not uniformly rich, though some I felt more acutely than others. From the house’s point of view, this makes sense to me. Some people spend years in the home, others are there for just a few moments. How well we know them reflects how well the house does.

But even those there for a few moments transform the experiences of future inhabitants—the soldier who ate the apple moments before he died becomes the source of the apple orchard when his body decomposes in the yard, a man who brings wood from a faraway place into the home for a romantic weekend introduces new beetles that wreak havoc on the trees in the area (but first, two of them have the most romantic experience of their short lives…)

What I enjoyed thinking about most was the way our choices and behavior exact consequences we can’t possibly imagine while they’re happening. Layer upon layer of our mistakes, virtues, tragedies, and triumphs live on in the places we’ve experienced them, and influence the people who come after us.

Those same experiences also affect nature and the creatures we are surrounded by, making this an environmental cautionary tale, too.

To answer the question about the catamount above—I think it symbolizes the havoc we all create on Earth just by living here and refusing to see how interconnected we all are to each other and the environment we live in. And by refusing to see, we lose something wild and precious.

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Love this!!

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