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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
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Summary
Summary
Reclusive David Huntington writes rigorously meaningless poetry to great acclaim. But he lives fearfully, sleeping and working with earplugs, rarely going outside, drawing his life more closely around him every day.
A wild parrot, a gift from his father, becomes the breach in the dike: Little Wittgenstein has a jungle shriek, fierce eyes, and a beak that wreaks havoc. David finally throws the bird out the window--and follows it into the world. His guilty search for the parrot takes him first to Telegraph Hill, where the parrot may have found others of its kind. Inexorably David is drawn even farther, lured to South America by rumors of an ancient flock in the wild mangrove swamps. There he meets the lovely level-headed Fern, an American scientist who has her own reasons for searching for the birds. Will he retreat, or follow the parrots' call?
Jim Paul has created a tender, whimsical romance, told with wit and subtlety, about having the courage to heed the messages the world sends you, and to welcome unexpected love.
Author Notes
Jim Paul is a poet, a translator, and the author of three books. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has also served on the faculty at Bread Loaf. He lives in the Rincon Mountains in southern Arizona.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A love story with an ornithological spin, this latest novel by poet, novelist and translator Paul (Medieval in L.A., etc.) leads its two protagonists deep into the hinterlands of South America. Fern Melartin is a naturalist interested in the aratinga erythrogenys, a species of parrot. It inhabits the mangrove swamps below Guayaquil, Ecuador, which is why Fern incautiously accepts a job at an animal reserve in that area offered by the reserve director, Leonard Qualles, leaving her fiance, Geoffrey, back in Arizona. Soon she discovers that the reserve is more like a zoo, and Qualles is a rat whose louche mannerisms conceal murky business. Fern is fired on drubbed up charges (Qualles doesn't want observers around for long), but finds refuge in Puerto Alegre, a coastal village in which two American Peace Corps volunteers are living. She is happy until she receives word that another supposed researcher into aratinga erythrogenys wants to meet her. David Huntington is in Ecuador on a fluke. He is a San Francisco poet, the opposite of a life-affirming Whitman type. A major fellowship has recently allowed him to quit teaching pick-up classes at Mills College. However, the real changes in David's life occur after his father gives him a parrot-an aratinga erythrogenys that he names Little Wittgenstein. The parrot runs wild in his apartment, so he lets it out the window; then he feels so guilty he looks for it, researches parrot life and generally begins to encounter the real, physical world he has spent his lifetime sedulously avoiding. Finally, after discovering a flock of feral aratinga erythrogenys, David decides to take a boat to Ecuador to see the birds in their native habitat. Paul's story successfully weds an odd theme-the ethology of parrots-to the perennial fascinations of human courtship behavior. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
Reclusive David Huntington prides himself on composing the most intentionally impenetrable poetry possible-and as Paul's novel opens, he's actually rewarded for his efforts with a large fellowship. However, when David receives an exotic parrot from his father, his preferred life of airless solitude is turned upside down, and in frustration David soon tosses it out his apartment window. Little does he know that through that open window his carefully controlled and spiritless existence has begun its exit as well. David's guilty search for the bird serendipitously leads him into an adventure outside his quiet apartment and all the way to the swamplands of Ecuador, where a young researcher named Fern happens to be studying the same type of parrot in its native habitat. As might be expected, love ensues, though this is the coda to the novel. The real victory for David is having his life opened to new possibilities. There are really no surprises here (and not much plot), just a sweet and whimsical novel featuring characters the author clearly loves dearly. Readers searching for that warm and fuzzy feeling in their fiction will find it here in spades. Recommended for public libraries.-Marc Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
David didn't go out much. Hadn't for years. Even though he lived in a beautiful city, San Francisco, and had lived there since his birth, the outside world had not really existed for him. His bookcase blocked the window in the bedroom of the third-floor apartment where he lived. Out there, out in the larger world, was trouble, difficulty at best and bad trouble at worst. People were a problem, but it wasn't just people. The elements of nature were to be avoided. The earth itself bore explosive forces that might shatter whole apartment buildings. The sea was frigid and murderous. Animals had teeth and were not to be trusted. The seemingly innocent sky harbored huge destructive forces, or at least rain, a watery nuisance.As a child, without ever mentioning it to anyone, David had begun fearing the world. If anyone had asked him just where this fear had begun, he might have said, facetiously, that as a child he had been bitten by a swan. This was true. In the park at the Palace of Fine Arts, he'd run toward the beautiful creature, his arms out, his four-year-old self ecstatic, and the big bird had let him have it, biting him on the hands and face and sending him screaming to his mother. It was more likely, though, he had derived his sense that the world was not safe from his father, who was himself not safe, subject to deep moodiness and sudden swings of temper.But probably David would not have been able to completely justify his fearfulness, to himself or anyone else. Though he had heard of terrible things, nothing very awful had, in fact, ever happened to him. Occasionally the elements got in his way, a big storm soaked him on the street or an earthquake shut off his lights for a time. But that was all. So his fear had mellowed into what appeared to be a simple lack of interest. Mostly he managed to live inside, both inside his apartment and inside himself, writing his poetry. This was his main interest and his chosen work. David was a poet.All his life he'd been a voracious reader-devouring a book or two a week. He had immense powers of recollection, practically memorizing all that he read. David could write before he went to school and had always written things down, making up little stories and poems, which, if they were very good, were posted by his mother on the back of the front door of the house. He'd grown up in the Sunset District, a protosuburb west of downtown. When he got out of high school, David stayed in San Francisco, going to State. He would have preferred to remain at home while at college, but his father, wanting to get him out of the house, rented him one of the apartments he owned in the Haight.His father did not give him a break on the rent, however, and he was forced to take roommates. He chose two as mild and bookish as himself, boys who looked to him as the head of the household. This admiration, combined with the natural nonchalance of the eighteen-year-old and the peace of a house without his father in it, had br Excerpted from Elsewhere in the Land of Parrots by Jim Paul All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.