Andrew Geyer
Author of Whispers in dust and bone
Works by Andrew Geyer
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- male
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Reviews
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Diverse in setting and broad in range, these award-winning stories all turn, in some way, on the passing of the rural Southwest Texas way of life and its stamp on those who leave there. Ranging from bare-bones narratives to magical realism and ever lush in regional particulars, the stories all center on a sense of place. Sharing a point of origin and a journey, their characters weave in and out of the stories, looking for new starts-for answers-and seeing the world through dry eyes. They explore exotic Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and a dig site in Peru and make a voyage of discovery down the Amazon River. They lose faith in God and find it again in such unlikely places as a water lot in South Carolina. The displaced protagonists all search for something elusive, something lost, yet in Geyer's hands are yoked by a tension that is somehow always new and always compelling.
Famous blurbers: Andrew Geyer's earthy, edgy, colorful stories range from Texas to Peru, reflecting life's frustrations and occasional small triumphs.—Elmer Kelton
The contents...reads like the track listing of some Marty Robbins album-dusty and elegiac, but with that ten-dollar smile, that flash of white teeth under a hat brim. Even when the stories take you to South Carolina, or South America, still, it's Texas. The real one.—Stephen Graham Jones
The most important work of fiction to come out of the Southwest since Woman Hollering Creek.—Michael Hathaway
My Review: I am a native Californian. Lived there for a whopping six years, then made visits because my divorced parents couldn't bear to be in the same state. (Not that I think they were wrong...two people that negative and vicious in one state is too many.) I was yanked away from the world I knew to start life anew in Mercedes, a horrible little burg in farthest-possible South Texas...which, in the mid-Sixties, was an unbelievably stark contrast to wealthy urban/suburban Northern California: POOR PEOPLE! MEXICAN PEOPLE (Matamoros, Mexico is closer to Mercedes, Texas than is San Antonio or Laredo)! SPANISH!! EEEEEEEEK! Oh, and heat. Lots and lots of heat.
And ya know what? I hated the heat. I hated my mother, and sister. But I didn't hate horrible, podunk Mercedes near as much as I hated, and still hate, plush piss-elegant pointless Los Gatos, California. I liked the Mexican migrant kids, I LOVED barbacoa and breakfast tacos and quesadillas and refritos and enchiladas (to my mother's enduring horror). I liked Spanish...and for the first time in my life, I felt like there was something to this idea people called “home.” Cali? Never did fit. Haven't been there in 20 years, and am not at all sure I'll ever go back.
Fast forward from 1966 to 2004. I'm living in Austin at that time, my mother having died and left me her house there. I found this collection of sixteen stories, published by Texas Tech University Press, at BookPeople (Austin's excellent unchain book heaven), on a shelf marked “Staff Recommendations.” Since money wasn't a problem for me then, I bought it on a whim...what a whim.
Peru! The Amazon! Ranch country in South Texas! Powpowpow the book-bullets hit me, spun me, felt like fire as they got in under my skin and made me smell smells I'd forgotten I knew (caliche roads, anyone?) and think about the life I almost led in places I'd been and left behind.
But, and I know this is such a boring cliché to hear again and again, but it's the characters and their voices that pinned me to my chair and kept the pages turning. Andrew Geyer made, in this collection, a believer out of me, and I'll read all his books one day before I die. Every one of the stories has someone in it that I knew, or know, or am related to. I recognize them, their concerns, their attitudes and prejudices. I don't always like them, but I know them, somewhere in the calcium in my bones I know them and their life and their deep fear of change. Change, in this world, is Never Good. Here, from my very favorite story, “Trust Jesus,” is a succinct statement of why:
As soon as the pattern of things changes, the certainties shift, the roots of survival are attacked. I forget this. I can't keep it in the forefront of my mind because I'm not this kind of person at heart, I'm a change-loving city-dweller by nature and design. Conservatism, which I regard as a character flaw to be rooted out and extinguished by all right-thinking people, has its roots here in this South Texas archetype tough ranch woman.
Andrew Geyer reminds me, in these stories, that nothing comes from nowhere...that people think and feel and believe what they do for reasons that make sense to them. That, in spite of my judgments, the world will always have these folks in it, and best to adjust to that immutable law of human nature.
This is why I read. To remind myself not to disappear up my own ass. People are different, not (only) wrongheaded. I hate being made to think, don't you?… (more)
The Publisher Says: Diverse in setting and broad in range, these award-winning stories all turn, in some way, on the passing of the rural Southwest Texas way of life and its stamp on those who leave there. Ranging from bare-bones narratives to magical realism and ever lush in regional particulars, the stories all center on a sense of place. Sharing a point of origin and a journey, their characters weave in and out of the stories, looking for new starts-for answers-and seeing the world through dry eyes. They explore exotic Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca, and a dig site in Peru and make a voyage of discovery down the Amazon River. They lose faith in God and find it again in such unlikely places as a water lot in South Carolina. The displaced protagonists all search for something elusive, something lost, yet in Geyer's hands are yoked by a tension that is somehow always new and always compelling.
