Bibliofreakblog

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

The Country of the Pointed Firs, written in the 1890’s, captures the customs and dialects that were dying out in Maine at the time.  Sarah Orne Jewett tried to preserve as much as she could in her fiction before it was forgotten.

She did a pretty good job of really bring the characters and their surroundings alive with a lot of detail.  Unfortunately, the dialect was harder for me to understand.  I kept hearing a cross between a Southern and a Cockney accent in my head.  Just see if you don’t:

“Lor’, no, I ain’t, Almiry Todd…I ain’t had a mite o’ supper, dear.  I’ve been lottin’ all the way on a cup o’ that best tea of yourn,–some o’ that Oolong yu keep in the little chist.  I don’t want none of your useful herbs.”

or, throughout the book some things showed up repeatedly: v’y'ge for voyage; lo’ded for loaded (I think); gre’t for great; bo’t for boat.  That last one drove me crazy.  How the hell are you supposed to pronounce bo’t?  Is it like bo-it?  Or boht?  Or bott?  I don’t get it.

Usually I don’t mind the inclusion of dialect in speech in books.  But I think that’s because I have some idea of what the accent sounds like in the first place.  So I can read Toni Morrison or Irvine Welsh no problem.  But how do people speak in Maine?  I tried using a Boston accent in my head (that being the closest I could think of).  That didn’t work with the clipped words at all.  It’s only now that I look back that I think it is probably closer to a Canadian accent.  Still though, it prevented me from really immersing myself in the writing.

Perhaps it would have been better if there was more of a story arc.  It’s really more of a series of vignettes as the narrator relays her experiences with the local people in the town where she’s staying for the summer, trying to write (one wonders what she is writing–is it this book?).  

The writing itself was really good though.  I’m going to quote the last two paragraphs of the book–they don’t reveal anything except that the narrator is leaving, which you knew she was going to do at the end of the summer.  It’s not like a modern book where there would be some sort of love interest and she would choose to stay there.  The summer really just captures a moment in time.

“As I came away on the little coastwise steamer, there was an old sea running which made the surf leap high on the all the rocky shores.  I stood on deck, looking back, and watched the busy gulls agree and turn, and sway together down the long slopes of air, then separate hastily and plunge into the waes.  The tide was setting in, and plenty of small fishe were coming with it, unconscious of the silver flashing of the great birds overhead and the quickness of their fierce beaks.  The sea was full of life and spirit, the tops of the waves flew back as if they were winged like the gulls themselves, and like them had the freedom of the wind.  Out in the main channel we passed a bent-shouldered old fisherman bound for the evening round among his lobster traps.  He was toiling along with short oars, and the dory tossed and sank and tossed again with the steamer’s waves.  I saw that it was old Elijah Tilley, and though we had so long been strangers we had come to be warm friends, and I wished that he had waited for one of his mates, it was such hard work to row along the shore through rough seas and tended the traps alone.  As we passed I waved my hand and tried to call to him, and he looked up and answered my farewells by a solemn nod.  The little town, with the tall masts of its disabled schooners in the inner bay, stood high above the flat sea for a few minutes then it sank back into the uniformity of the coast, and became indistinguishable from the other towns that looked as if they were crumbled on the furzy-green stoniness of the shore.
      The small outer islands of the bay were covered among the ledges with turf that looked as fresh as the early grass; there had been some days of rain the weeks before, and the darker green of the sweet-fern was scattered on all the pasture heights.  It looked like the beginning of summer ashore, though the sheep, round and warm in their winter wool, betrayed the season of the year as they went feeding along the slopes in the low afternoon sunshine.  Presently the wind began to blow, and we stuck out seaward to double the long sheltering headland of the cape, and when I looked back again, the islands and the headland had run together and Dunnet Landing and its coasts were lost to sight.” 

 

Buy The Country of Pointed Firs on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Lace Makers of Glenmara by Heather Barbieri
Dakota by Kathleen Norris
The Lace Reader by Brunonia Berry
Walden by Henry David Thereau
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Collected Stories of William Faulkner by William Faulkner
The Bostonians by Henry James

Other works by Sarah Orne Jewett:

The King of Folly Island and Other People
A Native of Winby, and Other Tales
The Mate Of The Daylight And Friends Ashore
A Marsh Island
Betty Leicester’s Christmas
Betty Leicester: A Story for Girls
The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories
A Country Doctor 
A White Heron and Other Stories
The Tory Lover
Country By-Ways
Strangers and Wayfarers
Deephaven and Selected Stories and Sketches
Tales of New England
The Life of Nancy
Old Friends and New.
The Story Of The Normans: Told Chiefly In Relation To Their Conquest Of England