I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place
(Libby/OverDrive eAudiobook)

*Starred Review* In his latest and most revealing and disquieting memoir, Norman revisits milestones along his off-the-beaten path to becoming a writer. Norman's nonfiction (In Fond Remembrance of Me, 2005) is every bit as spellbinding and mysterious as his fiction (What Is Left the Daughter, 2010), especially this inquisitive, dissecting sequence of recollections. Norman begins with the fateful summer of 1964, when, as a young teen in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he works as a bookmobile attendant while his burgeoning love for birds leads to a tragic encounter with a swan, his criminally inclined brother's girlfriend accelerates his sexual education, and he discovers just how dastardly his father truly is. Norman drops out of school, heads to Canada, and becomes involved with a painter whose death triggers his fascination with the Canadian arctic. There he tangles with a hostile shaman and finds himself hanging out with a band that plays only John Lennon songs on the night Lennon is killed. Norman also sensitively but frankly chronicles the horrors of the murder-suicide committed by a poet while staying with her young son in the Normans' home a decade ago. Fluent in strangeness, versed in ambiguity, Norman combines rapturous description with meticulous restraint as he potently recounts these feverish, eerie, life-altering events and considers the profound and haunting questions they raise.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

In this luminous memoir, novelist Norman (The Bird Artist) recalls moments of "arresting strangeness," even in the midst of his quest to gain clarity and stay balanced emotionally. Norman writes of five places where he lived and the characters he met in each, providing him with an opportunity to reflect on his life. With a twinge of melancholy and a steely resolve not to let himself be moved or hurt, Norman regales us with his tale of lust, death (he inadvertently kills a swan on a local lake), and disappointment that mark his teenage summer of 1964 in Grand Rapids, Mich.: "I was in a phase of moving away from people... and when the duck and swans... migrated south in their formations, I remember feeling bereft." Norman moves from one place to the next, often simply wishing to look at birds and write about them. He also recalls events that marked changes in his life: his work in an Intuit village where he first heard the phrase used in the book's title; a murder-suicide in his house in D.C. and its impact on his family; and his encounter with an owl and a kingfisher in Vermont. Norman is currently content to let the world come to his Vermont doorstep, but he may not have given up travelling quite yet. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Five stellar personal essays by Norman (Creative Writing/Univ. of Maryland; What Is Left the Daughter, 2010, etc.) that shed light on his melancholy, tragedy-struck fiction and larger human failures. Norman's novels tend to circle around a tight range of themes: gloomy Canadian backdrops, coincidence, death and a love for wildlife (particularly birds) that gives his work a quirky, musical vocabulary. These essays suggest the mood of the author isn't very distinct from that of his fiction, and sometimes the connections are explicit: One piece is about an affair in his 20s that ended when his lover died in a plane crash, a story echoed in his 2002 novel, The Haunting of L. Norman's fictional tensions between fathers and sons also have a real-life analogue in this book's opening essay, about his teenage summer working in a bookmobile as his estranged father attempts to worm back into his life. The author treats these incidents with poise and intellect (references to novelists and poets abound) but also with some glints of humor. In one essay, his criminal brother keeps calling for help crossing into Canada, and their phone exchanges are both comically absurd and exasperating for the author. The best piece is the title essay, about a John Lennon cover band in the Canadian tundra and the spate of bad weather, spirit folklore and music that consumed the community after Lennon's death. Its most harrowing is the closing piece, in which a poet housesitting at Norman's home in 2003 killed her 2-year-old son and herself. Written evidence of the woman's cracked psyche keeps stalking Norman in the house, and his chronicle of shaking off its effects pays tribute to the (sometimes-malicious) power of words and the wilderness' power as a balm for heartbreak. A bracing, no-nonsense memoir, infused with fresh takes on love, death and human nature.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.