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Another beautiful but poignant short novella from Cynan Jones. This was his debut, and most of the stylistic traits that characterise all of his work were already there - the spare, poetic prose, the obsession with death and life's fragility, and the rural setting on the Welsh coast. Like The Dig, this one is set on a small farm whose owners are struggling. In this case we are mostly in the head of the farmer Gareth, and the whole thing takes place in one day apart from a few flashbacks (some ta...
I could live inside Cynan Jones' prose forever. The quiet ferocity of his words is suffocating.
A (hot) day in the life of a welsh farmer. So much is going on - and so little. The descriptions are so realistic that you can step onto the farm, feel the heat and see the sea. Jones paints the picture drops an emotional 'bomb' and before you know it you are back in the farmyard. To talk about these events would spoil the effect.
Well I'm learning what to expect from this author: Short but dense reads, beautiful (and sometimes unusual) writing, not heavily plot-driven, stories about life and death in the farming community in Wales.In this and 'The Dig' there was a sentence on the first page that I squinted at and re-read a few times. In this it was "He tastes to her of coffee. In the morning, when he comes to wake her up." The structure of it feels slightly uncomfortable to me, and each clause slightly alters the meaning...
A small book with great heft. At times the book is a painful read as it dissects the anatomy of a relationship. Don't let its sparse muscularity deceive you. You will cry. That is, if you are not a robot.
I don’t think I’ve read an author that is so deliberate with every word he writes. Nothing is trivial or wasted. I read Cove yesterday and immediately started another by this author. His writing seems seasoned and wise. How he strings words together reminds me of Wendell Berry’s poetry. This is 5 stars and going on favorite list. This is a quiet book but full of emotion and really a heartbreaker. There has to be a term for his writing style but I lack the education to know. Thank you Doug for po...
I really liked his other book, The Dig. This was too sad. Like he wanted to make too many things in the book sad. I wouldn’t have written in the death (agonizing death from a poisonous mushroom) of his little daughter. Who wasn't his real daughter. Yeesh...
This is one of my all time favourites, beautifully written and totally absorbing. I read it one sitting and I am not sure if this makes sense to other readers, but it actually made me glow! It's such a realistic series of events, some saddening, then some uplifting and positive. I don't think it's giving anything away when I say that one of my favourite characters is a cow. I will definitely read this book again and again.
Another beautiful offering from Cynan Jones telling of a day in drought plagued rural Wales when a pregnant cow leaves the barn and wonders the fields. In that day Jones explores the farmers’ lives both in the family and the community. He captures a world, a lifetime, in a moment. His beautiful prose paints a nuanced picture of the natural world and the rolling Welsh farmland. The stories and events that happen happen to all of us in a way from childhood to old age, life and death. Good things c...
To call the story and writing in this novella beautiful is an understatement. Cynan Jones really can write incredibly well, and even in the mere 100 pages of this novella manages to create a tense and stifling atmosphere. Anything else I say about this will just sound like hyperbole, but this slim book packs a heavy emotional punch - I can't wait to read The Dig next.
When I started this book I thought at first it was based somewhere foreign, what with the drought and the heat I didn't think it would be a local book. Also, the style of writing came across to me as a little stunted as if English wasn't the first language of the character who was narrating it. As it turned out the book is set in Wales many years ago! I loved this book and the style in which it is written, I can't exactly put a finger on a specific word or phrase to describe it but it just works...
Simply, this is a magnificent novel. It's a gem of compression and poetic focus, cramming so much life — family life, human life, animal life, plant life, the life of an abandoned car in a field and a rickety van still on the road — into barely over one hundred pages. More astounding is the deep care and respect paid to each of those lives: nothing is slighted, however slight it might seem beside the "big" events of the novel, and nothing is shied away from either in the birth and death and bloo...
I seem to have given five stars to a book about a man searching for a lost cow in a heatwave... This is a quiet, restrained little gem of a book set on a farm in west Wales. There doesn’t seem to be a single superfluous word and yet I could see, smell and feel everything that Jones described. I will definitely be reading more.
