Tag Archives: Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap

Jack’s Monday Book Review

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Sunset Song – Lewis Grassic Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell)

When I was attending high school in Dunfermline, I don’t recall studying any Scottish authors whatsoever. English and American, yes, but no Scots.

It was only later in life and by way of a television adaptation that I was introduced to the works of Grassic Gibbon. He was born and grew up in Kincardineshire (also known as The Mearns), which, due to the vagaries of successive reorganizations of local government, no longer exists as a separate entity. Sunset Song is a longish short story, the first in a trilogy and all based in The Mearns. Like his famous predecessor Robert Burns, Grassic Gibbon captures rural life, speech and attitudes perfectly – in fact I think of him as a kind of novelist successor to Burns.

In the book Chris Guthrie’s mother kills her baby twins and herself after learning she is pregnant yet again. Chris, her older brother Will, and her father send two younger children to stay with relatives and continue to run the farm on their own. Will emigrates to Argentina with his young bride, Mollie Douglas because he and his father argue constantly. Chris is left to do all the work around the house when her father suffers a debilitating stroke and eventually dies.

Chris marries Ewan Tavendale, a young farmer, and the happily married pair have a son, whom they also call Ewan. After World War I erupts, Ewan Sr. and many other young men join up. Ewan dies in the war, after a leave visit that proves he is much altered by his experiences, and Chris learns later that Ewan was shot as a deserter.

The book touches on many fundamental dilemmas of life, both personal and more wide-ranging; changing farming methods, relationships, pacifism, patriotism etc. I found it dually compelling, for its Scottish depictions and for its portrayal of people caught in difficult situations.

Finally – Grassic Gibbon, like Burns, invented a kind of fairly accessible half way house between Scots and English that retains just enough of Kincardineshire ‘spik’ for authenticity.

This is regarded as one of the greatest 20th Century works of Scottish literature and I heartily recommend it.

PS – a new movie version was made in 2015 and is due for release in the US in April 2016. The trailer looks gorgeous! https://youtu.be/sQqqkTdwv50

 

Remodeling #10

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Jack’s weekly guest post –

Since we moved in here ten years ago we (and that means mostly I) have carried out some serious building projects. Some were simply needed because of the age of the building (built in 1903), some we chose to do and others were needed to meet certain legal requirements.

The first was redecorating most of the upstairs to make that area pleasant as living quarters, then I walled in the open car port to turn it into a garage complete with a window and an ‘up and over’ main door. Next was building a disabled ramp at the side of the porch and then re-shingling the roof. The upstairs bathroom got a complete make-over and shortly after we got a grant to completely renovate the front porch. We had earlier built a fire escape stair from upstairs which doubled as access to the yard for our dogs Zora and Bert, which turned out to be handy when we opened The Second Story Café.

Before we opened the café I had turned our dismal and cobwebby basement into our new living quarters (that’s chronicled in an earlier blog post) but I also had to install additional sinks and an extraction system in the upstairs kitchen. We had never had a separate heat and air system upstairs, so the advent of the café meant fitting a heat pump in the attic, running ducts to all the rooms and cutting holes in all the ceilings (very messy!).

Most of these jobs were interesting and challenging and I felt a definite sense of pride in my contribution to them although confirmed in my nervousness about plumbing and electrical work.

However, the latest jobs I had been putting to the end of the queue for years. The downstairs kitchen and bathroom both had old worn and curling vinyl flooring and I had been dreading fixing them. The first to be done was the bathroom and I used a floating planks system that proved much easier than I expected, so then it was time for the kitchen. We had divided this room with bookshelves as well as installing more along the walls on one side, so all the books had to be boxed and stored wherever we could find a corner followed by removing all the shelving into the garage. My good friend David Hamrick had arrived on Friday to help me and Wendy began boxing books on Saturday. By Sunday lunchtime we had all the books and shelves out and had started laying the new floor – more floating planks. By Monday afternoon we had the floor finished and the shelves back in place and this morning the last of the books were back.

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The old floor

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– and the new one

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m absolutely sure of one thing though – there’s another job just waiting around the corner!