Learning how to fly pdf
Site_link site_link site_link Tragedy could also in a strange way make us safe It would make the silence not seem so bad by comparison and I would learn to live with it I feared the silence and all it would take with it but tragedy made me crave for another place somewhere away It had been so long since I could remember the rain that finally the tragedy of never seeing it led me to pack up and finally leave our Kansas home once there was nothing left but the silence itself centered around all the nothing that was no longer there and the nothing that still lingers Quick With Flies is an excellent novel Set during Great Depression era in the vein of John Steinbeck s The Grapes of Wrath it chronicles the story of twenty three year old black man Howard Johnson who having been reduced to the state of vagrancy after losing much of his family and farm leaves his hometown in the hopes of finding his brother who had set out sometime before him and got separated from the family Ultimately a premise like this is easily prone to plummeting into clich s but Jessica Schneider s approach is tactful and unprecedented such that the seeming thematic banality is lifted into a great piece of literature that probes one man s alienation in catastrophic times of Dust Bowl in America made all the adverse by the ever present racism This is how the first chapter opens Spawned no rain The land was empty but my mind was full It was summer 1934 with some of the hottest temperatures ever Nebraska alone reached 118 degrees one day in July and a week later I read how one man even lived in his refrigerator for a whole week trying to keep cool no foolin When they finally got round to yankin him out they had to treat his fingers for frostbite Yes I could read and rather well at that My mother was a schoolteacher who taught me well books and the Bible to say the least And don t think I didn t appreciate it many Negroes at this time couldn t read or write but I could do both I always tried making my ma proud and doing right by her and some days when the summer air blew like a hot furnace upon my face ever so loosening the dust I couldn t but help from thinking of this thing that killed her This is a grabber of an opening that at once sets one into the both external and internal realm of the narrator through a prose that is dynamic and full of gravitas right off the bait See how that the revelatory words so beautifully condensed The land was empty but my mind was full are left curtly by narrator as he goes onto add some documentarian information This adds to the voice an unusual kind of poetic touch And then it follows up with a conversational tone as he briefly talks about his personal life wherein touching upon his mother s importance thus subtly building a trust within the reader all the while delving once again into poetics and some days when the summer air blew like a hot furnace upon my face ever so loosening the dust only to pull the rug out from under the feet of reader with the abrupt this thing that killed her This caps off the whole passage memorably and is first crackle of the realism that later incinerates throughout the narrative The fact that writing does so much in single passage bespeaks much of the writer s artistic mastery As story proceeds the writing becomes poetic and philosophical Here is one of wonderfully crafted ruminations that showcase the poignancy inside the main character caused by his rootlessness After a while if we are good dreamers we learn to forget Because if we kept on thinking about all the bad things in this world we d end up like the dust everywhere and nowhere all at once I envied the dust for this very reason for its power I envied the trains because they always moved and I was always still Howard the narrator then hops off onto the train meet some people along the way mostly thieves and among them is 14 years old Winky who becomes crucial part of his life yet not through the ways a reader would expect As I said Schneider avoids the banal patterns Like every character in the book Winky is nuanced and wonderfully sketched with extra dimension of humor This offsets the bleak tone of overall narrative Yet it is the humor that is made out be characteristic of him thereby revealing pathos and insights into his persona Howard meets people as he finds work and eventually settles down as in kind of a family of similar ethnicity and this is where Schneider s ability to weave off interdependent character dynamics escalates and so in the face of racism that ever so lingers in the background and becomes all the explicit as Howard s primal concerns of livelihood are temporarily resolved which is every bit realistic in the workings of life that how it lodges one from one quandary to another Yet the depicted racism never demotes into pontification nor does it override the narrative at the expense of undermining its universal concerns The book in fact explores the racism in novel way for Schneider ties it deftly with the human aspects of characters Nevertheless Howard as an individual stands at the center of narrative albeit with plights of both a man and a Negro trying to cull out meaning from the cosmos Quick With Flies is not only a great novel but important one It s a true classic given how it makes powerful and nuanced characterization out of seeming archetypes one can only predict its place in the pantheon in coming decades or so Jessica Schneider s writing is some of the most cinematic I have read The one that heightens the most jaded of subject matters with its great style and approach Fiction Historical Fiction
Twenty three year old Howard Johnson has recently lost his family and his farm to the many dust storms of the Great Depression Hitching the rails he decides to leave his Kansas home and head east in search of his brother where he encounters homeless men thieves and a young con artist along the way As he begins to set up a new life for himself in Virginia the young African American protagonist is presented with new found friends but also hatred poverty and cruelty Quick With Flies is a rumination for the mind and soul wherein a young man must face the many misfortunes that eventually shape his perception of his own dignity and humanity He might find peace but at what price Comfort but to what end And how much of this American Earth is really his Such questions are his tale Quick With Flies.
