Book Review: Chasing the Green Sun (Marilyn Brandt Smith)Reviewed by Ellen LaFlecheChasing the Green Sun by Marilyn Brandt Smith is a book that vibrates with color, especially the solar green of the title. The title refers to the strange aura surrounding the sun that was caused by the author's childhood glaucoma. The moon, the sun, the stars, indoor fluorescent lights, all glowed green when viewed by the young Marilyn Brandt Smith. The color green took on many layers of meaning throughout the book – as a reference to St. Patrick's Day, as a way to describe a hired driver without much experience, as the lush, remembered hue of shy grasses, and more. Smith, who experienced total blindness in early adolescence after an accident at school, uses her visual memories of colors and images to share her life with readers – her experiences as a daughter, student, wife, mother, Peace Corps volunteer, friend and writer, to name a few. Her book is a creative blend of interrelated short stories, memoirs, and poems, all of which are anchored in time through a series of haiku that mark each month of the year. I experienced this remarkable book as a solar system of ideas and images. Each writing form has its own planetary trajectory, orbiting through the book at regular intervals – poem, short story, memoir, haiku. Each section spins around the metaphorical green sun at the center of the writer's universe. Although the individual stories, poems and memoirs move back and forth in time, the haiku occur in linear sequence, rotating the book through one calendar year. I found the book's organization to be a bit disorienting at first; it took me a while to figure out how to maneuver comfortably through the rapidly shifting perspectives, navigating from poem to short story to memoir, back to the haiku that signaled another month of the year. Ah, I finally realized, this may be an effective way to metaphorically take a visually sighted reader through some of the spatial and emotional challenges of navigating the world while visually impaired. Early in the book, tension is generated when we find out that Smith's son Jay sees that neon green haze when he looks at the moon. One of the most compelling sections of the book, Twenty-Eight Years and Counting (Echo) , is a short memoir describing the creative, loving ways in which the Smith family dealt with Jay's progressive blindness and diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome. This story about Jay, infused with wry humor and compelling anecdotes, is the perfect introduction to the Smith family; it also provides a glimpse into Marilyn Brandt Smith's role as wife and mother. Jay is my Internet guru. We started computer programming lessons for him at eleven, because we
saw his talent emerging in computer classes at school. He was able to fool his teacher by using computer Braille. She thought he
handwrote his math homework. He wrote a program which cut his spelling homework time to practically nothing. Still, he passed
the tests with flying colors. Obviously he was a whiz at keeping secrets too. This short memoir, and the memoirs that followed, were my favorite part of the book. I am always looking to learn something new in a book – not necessarily new information, but new ways of looking at the world, new emotional perspectives, new metaphors and symbol systems. Not only did this book provide new emotional and metaphorical insights, it also gave me new ways of understanding the word looking. Adding yet more layers of meaning to these consistently compelling memoirs is the poetry, especially the recurring haiku. Contrary to common belief, it is very hard to write a good haiku. Smith's haiku, appearing in pairs that celebrate each month's sun and moon cycle, are superb. Here are two of my favorites, marking the month of July. BUCK/HAY/THUNDER MOON I love the contradictory imagery of velvet antlers, as well as the metaphorical implications of such a contradiction. The sharp and dangerous set of male antlers has its inevitably softer, more feminine side. The use of sunblock here is important; given that the sun is one of the central themes in the book, the indirect reference to possible sunburn and skin cancer is interesting. In July Sun, the reader is treated to a Fourth of July fireworks celebration, aware that Smith must rely on her visual memories of color. Because a sighted reader has learned so much about blindness at this point in the book, he or she also experiences those colorful fireworks as sound – the boom and sizzle of each explosion; as smell– the acrid sting of the ash and gunpowder mixing with meat-flavored smoke from the barbeque; and as movement – the shuddering of the ground and sky. Because Smith so successfully conveyed her experience with blindness, each reader, regardless of their visual abilities, will accompany Smith on her sensory journey, smelling, tasting and feeling her life. This is one reason why the book works so well as a mélange of literary forms – each memoir informs the next short story, which makes connections with the poems that follow, and so on, creating that wonderful, spinning galaxy anchored by the solar sun. Here is the sun cooling in October while other aspects of life begin to burn hotter. OCTOBER SUN While the irony in this poem provides humor, some sections of the book are LOL (laugh out loud) funny. While reading this book at my city library, I was politely shushed by another patron because I couldn't stop myself from howling with laughter. Here is Smith describing a childhood vacation through New Mexico, Texas and Florida in a Winnebago. Of course, Mom wanted it warmer, Dad wanted it cooler, the driver wanted the window open for
smoking, teens wanted the radio at night, little brother wanted to wait for McDonald's, Cracker Barrel's line was too long, the dog
threw up, and the shower overflowed, soaking the carpet. We lived through it all, and loved it. Although this anecdote is LOL funny, the last line ends that magical summer vacation with a simple truth. Stress is a small space is miserable, a brilliant metaphor for family life, for illness, for disability, for life's challenges and hardship. Many of these life challenges are document in the book. Here Brandt Smith describes what happened to her in school when she was in early adolescence. I had gone to the infirmary after hitting my eye on the corner of a ladder-back chair. When I was
admitted, I had vision in my left eye; when the doctor showed up eight hours later, I had none. The rhyming poems in Brandt Smith's collection are especially compelling when read aloud. Here is a section from Arlie's Oak. Arlie's Oak Arlie's Oak is a strong poetic example of what the reader can expect from the book – Brandt Smith's obvious love of language and sound, wry irony coupled with sorrow, metaphorical images of the moon, the complications of family life. I found the memoirs to be stronger than the short stories, but this is more a statement about the extreme strength of the memoirs than a critique of the short stories. I couldn't wait for the next true-life adventure, and was sometimes tempted to skip ahead to the next installment. I am glad I did not, because the themes introduced in the short stories were skillfully picked up and carried into the memoirs. A few of the sections were co-authored with her husband or a colleague, and I loved how this reflected Brandt Smith's communal relationship with the act of writing. I truly loved the originality and metaphorical depth of this book.
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