The Tree of Forgetfulness: A Novel (Yellow Shoe Fiction) - Softcover

Durban, Pam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807149721 ISBN 13: 9780807149720

Publisher: LSU Press, 2012

Synopsis

In The Tree of Forgetfulness, writer Pam Durban, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award, continues her exploration of southern history and memory. This mesmerizing and disquieting novel recovers the largely untold story of a brutal Jim Crow--era triple lynching in Aiken County, South Carolina. Through the interweaving of several characters' voices, Durban produces a complex narrative in which each section reveals a different facet of the event. The Tree of Forgetfulness resurrects a troubled past and explores the individual and collective loyalties that led a community to choose silence over justice.

About this title

About the Author:

Pam Durban is the author of All Set About with Fever Trees, The Laughing Place, and So Far Back. Her stories and essays have been widely published, and her short story "Soon" was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina.

Review:

"Durban's powerful, time-shifting narrative pulls us into all this darkness without ever turning maudlin or preachy and eventually turns up the light and turns this extremely ugly chapter out of our tumultuous near past into something miraculously redemptive."--Alan Cheuse, NPR

"[A] hard-hitting but lyrical novel....Crisp and honeyed prose underpins this honest, well-wrought study of a community's shared guilt."Publishers Weekly

"Durban's precise, beautifully evocative prose builds to a brief but breathtaking meditation on the true legacy of racial violence."--Shelf Awareness

"[An] unnerving but startlingly clear depiction of the contemporary South, its history and its people."--Carolina Quarterly

"It would be easy for a story about racist violence and guilt in the early twentieth-century South to fall under the shadow of Faulkner, but Pam Durban's The Tree of Forgetfulness casts a clear and eerie light of its own. As her memorable characters emerge from hearsay, denial, supposition and secrecy, Durban reveals the implications of 'complicity' in 'the low pressure system of the spirit' that one South Carolina town has become following a lynching 'so twisted nobody will ever set it straight.' In her vivid and suspenseful novel, Durban does get it straight in such important ways that, even in the presence of tragedy, we can find reasons to rejoice." --R. T. Smith

"[A] hard-hitting but lyrical novel....Crisp and honeyed prose underpins this honest, well-wrought study of a community's shared guilt." --Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0807149721
• ISBN 13: 9780807149720
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184