The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth - Softcover

Holm, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 157131251X ISBN 13: 9781571312518

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 2001

Synopsis

Growing up, Bill Holm knew what failure was: to die in Minneota.” But after returning to his hometown ( a very small dot on an ocean of grass”) after 20 years’ absence, he wasn’t so sure. Finding pleasure in the customs and characters of small-town life, in The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth he writes with affection about the town elders, seen by those in the outside world as misfits and losers. They taught me what to value, what to ignore, what to embrace, and what to resist.” In his trek through the heartland, Holm covers a satisfyingly wide emotional terrain, from scandalous affairs in the 1950s to his aunt’s touching attempts to transcend poverty with perfume and movie-star airs.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

After living all over the US and teaching in China, Holm (Coming Home Crazy, not reviewed) reapplies himself with gusto and grandiloquence to life as lived in his hometown, the minute Minneota, Minn. ``The Music of Failure,'' the book's centerpiece essay, showcases most of Holm's themes: the values of the local past, the particulars of family chronicles, the uses of memory, and, in contrast to these qualities, America's rootless lack of history and its obsession with individual success. Having met with failure, however, the author argues that failure is as American as success, and that memory, to be complete, must include those whose failures generally relegate them to obscurity. Holm focuses on the Bardals, a family of Icelandic immigrants who were never an all-American success story, dying out in rural poverty after a century in Minnesota. Pauline Bardal, the last survivor (whom Holm knew as a boy), nonetheless had her own virtues: laconic stoicism, natural charity, and even a minor talent for playing the organ. The author sketches two further examples of virtue in failure: Sara Kline, the town bag lady, to whom the young Holm was still required to show courtesy, and his Aunt Ole, whose romantic cheerfulness prevailed over genteel poverty. And he celebrates the qualities his austere Icelandic ancestors brought to the New World, including a love of literacy and hidden sociability. Holm occasionally provides some interesting contrasts with these musings on family and small-town characters and events by juxtaposing various of his experiences in China. But his exhaustive reaffirmation of his own ``from-ness'' curiously cuts out his experience of the rest of America in a sometimes ostentatious localism. Holm's frequent invocations of Walt Whitman and Tom Paine sometimes overtax the small-town context, but at their best, these essays make a virtue of parochialism. (22 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Holm (Coming Home Crazy) is living once again in the small town of Minneota, Minn., where he grew up, and he is feeling sentimental about it. He is a smart writer and has some interesting things to say about sense of place, but there is an underlying softness in his attitude towards his hometown that makes these essays treacly, and no amount of literary references can sharpen them. "God knows I tried to escape, to do the right American thing, making a middle-class life in a gentler, lovelier, more urbane place, some better home for an eccentric intellectual misfit," he insists in an essay that rambles from the cost of living in Minneota to the meaning of the town's name ("much water" in Dakota) to reviewer misprints of the title of his first book, but one gets the feeling he never tried all that hard. The history of the town is much less interesting than the characters that populated it in Holm's childhood, and he devotes much of the book to biography of these characters, many of them originally from Iceland. An essay on the way that children are taught to mistrust strangers today segues into a tribute to the elderly woman who often baby-sat for him; an examination of poverty disintegrates into admiration for how his parents forced him to be kind to Sara Kline, "a Minneota 'bag lady,' years before that term became fashionable." It's not that this isn't heartwarming, it's just that it is familiar and sometimes suffers from smugness.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 157131251X
• ISBN 13: 9781571312518
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230