Hayslip: Rhett and I both have farmers in the family. My mom was the daughter of a farmer. My favorite lines in the song are about bringing the cows around. I mean, stuff like that is real talk. Green: I raised pigs, and my brother, to this day.
Green: It was horseback riding in the morning and a quick surf in the afternoon. Herbison: Let me tell you about my old story. My town population: Cottage Grove, you got to be going there to get there. One true confession: you want to know why I never hauled hay? Herbison: Cause I did it once!
So, Rhett, did you see the video in your mind when he came up with that hook or what? Akins: Yeah. I grew up on a farm, and I used to bail hay with my uncle, and we had peach trees and we still have pecans on our farm down there. I grew up just seeing the work. So, The Farmer's Daughter beckoned at a used book store. I paused because of the proliferation of Daughter books, but at least there wasn't an Alchemist or Apprentice in the title. Now, I understand.
The Farmer's Daughter is three novellas, apparently a literary form the author fancies. They're not for everyone. Let's just say the men are often drunk and constantly tumescent. Sex happens, without a lot of foreplay. Like watching the macaques at the zoo. That doesn't mean that it isn't profound though: When he was eleven there was a neighbor girl who would show you her butt for a nickel but if you tried to touch it she'd smack the shit out of you.
He'd heard that now she was a school principal up in Houghton. You either get that, or you don't. Nothing really made me wince but then I grew up in such language. Indeed, this felt like putting on the most familiar soft flannel shirt. And it's full of truths, like: Grandpa had a theory that you should never go after a female with a bad father because they're always pissed off.
I've done no research on that theory but it sounds like it must be true. Jim Harrison is a wonderful storyteller. It's funny, yes, and it's been called 'masculine', whatever the hell that is. But there was lump in your throat heartbreak and profundity and I learned a lot of things like there are people suffering from anhedonia who can't experience pleasure, and that Antonio Machado was very wise when he wrote: Look in your mirror for the other one, the one who accompanies you. I could not put this down.
Advice, you know, for anyone who might be overdosing on Proust. Jim Harrison is an old man now, but he has a lengthy oeuvre, for which I am very happy. View all 10 comments. Jan 30, Mercedes rated it it was amazing. Jim Harrison is now officially my favorite contemporary writer. His latest, The Farmers Daughter includes three brilliant novellas. In trying to describe Harrison I can't beat a line I read in an interview. They called him a Falstaffian figure; part wild man, part cultivated literary lion.
In the first story, The Farmers Daughter, an intelligent isolated homeschooled girl raised on a ranch in Montana deals with her need for revenge after a rape. I was impressed how Harrison captures the voice of Jim Harrison is now officially my favorite contemporary writer.
I was impressed how Harrison captures the voice of this female character with such honesty and respect. He is an Anishinabe Indian, happily sexual and unimpressed with society, now trying to care for his adopted daughter.
The third, The Games of Night is the ever popular werewolf theme told with new intelligence and creativity. All three characters are loners, living on the fringe while carefully observing the human landscape. Thank god there are still wild wordsmiths like Harrison to bring life to them.
Jan 22, A. Jim Harrison is one of those love-'em or hate-'em kind of writers, the love or hate coalescing around a question that's followed him from the get-go: is he "too macho? Fine; the question is, then, is he too masculine? What are we to make of the extraordinary, unearned sexual success of his male protagonists?
Or of the precocious, preternatu Jim Harrison is one of those love-'em or hate-'em kind of writers, the love or hate coalescing around a question that's followed him from the get-go: is he "too macho? Or of the precocious, preternatural sexuality of his adolscents? Are his female protagonists Dalva, Julip, etc.
Indeed, what's up with all this sex? Is it just male wish fulfilment? Or, recalling that it is fiction, male wishfulness? Or do Dalva and Julip usurp male prerogatives -- are they women who actually threaten male dominance? Is the sexuality of his male protagonists a boon, or an affliction? Is Harrison making some kind of point here that some of his critics continually miss?
