In The Country of the Young and In the country of the dumb

I just finished reading Lisa Carey's In the Country of the Young. It's a book I've had sitting on a shelf for years. That's the curse of those of us who love books...we never have enough time to read them all! Anyway, it's a really gorgeous story about the dead...both the really dead, and the living dead. You could call it a fairytale, or you could call it a parable, but in either case, it shows us how our ghosts (or the skeletons in your closet, if you will)--if we listen to them--can teach us about life.

Oisin (Oh-sheen) is alive, but just barely. He's closed himself off from most of life, both the joys and the sorrows, because of a series of tragic events in his younger years. In truth, he's always been much better at communicating with ghosts than with the living...

"Last week, on the night of the full moon equinox, Oisin had left his front door open until morning. He has done this every November for almost thirty years, but it's been ages since he truly expected anything to come of it. Now the light in a house that should be dark pulls him toward his door with a combination of thrill and panic. He swings it open, propping it with a tree-trunk stool from the porch. Please please please, he repeats in his mind, and he hopes this begging will serve as an invitation.

"He knows wht happened to his tobacco. Something has entered his hermitage, something he has anticiapted for more than half of his life. Something that most people--if they believed in such things at all--would not welcome with an open door."

And that's how the "visitation" began. That's how Oisin was able to look at his life up until then, and finally move on. It's a brilliant metaphor for self-examination. But the tale isn't just one about the dreariness of figuring out one's life. It's a celebration of everything that we cherish: childhood, love, lust, wisdom.

I spent the last pages of the book in tears, so I need to reread it. I was so carried away by the emotions of the characters, and by my own emotions, that it was more like reading with half my brain and all of my heart. It's not so often that a book enables a personal epiphany. In my superstitious Irish mind, I think that maybe I was supposed to read this lovely piece when I did, six years after it was first published. Maybe my own ghosts weren't ready to come to me until now. Who knows?

Lisa will be reading from her new novel, Every Visible Thing, at Brookline Booksmith on August 31st. Go see her!

Note: The book I read was an uncorrected proof, and before any of you English majors start bellyaching about a light in a house being able to be thrilled or panicky, just keep the uncorrected part in mind.

As for the country of the dumb, I just came across these two tidbits in The Week. First, in a section entitled "Only in America," there was this:
"A camper is suing the U.S. government because he fell off a cliff while looking for somewhere to pee during the night. Jerry Mersereau, 23, was camping Mount Hood National Forest when misadventure struck. 'While finding a place to relieve himself,' his lawsuit says, 'plaintiff walked off the unguarded and unprotected creek, falling approximately 20 to 30 feet to the creek bed below.' Mersereau says the government should have known that campers might wander off the cliff, and is demanding compensation for his 'mental anguish.'"

That piece sits right beside another interesting tidbit in a section called "Good Week For..."
"...the future of the human race, after scientists at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics announced the invention of the first pill to combat stupidity. The drug has been shown to improve the attentiveness and short-term memory of fruit flies and mice."

Too little, too late for Jerry Mersereau, hm?

~Fischlipps