Paperback, 142 pages
Published Sept. 17, 2019 by Two Dollar Radio.
After moving with his wife and two children to a smallholding in Ireland, Paul Kingsnorth expects to find contentment. It is the goal he has sought ― to nest, to find home ― after years of rootlessness as an environmental activist and author. Instead he finds that his tools as a writer are failing him, calling into question his foundational beliefs about language and setting him at odds with culture itself.
Informed by his experiences with indigenous peoples, the writings of D.H. Lawrence and Annie Dillard, and the day-to-day travails of farming his own land, Savage Gods asks: what does it mean to belong? What sacrifices must be made in order to truly inhabit a life? And can words ever paint the truth of the world ― or are they part of the great lie which is killing it?
A beautifully written essay about what happens when an author finds his words failing him. One of the best things I've read all year.
Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it.
This is a parable of a book, a journey that's gradually told via Ireland, fables, gods, and family. I've not read Paul Kingsnorth before, but he strikes me as a quite elusive man in his mid-forties, used to writing, prone to recollect without nostalgia.
Perhaps the following lines say most about this book:
I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon …
Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it.
This is a parable of a book, a journey that's gradually told via Ireland, fables, gods, and family. I've not read Paul Kingsnorth before, but he strikes me as a quite elusive man in his mid-forties, used to writing, prone to recollect without nostalgia.
Perhaps the following lines say most about this book:
I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon you.
Communicating is an earthed way of trying to be god. One scratches at paper or a computer and hopes to have wrought out a more-than-passable line, and also trembles in lieu of anybody to speak with about what you've produced.
There are quite a lot of short sentences in the book, of which many are familiar and some seem like attempts to stay forever, but after a while I thought, wait, they just seem that way; it's a matter of the author struggling with his raison d'être, at least as a writer, or something that nags at his soul, a banshee of sorts that he's trying to exorcise with words, perhaps as he, around two thirds into the book, heavily starts using deities.
Other times, Kingsnorth's just funny:
I’m a writer, which means that I aim myself at all of those things but fall short at all of them most of the time. Writers fall short at everything except creating sentences. This is what we really like to do: put words in an order which can conjure something real but unseen in the air around us, and around you when you read what we have put down. Really, this business of sentences is the only thing we can do and the only thing that motivates us. All the rest—the stories, the characters, the metaphors, the morals and the messages—they come later, with varying degrees of success. Everything is built on the sentences. We just love sentences, and we can’t get proper jobs.
I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.
This book strikes me as a whole middle-age crisis, other times as a quite existential view of how humans mostly work: most things aren't straightforward, and we're quite complex, yet simple beings. We're isolated, yet very intertwined.
It's a good book to read, short, savoury, and sweet, and I would like to read another autobiography by the author, in circa 30 years.
Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it.
This is a parable of a book, a journey that's gradually told via Ireland, fables, gods, and family. I've not read Paul Kingsnorth before, but he strikes me as a quite elusive man in his mid-forties, used to writing, prone to recollect without nostalgia.Perhaps the following lines say most about this book:
I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon you. …
Writers are lost people. Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it.
This is a parable of a book, a journey that's gradually told via Ireland, fables, gods, and family. I've not read Paul Kingsnorth before, but he strikes me as a quite elusive man in his mid-forties, used to writing, prone to recollect without nostalgia.Perhaps the following lines say most about this book:
I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon you.
Communicating is an earthed way of trying to be god. One scratches at paper or a computer and hopes to have wrought out a more-than-passable line, and also trembles in lieu of anybody to speak with about what you've produced.There are quite a lot of short sentences in the book, of which many are familiar and some seem like attempts to stay forever, but after a while I thought, wait, they just seem that way; it's a matter of the author struggling with his raison d'être, at least as a writer, or something that nags at his soul, a banshee of sorts that he's trying to exorcise with words, perhaps as he, around two thirds into the book, heavily starts using deities.Other times, Kingsnorth's just funny:
I’m a writer, which means that I aim myself at all of those things but fall short at all of them most of the time. Writers fall short at everything except creating sentences. This is what we really like to do: put words in an order which can conjure something real but unseen in the air around us, and around you when you read what we have put down. Really, this business of sentences is the only thing we can do and the only thing that motivates us. All the rest—the stories, the characters, the metaphors, the morals and the messages—they come later, with varying degrees of success. Everything is built on the sentences. We just love sentences, and we can’t get proper jobs.
I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.
This book strikes me as a whole middle-age crisis, other times as a quite existential view of how humans mostly work: most things aren't straightforward, and we're quite complex, yet simple beings. We're isolated, yet very intertwined.It's a good book to read, short, savoury, and sweet, and I would like to read another autobiography by the author, in circa 30 years.
