A Farm Under a Lake - Hardcover

Bergland, Martha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555971199 ISBN 13: 9781555971199

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 1989

Synopsis

As she takes May, an old woman she has cared for, to live with her daughter in Illinois, Janet recalls a summer twenty-years past when she loved two brothers but finally married one

About this title

Review

Janet Hawn is driving back to rural Illinois, to the town and farms where she and her husband Jack grew up, to the place they've always wanted to return. But life has taken paths neither Jack nor Janet envisioned, and now twenty years have passed. Janet has a job driving eighty-year-old May, a woman who no longer speaks, to May's daughter's house. While on this drive Janet talks to May about her connection to Jack, to the land, putting yearnings into words for the first time, maybe because it's easier and safer with a listener who doesn't respond. Janet realizes "that I was making this trip to Illinois to learn what to say or what to do about who I was...I was trying to sort - with my skin and my eyes and my breathing and my remembering - what to keep, how far to draw a line of...what? Sisterhood? Eminent domain? Marriage? Duty? I don't yet know the terms for inside and outside." At the same time, watching and helping May, she can't help but wonder what her life will be like when she herself is eighty. Janet's journey is inward and poetic: she consciously senses and tries to understand how life can overtake you while you are living it, how you can suddenly find yourself somewhere you never thought you would be, and how this realization can put you on a new path. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Holly Smith

From Publishers Weekly

In luminous, limpid prose, unmarred by false notes or easy cliches, Bergland tells the tale of a woman, as recognizable as a sister or oneself, who finds her life at age 40 different from what she had expected it to be--and has the courage to examine how and why. Janet Hawn is a private nurse who agrees to drive her latest charge, a wilfully mute but beautiful old woman named May, from Wisconsin to her daughter's home in Illinois. Janet's husband Jack, unemployed for over a year, has fallen into a sour hopelessness utterly uncharacteristic of the exuberant, energetic young man she married two decades before. Traveling south with May, Janet drives in the direction of her own rural childhood home, where she and Jack and his siblings grew up. In an attempt to regain her love for Jack and a chance for their shared hopes to ripen, Janet reexamines her young self and the events of the summer before her marriage, when she loved both Jack and his brother. Bergland's delicate but unflinching touch extends from character to setting; like her evocations of childhood, her descriptions of weather and landscape are rich without extravagance. This fine first novel is marked in all aspects by deftness, honesty and compassion.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 1555971199
• ISBN 13: 9781555971199
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208