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The Last of How It Was: A Novel (1987)

by T.R. Pearson

Series: Neely (3)

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The last volume in an unforgettable trilogy (with A Short History of a Small Place and Off for the Sweet Hereafter)
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The town of Neely, North Carolina is just as Gothic as anything Faulkner ever wrote, with murders, adultery, accidentally slaughtered mules, Stonewall Jackson, escaped convicts, dropped coffins, and Injun fights, but T. R. Pearson makes Neely one hell of a lot funnier than Yoknapatawpha County. In the final volume of the trilogy that also includes A Short History of a Small Place and Off for the Sweet Hereafter, narrator Louis Benfield relates stories of his family as told by Louis's daddy Louis, with interruptions, corrections, and emendations from Aunt Sister, Louis's maternal great-aunt, and from Louis's mother. The story rambles like a footpath through the North Carolina hills, with sentences that continue for whole paragraphs and paragraphs that continue for pages, creating a style that seems incomprehensible on the page but which reveals its meaning when read aloud, in all its Southern baroque glory.

The Last of How It Was has the flavor and feel of a long Sunday afternoon visit, sitting on the front porch, listening to family tales that don't go anyplace much or have any enormous meaning, but which, for that very reason, are nonetheless a delight. ( )
  Marchbanks | Feb 8, 2009 |
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She said it was a blood thing, Aunt Sister did, and not even from Great-Granddaddy really but likely Great-uncle Jack that would be Great-uncle Cyrus Barnard Yount who got called Jack everywhere but the front of the Bible, and Aunt Sister insisted it was down from him with Great-granddaddy just a conduit to Granddaddy himself who got the whole of it, and Momma asked her the whole of what like she always asked her the whole of what and Aunt Sister waved her hand in the air like usual and like usual told her back, "You know," and Daddy suggested Passion? but Aunt Sister stuck with foolishness like always, just plain foolishness she guessed with maybe some passion to it somewhere but foolishness mostly.
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The last volume in an unforgettable trilogy (with A Short History of a Small Place and Off for the Sweet Hereafter)

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