Litfest

Every once in a while you come across a book that changes your entire perspective on what literature is, or should be or can do; you find a narrative that transcends conventions, that just seems so true and so beautiful you wonder why you never read it before, or how one book could speak so directly to you- as though it were written exclusively for your personal enjoyment. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer is such a book.

Knowing he was coming to Litfest, I wanted to read the book and just get a handle on what his style of writing was before I saw him; I wasn’t expecting to be moved in the way I was. It’s a book that demands time. It’s a book that makes you pause and re-read bits, wanting to say them aloud even if there’s nobody in the room just to let the beauty of the language wrap itself around your tongue. It’s a book of such wide, accepting love that it is quite simply remarkable.  More than a narrative, one feels as a reader as though one is being presented with a new philosophy on life; a new way of living, and interacting and touching.

Definitions of what love or sex or companionship mean stretch as long and wide as the American landscapes Shed and the other characters travel through.  I can’t really say it better than the books says it for itself:
“There’s really only a very short time that we get hair and teeth and put on red cloth and have bones and skin and look out eyes. Not for long. Some folks longer than others. If you re lucky, you ll get to be the one who tells the story: how the eyes have seen, the hair has blown, the caress the skin has felt, how the bones have ached. What the human heart is like,  he said. How the devil called and we did not answer. How we answered.”

Wow.

Guest blog post by Andrew McMillan. Andrew studies literature at Lancaster University and his poetry is published in Flax018. Tom Spanbauer reads at Litfest’s Summer Readings at The Storey on Wednesday night.