Monday, November 10, 2008



Ruth Ann Torstenson-LeMasters
The Thin Place
Kathryn Davis

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1 comment:

RATL said...

I chose this book not because it is my absolute favorite, but because I happened to be enjoying it at the time. It would be impossible for me to have just one favorite—I would need a READ poster in which I was completely covered in the books that I have loved over the years (that I have spent entirely too much time living in other people’s realities is probably a legitimate criticism). The Thin Place is all about the nature of reality—for humans, dogs, cats, even corn and lichen get their say. Davis’ thin place is the mysterious space between the everyday world and the cosmic; it is where the physical and the spiritual meet. The story toggles between the ordinary lives of the people in a small town in Vermont and the extraordinary –a child who can bring people back to life and communicate with animals, corn that dreams about cross-fertilization, a glacier that takes on a human point of view. It begins with a dead man on a beach and ends with violence in an Episcopal church on Pentecost Sunday, but it is not a murder mystery or a thriller. It’s a spiritual treatise and, at the same time, an often hilarious description of the mundane concerns of very human beings. As the Washington Post critic Julia Livshin says, Davis “expos(es) the spiritual lining of everyday phenomena. She makes you want to slow down and follow her tangents, reminding us that ‘every single thing that happens in a life is like Chekhov's Gun, trustfully casting before it the shadow of its own final shape, if only we knew how to see it clearly’." As you finish this unique and haunting book you find yourself in agreement with Davis who says "there is probably nothing more beautiful and implausible than the world."
A Village Voice critic said: "I like to think of Kathryn Davis as the love child of Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll, with a splash of Nabokov, Emily Brontë, and Angela Carter in the gene pool." What do you

November 13, 2008 at 10:51 AM

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