Famous blurbers: Andrew Geyer's earthy, edgy, colorful stories range from Texas to Peru, reflecting life's frustrations and occasional small triumphs.—Elmer Kelton
The contents...reads like the track listing of some Marty Robbins album-dusty and elegiac, but with that ten-dollar smile, that flash of white teeth under a hat brim. Even when the stories take you to South Carolina, or South America, still, it's Texas. The real one.—Stephen Graham Jones
The most important work of fiction to come out of the Southwest since Woman Hollering Creek.—Michael Hathaway
My Review: I am a native Californian. Lived there for a whopping six years, then made visits because my divorced parents couldn't bear to be in the same state. (Not that I think they were wrong...two people that negative and vicious in one state is too many.) I was yanked away from the world I knew to start life anew in Mercedes, a horrible little burg in farthest-possible South Texas...which, in the mid-Sixties, was an unbelievably stark contrast to wealthy urban/suburban Northern California: POOR PEOPLE! MEXICAN PEOPLE (Matamoros, Mexico is closer to Mercedes, Texas than is San Antonio or Laredo)! SPANISH!! EEEEEEEEK! Oh, and heat. Lots and lots of heat.
And ya know what? I hated the heat. I hated my mother, and sister. But I didn't hate horrible, podunk Mercedes near as much as I hated, and still hate, plush piss-elegant pointless Los Gatos, California. I liked the Mexican migrant kids, I LOVED barbacoa and breakfast tacos and quesadillas and refritos and enchiladas (to my mother's enduring horror). I liked Spanish...and for the first time in my life, I felt like there was something to this idea people called “home.” Cali? Never did fit. Haven't been there in 20 years, and am not at all sure I'll ever go back.
Fast forward from 1966 to 2004. I'm living in Austin at that time, my mother having died and left me her house there. I found this collection of sixteen stories, published by Texas Tech University Press, at BookPeople (Austin's excellent unchain book heaven), on a shelf marked “Staff Recommendations.” Since money wasn't a problem for me then, I bought it on a whim...what a whim.
Peru! The Amazon! Ranch country in South Texas! Powpowpow the book-bullets hit me, spun me, felt like fire as they got in under my skin and made me smell smells I'd forgotten I knew (caliche roads, anyone?) and think about the life I almost led in places I'd been and left behind.
But, and I know this is such a boring cliché to hear again and again, but it's the characters and their voices that pinned me to my chair and kept the pages turning. Andrew Geyer made, in this collection, a believer out of me, and I'll read all his books one day before I die. Every one of the stories has someone in it that I knew, or know, or am related to. I recognize them, their concerns, their attitudes and prejudices. I don't always like them, but I know them, somewhere in the calcium in my bones I know them and their life and their deep fear of change. Change, in this world, is Never Good. Here, from my very favorite story, “Trust Jesus,” is a succinct statement of why:
At 6:15 she was standing on her front porch watering gardenias and watching another line of thunderstorms split and go around her. The same thing happened almost every day. Some days they came so close all she could smell was the rain. The wind whipped up dust from the fields until it drove like buckshot into the shuddering mesquites, and Clara Nell started to pray. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'Jesus, Jesus....' But the only thing that came out of the sky was her topsoil. Every day the wind took a little more, and it hadn't rained in almost a year.--p27, hardcover edition
As soon as the pattern of things changes, the certainties shift, the roots of survival are attacked. I forget this. I can't keep it in the forefront of my mind because I'm not this kind of person at heart, I'm a change-loving city-dweller by nature and design. Conservatism, which I regard as a character flaw to be rooted out and extinguished by all right-thinking people, has its roots here in this South Texas archetype tough ranch woman.
Andrew Geyer reminds me, in these stories, that nothing comes from nowhere...that people think and feel and believe what they do for reasons that make sense to them. That, in spite of my judgments, the world will always have these folks in it, and best to adjust to that immutable law of human nature.
This is why I read. To remind myself not to disappear up my own ass. People are different, not (only) wrongheaded. I hate being made to think, don't you?… (more)
7 
richardderus | 1 other review | Aug 24, 2012 |
richardderus | 1 other review | Aug 24, 2012 | Awards
Statistics
- Works
- 4
- Members
- 12
- Popularity
- #813,248
- Rating
- 4.0
- Reviews
- 3
- ISBNs
- 5
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