Jayber Crow
by Wendell Berry

List Price: $15.95
Our Price: $8.39
You Save: $7.56 (47%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $3.98 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of Jayber Crow

Book Review: Jayber Crow - A personal review
Summary: 5 Stars

But Jaber Crow found more than just interesting faces in Port William. He found himself and he found his community...his place. He had carried with him his loneliness, his isolations, and his self-reliance for a long, long time. " I learned to think of myself as myself. The past was gone. I was unattached. I could put my whole life in a smallish cardboard box and carry it in my hand."
But when he got back to Port Williams and recognized some of the folks he knew and who knew him "...well, that changed me. After all those years of keeping myself aloof and alone, I began to feel tugs from the outside. I felt my life branching and forking out into the known world. ...nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away."
Jayber's place in his community, his role there, his thoughts, his unattained love, and his relationship with the fields, streams and forests of the place provoke an inescapable reflection on what it means to "amount to something, to make something of oneself."

Summary of Jayber Crow

Jayber Crow is another story of the Port William membership, the community whose life--and lives--Berry has unfurled over the course of a half dozen novels. Jayber himself is an orphan, lately returned to the town. And his status as barber and bachelor places him simultaneously at its center and on its margins. A born observer, he hears much, watches carefully, and spends 50 years learning its citizens by heart.

They were rememberers, carrying in their living thoughts all the history that such places as Port William ever have. I listened to them with all my ears, and have tried to remember what they said, though from remembering what I remember I know that much is lost. Things went to the grave with them that will never be known again.

Berry's prose, so carefully tuned that you never know it is there, carries us into the very heart of the land itself; his exquisitely constructed sentences suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world. Jayber Crow resonates with variations played on themes of change, looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found. --Kelly Flynn

Literary Books

• Subjects > Literature & Fiction > Literary