In the third novella of his latest collection, "The Games of Night," his narrator muses on that point: " Perhaps it's because I read it concurrently with Conversations with Jim Harrison University of Mississippi Press, , in which Harrison continually answers interviewers on this point -- encouraging me to read with more intelligence than my usual lunkish efforts -- but it seems he's never found that animal so convincingly as in The Farmer's Daughter.
Not that he's universally successful. The title novella, told from the viewpoint of an adolescent girl, is the weakest of the three. Harrison never seems to fully inhabit her consciousness and consequently she doesn't come to life as richly or as fully as his other protagonists. She is too precocious which Harrison hangs a lampshade on by continually having people say she's old beyond her years , and too sexually open to be a believable teenager.
While she's undoubtedly a strong female character in the same vein as Dalva and Julip , she never quite feels fully realized. Harrison is far more successful in his reprise of his long-running character, Brown Dog. It seems here that Harrison is putting BD to bed; if so, it's a fine, and hilarious, exit. Brown Dog ambles through life in a perpetual state of lazy, masculine befuddlement. He desires women without irony, says his counsellor and sole true love , Gretchen, and this is why they sleep with him; never has Harrison stated so bluntly what all this sex is about.
But BD is not exactly marriage material, and consequently he is abandoned, rejected, and permanently perplexed. He is, as his name implies, just like a big, dopey puppy, and Harrison gets at this idea much more successfully here than he did with Cliff, in his recent novel The English Major , whose befuddled canine goofiness was clearest when waitresses patted him affectionately on the head.
This is Harrison's vision of masculinity: when we aren't puppies, we're dogs. And bearing in mind that dogs have teeth, we can also be wolves. The third novella of this collection, "The Games of Night," takes up lycanthropy, one of Harrison's old motifs.
Harrison said of his unsuccessful, Hollywood-bastardized screenplay, Wolf not related to his novel of the same title that he wished he'd done it as a novella first, so he would have had control of it, and "The Games of Night" seems to be a belated attempt to correct that error.
Harrison's protagonist is bitten in the neck by a wolf cub at the age of 12, which results in a blood disorder with symptoms only too familiar to Harrison fans: outrageous appetites for food and sex, and a violent disposition which overcomes his better nature, to his later regret.
Those appetites wax and wane with the moon, on a monthly cycle; he is not precisely a werewolf, but he is half wolf, or half dog. That this coincides with puberty is hardly coincidental, and interestingly, the narrator continually euphemizes this condition with such expressions as "my monthly affliction," recalling certain menstrual euphemisms.
This is, Harrison asserts, the male condition. Although the title novella is weaker than the other two, The Farmer's Daughter is possibly Harrison's best book, and the clearest expression of his concerns, in years.
Oct 03, Stephen Durrant rated it liked it. I would give this 3. I have always liked Jim Harrison. And I've always felt slightly guilty about that. Let's face it, he's a muscular writer whose male characters are always filled with lots and lots of whiskey and ready for lots and lots of sex, while his best female characters, like the "the farmer's daughter" can shoot and dress down a deer in one paragraph and discuss Stendhal in the next. It's a little embarrassing to like this kind of thing in a post- I would give this 3.
It's a little embarrassing to like this kind of thing in a post-feminist age, but I am from the West, where such stereotypes proliferate, so what can I say? This book is made up of three novellas, a form at which Harrison excels.
The first, "The Farmer's Daughter," is the weakest of the three in my judgment. It concerns a girl who moves to Montana at a young age and grows up as a tough hunter, a great cook of elk stew, an outstanding classical pianist prefers Shubert over Schumann , and a connoisseur of great literature prefers, yes, Stendhal over all others!
She is obsessed with murdering a worthless local who once abused her sexually. In the second novella, "Brown Dog Redux," a half-Lakota struggles to raise a daughter who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome. He's a fascinating character who lives entirely in the "now," with, to use Harrison's words, "his inner and outer child. The third novella, and the best, is "The Games of Night.
