Yiyun Li's Favorite of the Year--Tinkers--Paul Harding

While browsing yestereve, I stumbled upon an article at Granta more a blurb, that listed favorite books of 2009.  To my surprise and pleasure the person featured was Yiuyun Li and the book she chose was one that I happened to snatch off the shelves in my historic look for short novels tour a few days back.

Naturally, given that Yiyun Li has captured my reading heart this year, I had to take a look at what captured hers and almost right off fell into this:

from Tinkers
Paul Harding

But he was nearly a ghost, almost made of nothing, and so the wood and metal and sheaves of brightly printed cardboard and paper (MOVE FORWARD SIX SPACES TO EASY STREET!  Great Grammy Nodden, shawled and stiff and frowning at the camera, absurd with her hat that looked like a sailor's funeral mound, heaped with flowers and netting), which otherwise would have crushed his bones, dropped on him and fell away like movie props, he or they facsimiles of former, actual things.

There he lay among the graduation photos and old wool jackets and rusted tools and newspaper clippings about his promotion to head of the mechanical-drawing department at the local high school, and then about his retirement and subsequent life as a trader and repairer of antique clocks. The mangled brass works of the clocks he had been repairing were strewn among the mess. He looked up three stories to the exposed support beams of the roof and the plump silver backed batts of insulation that ran between them. One grandson or another (which?) had stapled the insulation into place years ago and now two or three lengths of it had come loose and lolled down like pink woolly tongues.

This is one of those books in whose language you want to wander and cavort.  You want to see where the story will go--but that is ancillary to the rich pleasures of this voice, this sensibility, this guide to wherever it is you will go.  I don't know where the journey might lead, but I find myself not particularly concerned with that aspect of the reading, but there is such a luxury here, such a wealth of language and detail.  It is poetry crystalized into prose, but not in the way of dull and flaccid prose poems, but rather in the way of a prose artist who values the language and treats it, above all the aspects of his art, as the centerpiece.  Just as with Francine Prose's Goldengrove, the riches here promise to be in the language; and just as with that fine book, minor flaws in the plot, composition, characters, and incident of the narrative will not compromise the pleasure of reading the book.

Or so I think now upon short exposure--obviously, time will tell.