Stories from My Life with the Other Animals - Softcover

McConkey, James

4.2

10 ratings by Goodreads

9780879239671: Stories from My Life with the Other Animals

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0879239670 ISBN 13: 9780879239671

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1993

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Like all of James McConkey's writing, this book defies conventional definition. It deals with memory - McConkey's memory - of events and lives, politics and family, people and animals, all reconstructed as interwoven stories that are convincing, poignant, and uniquely insightful. His is a visionary journey, neither totally factual nor completely fictive. Instead, McConkey takes a transparency of the past, lays it upon the present, and creates a newly focused image. In Stories from My Life with the Other Animals, he revisits his intimate history to create a totally credible journey of the soul, a journey that sweeps the reader along by the sincerity and precision of the speaker's language, clarity, and probity.

Stories from My Life with the Other Animals forms the final volume in the author's great Court of Memory trilogy a monumental attempt to articulate a message and meaning from his life. Proust wrote, "Those who are haunted by the confused remembrance of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted; but if they never go beyond saying that they can hear a ravishing tune, they convey nothing to others. They are without talent." McConkey, bravely, brilliantly, successfully, grapples with this memory, bringing the truths of his life to light. His is an immense talent.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

This third and concluding section of McConkey's memory-investigations (Crossroads, 1968, and Court of Memory, 1983) contains seven essays, from 1984 to 1991, that go gently and artfully from colic, family reconciliation, property, anticipation of death, animals and the hopes we sieve through them, and on to the soul's way of allowing itself to be glimpsed in music. McConkey's compositional preference is the fugue--so that what seems at first to be a painful if always dignified recital of difficult times and feelings turns into its opposite and then a recasting of good and bad into fragile harmony. In Court of Memory, the process turned formulaic, but McConkey has written himself free of the repetitiousness. When these late-in-life memory-tales are given fullest voice, as in ``An Ode for St. Cecilia's Day''--which conflates Proust, Hohner harmonicas, and stroke-rehabilitation--the result is a haunting tune all of itself, with McConkey going beyond the sentimentality, the nostalgia of memory, to its harshest but most enduring demands. A fine conclusion to an especially interesting, worthwhile project. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

The concluding volume of a trilogy that includes Court of Memory ( LJ 1/1/83), these autobiographical essays proceed less by chronology and the accumulation of detail than by a kind of continuous circling back to central events in the author's life. These events look just a little different each time they reappear: a first job as a college teacher in Kentucky; the violent accidental death of a beloved brother; a horse's never-ending grief at the loss of a companion. The events themselves are singular, as are all events, which is to say that they are neither more nor less unique than comparable occurrences in other lives. What makes this life remarkable is the telling of it; just as the organ is "an instrument capable of infusing the most secular music with spiritual sounds," so too does McConkey's supple prose mix sorrow, hope, and love in a way that ennobles all lives.
- David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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