Halflife is a fictive memoir, hovering between fiction and biography. Deciding that half his life is over, a young man recalls stories of people, animals, plants, and places that he he has known. Just as matter decays according to its own physical half life, these accounts are bound together by themes of loss, but they also reverberate with creation and delight. The metaphor of halflife, the measure of physical decay, weaves in and out of the stories. The soothing of loss is found in the observation of life around us. The journey unwinds in five chapters that describe mountains, desert, Villa Trice (a mysterious estate in Texas), Aquidneck Island, and Memphis, Tenessee. The writing is crisp and elegant. The author is an artist, architect, and historian. Halflife is his first work of fiction and memoir.
There was a boy/
A very strange enchanted boy/
They say he wandered very far, very far/
Over land and sea/
A little shy/
And sad of eye/
But very wise/
Was he.
Before Anthony Alofsin wrote HalfLife, before his name was ubiquitously linked to that of Frank Lloyd Wright, before he was an architect...a Harvard art student...a gifted Memphis boy who wove precocious textiles...he was a Nature Boy. You can learn many things about Alofsin on the internet - Wikipedia [...] but it's in HalfLife that we most feel the power of his loving observation of life in myriad form.
At his metaphorical half-life, Alofsin brings with him glimpses of creation, youth, entropy, and love enduring. The story opens in Santa Fe, where a simple goat's head thorn, at the author's examination, becomes a complex form of life, it's wicked death-head shape foreshadowing the author's losses to come. It is best read at a contemplative pace. Gallop into it and the prose will rein you in, beckon you to graze and plumpen on such musings: "Sleepless, I went walking in the full moon and saw blooming datura, the huge white caverns of tissue painted by Georgia O'Keefe. They sprang from the scopolamine loaded roots. Eat those roots and you fly." Annie Dillard dances to Leonard Cohen.
Quirky, tragic, and sometimes very funny, HalfLife is a travelogue of human byways. Most often it is women, powerful or fragile, seductive or elusive, that join the beautiful young man along his life path: a childhood girlfriend whom he fears he's loved to death, the mythic Anna who haunts the very bindings of the book, the famously buxom, terribly lonely exotic dancer who seeks his solace, and ultimately a partner ("united in our shared status of being orphans") with whom, in fact or fiction, he once again settles on the outskirts of Santa Fe, where the book begins.
We are deeply affected as, one by one, Alofsin's family falls away, even his beloved companion, "the great dog Minnie" becomes part of the unremitting death march across the heart and psyche of a young man. Yet somehow, the tone never becomes maudlin. The author translates grief as a natural life occurrence - not only bearable but exquisite in its bearing - an auger tunneling upward - toward the light - clearing space for joy.
The writing is charming, the point of view delicate and sharp as the goat's head thorn. Autobiographical or fictional, HalfLife is a real story which takes the reader on a sensuous quest into Alofsin's inner space.
The greatest thing/
You'll ever learn/
Is just to love/
And be loved/
In return. --Innerforms.com, Susanna Vance
