It's an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.
Description:
I picked up this book simply because I liked the first sentence and had experienced the loss of a loved one with the recent death of my wife's mother. Jo was a great person, a friend always to me, and so full of life throughout her 89 years that I miss her tremendously. Funny thing for a son-in-law, I suppose, but it's true. Friendship and love are precious gifts wherever one finds them, and when they are no longer available for you due to a death, dealing with the world is a challenging experience.
For Gail Caldwell, her deep friendship with and eventual loss of her best friend Caroline Knapp are sensitively recounted in Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memorial of Friendship. As Caldwell writes, "We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow."
This is a book of intimacy - emotional, intellectual, and physical (although not sexual) - that depicts a deep relationship between two women who have found a soul mate in each other. First meeting and bonding over their love of their dogs, Gail and Caroline immediately find they share commonalities of writing careers, fierce independence, competitiveness, relationships with men, and even struggles with alcohol.
They take long walks with their dogs daily through the woods near Cambridge, Massachusetts, discussing books, life, dogs, and nothing. They share emotions, questions, and laughter through their daily talks during dog walks, phone calls, and athletic training (Gail is a swimmer and Caroline a competitive rower on the Charles River. Rowing eventually becomes a shared experience when Caroline teaches Gail so well that they soon can row together and dream of racing in a double skull boat).
Caldwell, a Pulitzer Prize winning author for Criticism, is the narrative voice, completely open in her revelations about her memories of Caroline and later her efforts to live a life without her friend. Caldwell is an author I easily identified with; her self-portrait checks my lifestyle boxes:
This is a book celebrating the life together of two friends, and then the life of one left to carry on after death claims the other. It is both exuberant and deeply sad, humorous and melancholy. But Caldwell, a skilled writer, balances these contrasting emotions honestly and poignantly to depict the totality of their strong friendship together and apart.
The story reminds me very much of the relationship between my wife and her best friend who walk their dogs together each morning, evaluate the neighborhood remodeling projects, and tackle the complexities of relationships and antique wood pull toys. They are the best of best friends, soul mates who always carry some of the other person in their heart.
In the end, I felt Let's Take the Long Way Home a highly revealing and satisfying book. Caldwell so beautifully examines her emotions experienced with and without Caroline, gathering ideas from others as well as her own thoughts.
Her mental and physical searches for answers and comfort lead to many paths. One I most liked is when she encounters a poem by Pablo Neruda hanging on the wall in a house in her neighborhood that strikes a chord with her (and me).
If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south, lift your indelible eyes
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don't want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don't want my heritage of joy to die.
Don't call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air.
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.
When I die, I hope someone reads this for me.
For Gail Caldwell, her deep friendship with and eventual loss of her best friend Caroline Knapp are sensitively recounted in Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memorial of Friendship. As Caldwell writes, "We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow."
This is a book of intimacy - emotional, intellectual, and physical (although not sexual) - that depicts a deep relationship between two women who have found a soul mate in each other. First meeting and bonding over their love of their dogs, Gail and Caroline immediately find they share commonalities of writing careers, fierce independence, competitiveness, relationships with men, and even struggles with alcohol.
They take long walks with their dogs daily through the woods near Cambridge, Massachusetts, discussing books, life, dogs, and nothing. They share emotions, questions, and laughter through their daily talks during dog walks, phone calls, and athletic training (Gail is a swimmer and Caroline a competitive rower on the Charles River. Rowing eventually becomes a shared experience when Caroline teaches Gail so well that they soon can row together and dream of racing in a double skull boat).
Caldwell, a Pulitzer Prize winning author for Criticism, is the narrative voice, completely open in her revelations about her memories of Caroline and later her efforts to live a life without her friend. Caldwell is an author I easily identified with; her self-portrait checks my lifestyle boxes:
...reading was my equivalent of chewing on a bone. I had long thought that the gods had handed me work tailor-made for my idiosyncrasies: I was too opinionated to be a straight news reporter, too gadabout to be an academic. I was dreamy, stubborn, and selectively fanatical; my idea of a productive day, as both a child and an adult, was reading for hours and staring out the window. It was my good fortune that I had found an occupation requiring just these talents [book critic for The Boston Globe].
This is a book celebrating the life together of two friends, and then the life of one left to carry on after death claims the other. It is both exuberant and deeply sad, humorous and melancholy. But Caldwell, a skilled writer, balances these contrasting emotions honestly and poignantly to depict the totality of their strong friendship together and apart.
The story reminds me very much of the relationship between my wife and her best friend who walk their dogs together each morning, evaluate the neighborhood remodeling projects, and tackle the complexities of relationships and antique wood pull toys. They are the best of best friends, soul mates who always carry some of the other person in their heart.
In the end, I felt Let's Take the Long Way Home a highly revealing and satisfying book. Caldwell so beautifully examines her emotions experienced with and without Caroline, gathering ideas from others as well as her own thoughts.
Her mental and physical searches for answers and comfort lead to many paths. One I most liked is when she encounters a poem by Pablo Neruda hanging on the wall in a house in her neighborhood that strikes a chord with her (and me).
If I die, survive me with such sheer force
that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,
from south to south, lift your indelible eyes
from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.
I don't want your laughter or your steps to waver,
I don't want my heritage of joy to die.
Don't call up my person. I am absent.
Live in my absence as if in a house.
Absence is a house so vast
that inside you will pass through its walls
and hang pictures on the air.
Absence is a house so transparent
that I, lifeless, will see you, living,
and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.
- Pablo Naruda Love Song XCIV
When I die, I hope someone reads this for me.
Happy reading.
Fred
www.firstsentencereader.blogspot.com
If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:
Caldwell, Gail. A Strong West Wind: A Memoir
Author of Let's Take the Long Way Home writes of her childhood growing up on the Texas Panhandle in the 1950s, and her relationships with her father and first loves.
Knapp, Caroline. The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays
Highly personalized essays on Knapp's view of life, women, relationships, and the world around them.
