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Anna Spydell's avatar

One thing I am noticing is the tension between the embodiedness of the text (it is crowded with human smells and body parts, and not only literal ones: the sky has ears and flame has tongues, for example), and the way the fragmentation allows the reader to participate in the derealization or depersonalization of the trauma of poverty, which is a very disembodied feeling; there is a slightly numb, distanced feeling in the reading of it, that the characters also seem to experience (the most obvious one is Anna's state during pregnancy on the tenant farm). It's heartbreaking.

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Lassandro Ivana's avatar

I like Chapter TWO,.

It's a melody of "sound of fear".

A melody charged with dread, tension; sound of fear, suspended in the air waiting for a tragedy.

"On the women's faces lived the look of listening"; "everywhere the sky and earth were listening , listening ", listening to this melody and fearing to hear the much feared sound.

I can perceive and deeply feel this melody :

"the autumn days brought always the sound of fear into the air"; "leaves dashed against the houses" "giving a dry nervous undertone to everything" ; a "maniac wind" "shrieked and shrieked" and "was whirring", and "was pitting the grass and leaves".

Suddenly the much feared sound, the shrieking whistle the tragedy.

A musical void , a mournful silence follow.

"...and the hush. ...No sobs, no word spoken.."

Attention shifts from the "sound of fear" to the silence of an " open grave".

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