I Hate To Leave This Beautiful Place

€œThe events of a single episode of Howard Norman€s superb memoir are both on the edge of chaos and gathered superbly into coherent meaning . . . A wise, riskily written, beautiful book.€ €" Michael Ondaatje

Howard Norman€s spellbinding memoir begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile, in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother€s girlfriend. His life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales€"including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is €œI hate to leave this beautiful place€€"and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. Years later, in Washington, D.C., an act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a murder-suicide when Norman and his wife loan their home to a poet and her young son. In Norman€s hands, life€s arresting strangeness is made into a profound, creative, and redemptive story.

€œUses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling periods of his life, each separated by time and subtle shifts in his narrative voice . . . The originality of his telling here is as surprising as ever.€ €" Washington Post

€œThese stories almost seem like tall tales themselves, but Norman renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these bizarre experiences, he finds solace through the places he€s lived and their quirky inhabitants, human and avian.€ €" The New Yorker