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The Bluejay's Dance (Paperback) Loot Price: R203
Discovery Miles 2 030
You Save: R70 (26%)

The Bluejay's Dance (Paperback)

Louise Erdrich

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List price R273 Loot Price R203 Discovery Miles 2 030 You Save R70 (26%)

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Astute, poetic reflections on the powerful mother-daughter relationship from conception through the baby's first year. Developmental researchers have found that when a mother and her infant gaze into each other's eyes, the feelings generated can be so intense that one or the other must turn away for relief. It is about such feelings that novelist Erdrich (The Beet Queen, 1993, etc.) writes in this intimate record of pregnancy and giving birth. "Love of an infant," she says, "is of a different order" than love of an adult: It is "all-absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages...uncomfortably close to self-erasure." But like mother and infant, neither writer nor reader can confront those emotions directly for very long. So Erdrich finds both relief and metaphoric power in painting scenes from her life with her husband, five other children, a dog, and many cats on a New Hampshire farm. She describes dreaming over garden catalogs in the long New Hampshire winter nights, trapping and taming feral cats, collecting birds' nests, an "all-licorice" meal her husband prepared to satisfy her inexplicable craving, and a blue jay's defiant dance to successfully thwart a hawk's attack. Tied to each tale of rural life is a range of emotions: rage, depression, frustration, pain, sorrow, and nostalgia as well as transcendent joy, ordinary pleasure, pride, and satisfaction. How "a writer's sympathies, like forced blooms, enlarge in the hothouse of an infant's needs" is also part of Erdrich's story, as she trudges back and forth each day to her writing shack, accompanied by her nursing infant. For instance, a writer's effort to understand and depict evil becomes easier when the threat of evil coincides with a mother's absolute need to protect her child. Occasionally too self-conscious about the importance of Erdrich's role as Writer, but the bond between mother and infant has rarely been captured so well. (Kirkus Reviews)
An exhilarating and enchanting meditation on becoming a mother from one of America's most acclaimed writers, and winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, 2012. 'She is a winter-spring baby, and all day there is just her, me, snow and the birds outside.' A mother for all seasons, Erdrich tracks the end of her pregnancy into the dazzling light of childbirth and beyond into her baby's infancy, keeping a weather-eye on Nature outside her window and inside her body, gauging its lessons and constraints. She spills over with the intense feeling a baby carries into being as its gift to its mother. But her book is no mystical trip; Erdrich is umbilically attached to the earth, and to common sense. All prospective and seasoned parents will cherish her report from the frontline, for she never lectures, she simply strives to record exactly - in language both supple and ripe. Moving and memorable, neither handbook nor tract, here, for perhaps the first time, is mothering converted into writing without fakery.

General

Imprint: Flamingo
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Release date: February 1996
Authors: Louise Erdrich
Dimensions: 198 x 131 x 14mm (L x W x T)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 978-0-00-654790-7
Categories: Books > Health, Home & Family > Family & health > Family & other relationships > General
Books > Health, Home & Family > Family & health > Advice on parenting > Pregnancy, birth & baby care
Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social institutions > Family & relationships > General
LSN: 0-00-654790-7
Barcode: 9780006547907

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