The Big Snow
by
David Park
Read April 2007
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library, Maplewood branch
Essay written June 25th, 2007
I think one of the other books I checked out when I checked this one out was The Milagro Beanfield War by whoever it's by. I started reading Milagro and gave up after a few pages because it wasn't the scene I was in the mood for at that time. It was April, and I'm very much a winter person, so the coming of spring and summer is bad news to me. Milagro had a southern culture, arid climate, Grapes Of Wrath, dust bowl kind of setting, at least from what I gathered in the first few pages. I should give it another try here this summer. Or sometime.
The Big Snow was perfect for my mood at the time. With winter dying, it was marvelous to read this and pretend I was experiencing one last violent gasp, of monumental proportions. That, and it was just genuinely good storytelling. It really was more of a short story collection than a novel, but all the stories took place in the same place during the same blizzard. (Maybe blizzard isn't the right word to use to describe this storm. Do they say blizzard in the U.K. and Ireland? Clearly, a winter storm of this magnitude happening here, in North America, would be called a blizzard. But maybe not there. I can't recall if during the book it was ever referred to with that word or not.)
One seriously refreshing aspect of The Big Snow was that it took place in Northern Ireland in 1963 but had nothing to do with Catholics, Protestants, Sinn Fein, Orangemen, or any of that political territorial scariness. That is one messed up corner of the world, and it was good to read about normal people who are messed up in their own ways having nothing to do with Ullster and partitioning and all that.
back to books
|