deliverance

this is a fantastic book. thanks to adam for the loan.

it's interesting to feel such an affinity with a writer as i do with james dickey (except for the dialogue, which is dated and stifled and unrealistic. also i would've made lewis more of an asshole. that would have moved the story along in a different, perhaps more interesting way, and made for what i think would be a more realistic dynamic between the guys). regardless, caint say i've felt such a connection with a writer before, both syntactically and thematically. major concerns for him are the contrast between the microscopic and the huge; the anonymous, lost quality of wild nature and the personal, familiar character of the predictable, civilized world; being in wilderness or being out of the city -- which is it? things i've considered. and then of course, he's elaborating on and illuminating themes that i've considered less: the animalistic nature of man (not woman); male aggression; the degree to which aggression is tamed by civilization; what, at his most essential, makes a man a man; the real and brutal gap in the heart of america between the disenfranchised (wrong word in the context of the book, but i can't think of a better one) poor white population and the educated middle and upper classes. all conveyed in a graceful, simple-yet-at-the-same-time-complex, brilliantly well considered story and prose.

i haven't finished the book, but here's a portion that struck me:

There is always something wrong with people in the country, I thought. In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment, maybe. But there was something else. You'd think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn't have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong; I never saw one who was physically powerful, either. Certainly there were none like Lewis. The work with the hands must be fanstically dangerous, in all that fresh air and sunshine, I thought: the catching of an arm in a tractor part somewhere off in the middle of a field where nothing happened but the sun blazed back more fiercely down the open mouth of one's screams. And so many snake bites deep in the woods as one stepped over a rotten log, so many domestic animals suddenly turning and crushing one against the splintering side of a barn stall. I wanted none of it, and I didn't want to be around where it happened either. But I was there, and there was no way for me to escape, except by water, from the country of nine-fingered people.