Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
-
Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Miscellaneous
Meet Bookrageous!
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
Mar
05
Just Read It: BIRDS OF A LESSER PARADISE by Megan Mayhew Bergman
2012 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Published March 6, 2012 by Scribner
I’ve been raving about this book since November, and I’m so happy to be able to tell you that it is finally out in the world.
Megan Mayhew Bergman’s debut collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise opens with “Housewifely Arts,” a piece about a young mother who takes her son on a roadtrip with the goal of finding her dead mother’s African gray parrot. Having realized she can no longer remember the sound of her mother’s voice, she is desperate to find the parrot, Carnie, who has mastered the imitation.
I’m surprised when I remember phone numbers and the alphabetical order of all fifty states, the way I can summon Deuteronomy like a song during a long run. But I can’t recall the funny way Mom said “roof” or “Clorox.” Not the rhyme she made up about bad breath or the toothpaste jingle she had stuck in her head for two years, not the sound of the way she said goodnight.
This story is utterly heartbreaking, and it serves to introduce Mayhew Bergman’s focus on motherhood and her love for animals, both themes that run throughout the collection.
The title story presents a young woman who, tired of city life, returns to her family home to guide travelers on bird sighting trips. She wants “to find a place where I could look out my window and see nothing man-made.” What she discovers instead is an unexpected affair–”I’d forgotten how it felt to be flipped on like a light, to try to concentrate when your blood and heart were screaming inside you”–and a renewed connection with nature and her dying father. This title piece also contains my favorite line of the whole collection: “Nothing was as fierce and wild as me. I was furiously alive.” File that under: future literary tattoos.
Whether pondering the unintended consequences of their efforts to care for others, the hard times they and the people around them have fallen on, or the ways their lives have changed with marriage and motherhood, Mayhew Bergman’s characters are always, always thinking about nature. For some, like Lila in “Saving Face,” the world is bleak. “There were no promises, no obligations between living things, she thought. Not even humans. Just raw need hidden by a game of make-believe.” For others, it is hopeful, filled to brimming with beauty. But for most, it’s unspeakably complicated.
These pages are filled with relationships, none of them simple. In “Yesterday’s Whales,” a woman who has joined her partner’s commitment to end overpopulation by not having children struggles with the discovery the she is pregnant and must decide what she is more willing to give up–the love she thought would be lifelong, or the opportunity to be an “exalted, complicated presence in someone’s life…the source of another’s existence.” “Every Tooth A Vein” presents a couple with dueling his obsessions–her devotion to stray animals and his desire to collect “complete leaves” and pin his findings down neatly in rows. In “The Artificial Heart,” set in 2050, the narrator watches her ninety-one-year-old father sink into senility and fall in love with a woman from his Senior Center. “Love keeps them in the present; a relationship is a tether to the future.” Gorgeous, carefully rendered stuff, this.
Birds of a Lesser Paradise is about people who let their lives run wild and people who want to but can’t. It’s about the tension between our connection to nature and our need for control. It’s about love and family, duty and regret, and the oh-so-fragile ties that bind. And there’s not a weak piece in the bunch! Every last story in this collection belongs here. It’s a rare book that deserves that praise, and an even rarer debut. Megan Mayhew Bergman’s stories are as technically skilled as they are emotionally affecting. They beg to be savored, but you’ll have to work hard to resist gulping them down in one sitting. This is destined to be one of my favorites of 2012. So just read it, already!
Related posts:
This sounds like a great read. I need to add it to the long long list of mine. Have a great week.
Diane@BibliophileBytheSea´s last [type] ..Mailbox Monday – March 5
I read “Housewifely Arts” in The Best American Short Stories 2011. If the whole collection is as good as it is, I’ll have to pick it up.
carol´s last [type] ..Mailbox Monday
Got to go pick this up later. Exxxxcited!
*muppet arms*
“It’s about the tension between our connection to nature and our need for control.”
The title would have grabbed me right away, but now I’m super intrigued!
Meg´s last [type] ..And our Trafalgar destination is . . .
Sounds like an interesting read!
Billy´s last [type] ..Return to Finkleton Giveaway!
This has been on my wish list since you raved about it in November. I’m going to be sure to read it!
Debbie Rodgers @Exurbanis´s last [type] ..Oh, Happy Day: Snow in April