Joanna Ostrow

Time magazine named it one of the ten best novels of 1970, along with Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and books by Bellow, Welty, Updike.

I was young, just beginning to build my own personal library, and perhaps a bit too impressed by lists. I bought as many of Time's ten as I could afford. Something about the cover of Joanna Ostrow's book convinced me to read it first. Of course, I already owned some books, but because of that choice, I tend to think of hers as Book One in my library, which is why I smile when I see that due to the ellipsis, it comes up first in my LibraryThing catalog.

Ostrow had published short stories, but this was her first novel. I had never been to Scotland, but Ostrow's book took me there, I was sure of it. Her attention to detail, her creation of a place, a world, is so complete -- and it is two worlds really -- modern Edinburgh and the ancient dying world of the crofts in the highlands. Nothing pleases me more than a book that takes me somewhere -- a somewhere that winds up on my personal literary map, a place so clear in my mind that I can revisit it anytime I want, even forty years later.

But Ostrow isn't just about place, she's about characters, with three young people struggling with identity, with the direction their lives will take: Simon with his deep need to return to the farm where he'd been placed as a foster child, to the old couple who refuse to leave the croft despite the ravages of old age and a rapidly dying way of life; Jenny, confused by her husband's need to return to the croft, to leave their life in Edinburgh, to bring her and their two small children to live in this harsh environment; and Michael, the American dodging the draft, fascinated by the old ways, the Gaelic language and lore -- Michael with his dogs, the salukis.

I have a passion for books about people 'on the borders', people standing between two cultures, terrified they belong to neither. All three of the main characters are on the threshold, searching for who they are, where they belong.

Several times in my life I've weeded out books -- or, in one really desperate time, sold them -- but I've never let go of this one. I don't know what became of Joanna Ostrow -- if there were more books, stories -- but I've always been grateful for this book. I can see its title on my shelf and be back in that place -- back in the highlands with Simon and Jenny and Michael . . . and back to 1971 when I was young and just starting to build my library.… (mais)