Thursday, February 6, 2014

Review: The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg



Klinkenborg’s The Rural Life approaches memoir through his collection of seasonal journal entries. These entries reflect the passage of time and seasonal changes brought to his farm over several years. In his opening, Klinkenborg describes how the writer in him pressured him to keep a journal but the farmer in him desired a more pragmatic approach. He not only wanted to capture the essence of rural life and how it felt, but what plantings had been done or how many animals he had at any one time. Journaling in the style he does fulfills his desire to record the everyday pleasures or practical notes of living on a farm.

“It’s no longer the writer in me that wants to keep a journal. It’s the farmer—or rather the son and nephew and grandson of farmers.”

When reflection on the land does spur personal memories, Klinkenborg’s interruptions in exposition to describe his mother’s voice or the age of the universe flow within the entries as if he was meant to speak of them all along. The beauty of his writing is simple and genuine, almost intimate as Klinkenborg shares the minutest details he notes of his land and the life that occupies it. But there is more to the book than a “herd all ones days” as he puts it.

“In America, we’ve learned to locate the meaning of rural life in the past, thereby dismissing it.”

The Rural Life brings the small-town farm back into the present. Klinkenborg makes no official claims against the progression of the modern era. Instead, he reminds the rest of the world of this somewhat hidden life of rural farmers by celebrating the farming tradition he has upheld. It is easy to forget the quiet yet extremely productive day on a farm when you live in the middle of a metropolitan city.  For the duration of the book, the reader is brought face-to-face, sense-to-sense if you will, with the earthy link between a farmer and his land not as he is in the past but in the same present as the reader.

“A conscientious journal keeper is really the natural historian of his own life.”

I thoroughly enjoyed my reading experience. Having spent much of my childhood visiting family in rural Minnesota, the summer and winter months felt as though they had been plucked from my own memory. From the first page I found a strong sense of kinship to Klinkenborg and his nostalgia as well as his relationship to the land. The progression into the other months enveloped me in the spring and fall on his farm with such effortless yet reverential descriptions of the landscape. I could clearly see what Klinkenborg was seeing when he was writing without him ever becoming too poetic or metaphorical. Nothing felt forced in his writing, even when he sporadically brought up his personal memories. Reading was more akin to sitting next to Klinkenborg and hearing him speak over a warm mug of coffee. His writing is a new model of how I am trying to approach my own accounts of rural land and memories. I want to reach that kind of level of naturalness that he achieves.

“A journal always conceals vastly more than it reveals. It’s a poor substitute for memory, and memory is what I would like to nourish.”

Klinkenborg’s writing is delightful to read, especially when he connects the scenes outside his door to his family memories. There is warmth to his descriptions indicating his genuine appreciation for what nature gives his farm. Anyone interested in a location-focused memoir will find The Rural Life enjoyable. But anyone with firsthand experience of northern rural life on or near farmland will feel right at home in Klinkenborg’s accounts.

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