What makes this character intriguing and a bit humorous is that he becomes almost a parody of the usual Harrison hero: he admires the poetry of Rene Char, speaks of the iconography of the Vezelay cathedral, praises the bistros of Lyon, knows about Willis Barnstone's translations of Chinese poetry but is at the same time about as muscular as muscular can be i.
What always redeems Harrison, though, is his skill at cutting through the bullshit--e. I love this sort of stuff. Should I feel guilty? Jan 07, Isabelle rated it really liked it. It was so nice to read some of the reviews of this book prior to writing my own; nice and also quite reassuring inasmuch as I am not the only one who has become a slavish fan of Jim Harrison's since the first book of his I read: "Legends of the Fall" before the movie was made, rest assured!
Here he is, so macho as to be totally incorrect in a post-modern feminist construct, so ribald that you have to laugh in spite of yourself, so incredibly gifted that he can pen female characters in an utter It was so nice to read some of the reviews of this book prior to writing my own; nice and also quite reassuring inasmuch as I am not the only one who has become a slavish fan of Jim Harrison's since the first book of his I read: "Legends of the Fall" before the movie was made, rest assured!
Here he is, so macho as to be totally incorrect in a post-modern feminist construct, so ribald that you have to laugh in spite of yourself, so incredibly gifted that he can pen female characters in an utterly convincing way even though those women ride, hunt and plot homicide as naturally as Mme Bovary plotted elopement! Jim Harrison is equally comfortable writing essays about food, poetry, full-length novels or, as in this case, novellas.
He seems to write totally effortlessly, creating rich plots that showcase the drama of simple daily life and penning characters that are eminently credible even in the case of an altogether likely and unlikely werewolf. All this happens against a backdrop he is able to render flawlessly whether it is a ranch in Montana, a small Italian village, a water tank in a Louisiana cow pasture or a busload of American Indian rock musicians drifting from Toronto to the Dakotas.
These novellas are like a three voice harmony, reminding the reader, each in its own octave, each with its own perfect pitch, that things and people are rarely what they seem, that only our prejudices are one-dimensional and that good stories are all in the telling. Jan 04, Bruce Roderick rated it really liked it. I haven't read anything by Jim Harrison that I didn't like; so before I continue, it is only fair for me to say that I might not be the most objective critic of his writing.
This particular collection includes yet another tale of Brown Dog who has returned from Harrison's earlier body of work. Despite a new setting and supporting cast of characters Brown Dog hasn't changed a bit.
Immoral, broke, and abstractly unconcerned about his own situation, Brown Dog still makes for yet another great read I haven't read anything by Jim Harrison that I didn't like; so before I continue, it is only fair for me to say that I might not be the most objective critic of his writing. Immoral, broke, and abstractly unconcerned about his own situation, Brown Dog still makes for yet another great read.
This also includes Games of the Night which is one of my all-time favorite Harrison stories. This time Harrison provides us with the tale of a werewolf who is the son of struggling and failed academics. Despite the intriguing and mythical notion of a lycanthrope, Harrison still manages to create a very multidimensional character whose situation is otherwise entirely plausible.
Very much worth the read! Feb 21, Amy Bossy Bookworm rated it it was ok. This was on my to-read list for so long that when I sat down to read it I had forgotten it was three novellas. Which was disappointing when I became invested in the first story and its characters and then it ended--and was even more disappointing when I found the other two stories offputting. In both of the latter cases the protagonists were sex-obsessed men with minor stories circling around them.
View 1 comment. To look at it with any clarity you certainly had to attempt to look at it through the perceptions of a million-plus other species. Scared, solitary, badass, lonesome. He's glad he didn't quit. It's a real cute song. It's real rural. We're talking about feeding hogs, hauling hay and it being hot and hard work, but it was all worth it because "I fell in love with the farmer's daughter.
Rodney heard it and loved it.
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