Originally published in 1999, Picador Books is using Stewart O'Nan's book, A PRAYER FOR THE DYING's 10th anniversary to release a paperback edition as the summer 2009 selection for "The Best Book You Never Read." I am always pushing O'Nan and my bookgroup will be discussing it tomorrow night.
If you only read one book by Stewart O'Nan, make it this one.
A few years after the Civil War, a soldier returns and takes up duties as both constable and undertaker in a small town that is soon beset by disease. The writing is so lovely and the anguish so real you won't be able to forget it. It's the kind of book, you will soon pick up at used book sales to pass on to a
friend.Don't let the unusual second person voice put you off. You will quickly get used to it and see it as a strength by the end. We all share in the narrator's horror. The "you" is entirely correct in this tale. Here's a brief interview with O'Nan at the time of its first publication.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1051148
It became very clear to me after reading this book after ten years that it had a significant impact on a story I wrote last year for Spinetingler where a mother wrestles with a dying baby while her husband is gone in the 1800s. Have you ever read a piece and discovered you probably inadvertently used themes or ideas?
11 comments:
Thanks for visiting My Muskoka, good to see book being reviewed on this topic. There is so much to understand about death and dying. Some of my mom's friends shudder when I tell them I wrote of their dying process in Dying With Dignity. Others devour it!
I so admire people who can write fiction, though! :-)
I'm one of those who haven't read this. I suppose I'm not quite ready to confront my mortality so openly.
I dunno, Patti. I usually find second person really off putting, but maybe I'll give the book a try.
I'm slowly working my way through O'Nan's backlist, and I haven't read this one yet. Now will most definitely get to it this summer.
I haven't read all of them, but this was my favorite. SPEEDQUEEN and LAST NIGHT are awfully good too.
And, of course, O'Nan is among the most widely respected writers in the horror community, even at the edge of it as he is.
I've seen several reviews where he was classified as such.
My gateway into crime fiction was Elmore Leonard. I picked up a handful or his books from a used book shop near my house (something I’ve done as long as I can remember; once every couple of months I’ll go and drop twenty quid on a dozen or so books that look interesting and work my way through them.) and, fortunately, they all turned out to be from the seventies.
I really loved the feel of them, they way they married style to content (I honestly think he’s an under-rated writer in the sense people say his books are plotless. I really don’t think they are, I think plot and character are merely one and the same in his books.) and the Detroit books (in particular) are harsh.
So, yeah… that mix of abrasiveness and elegance is certainly something I try to bring to my fiction (and people do tend to tell me there’s an evident Leonard influence.) and I also love George V. Higgins, whom Leonard led me to on account of his praising the man…Eddie Coyle is really a precursor to ‘The Wire’ (in the sense that it’s about institutional dysfunction and the perversions that institutions inflict on people and vice versa.) written some forty years before David Simon’s piece.
So that was very influential on my thinking, but possibly not as influential as being a police officer’s son and a barrister’s godson. :)
My earliest influences were Tey, Marsh, Sayers, Allingham, Christie, Freeling, Sjowal and Wahloo, McDonald, McBain.
It took me a long time to discover the more noirish writers.
Which McDonald? All the Macd/MacDonalds who come to mind at least verge on noir, except maybe Philip.
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