Sea of Grass

This week I read another Conrad Richter called Sea of Grass. It's a poignant story about the settling of the Southwest. Although there are several interesting characters, the land, or "sea of grass" itself, is perhaps the most compelling. The idea of creating a character out of the landscape reminds of the the great Willa Cather novels O Pioneers and Death Comes for the Archbishop.

I highly recommend this book -- it's not long, but speaks volumes about the process of converting cattle land to farming land... a process that wasn't highly successful, at least according to this story.

I am struck by Richter's style of writing. The details that he leaves out leave much to the imagination and I find myself reflecting often on the possibilities of how the backstory might go.

I can't quite figure out how I got to be almost 50 without discovering this marvelous writer.

The Town

Okay, I have finished The Awakening trilogy. It is wonderful! The third book, The Town won a Pulitzer in 1951. It is significantly different than the other two, as the main character's homestead becomes a full-fledged town and she has to navigate her life and the lives of her more modern children. I loved all three of the books. Richter's writing is so interesting... I love it for all that he doesn't say as much as for the beautiful prose. There are many details about the characters and the story that you just have to imagine or wonder about, even as he writes so lovingly and completely about nature. There is a lot of inference. It's like no other writing that I've experienced. I'm in the middle of another of his books, The Sea of Grass, right now and I'm feeling the same way about it. He loves the land, the people that settle it are fascinating to him, but he doesn't pretend to have all the answers or to understand them thoroughly.