Always hesitant to engage heavy dialect in writing, a reluctance I
developed in childhood reading Tom Sawyer, I took the plunge with The Unbearable Lightness of Prunes on the recommendation of a friend.
She's not only still a friend, but a more trusted friend than ever
before. This long story, which Ms. Langstaff has said she plans to
include in a book about the protagonist, a tormented, mischievous boy
named Jerrold, quickly smacked down my dialectal squeamishness and
seduced me into a world of linguistically quirky humor I eventually came
to savor thanks to a late-blooming appreciation for that same Mark
Twain who'd stymied me in my tenderer years.
I need not say one
whit about the prunes and their weight, or lack thereof, as suggested by
the title of this delightful plum of a story. If you have ever eaten a
prune, or even seen a bag of them dried like gargantuan raisins, or
smelled them stewing in water in a pot on the stove, you will most
assuredly feel an instant rapport with poor Jerrold whilst thanking your
lucky stars to be a mere voyeur as the lad suffers with surrogate angst
for your own private indolence and dietary trespasses.
The story
is rich in and of itself, and the language beyond the dialogue brings
depths of brilliance and humor of a sort I haven't seen since those
miracle days discovering the voice bewitching me with the likes of The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was the same one that
frightened me as a lad about the same age as Jerrold in this splendid,
uproariously entertaining tale about prunes, potato guns, horrible
adults and the kind of crazy aunt we all would love to have in our
family tree.