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Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

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Berlin after A-Tumblin' Down

December 5, 2023 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This November I finally returned to Wittenberg after four years away—which is a long time for me, since I’ve taught a course on Luther’s theology in Wittenberg every November since 2009. The reason I didn’t make it here in the interval is too obvious to state. It felt like a homecoming, and I enjoyed it hugely.

But it wasn’t till I got here—and took one of my free days for a day trip to Berlin—that I realized something else. Between my last visit in 2019, and this visit in 2023, I wrote, edited, and published my first novel, A-Tumblin’ Down. Both East Germany and Berlin are essential to the story. Yet in that entire process, I didn’t so much as set foot here…

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Tags novels, communism, A-Tumblin' Down
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What I Learned from Agatha Christie, Part 5: Horticulture

March 14, 2023 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Saxifrage

I have already shared two posts on visual vocabulary learned from Agatha Christie… but that doesn’t begin to cover the horticultural entires. Seriously, why has no one ever written Agatha Christie, Botanist?!

Some plants (chiefly flowers in her works) are so common that even a non-gardener like me knows them: roses, lilies, chrysanthemums, yew trees. But I encountered quite a lot of unknown terms in my latest read-through of Miss Marple in particular (the spinster detective is a passionate gardener). Though, as I’ve looked them up, I realized that I know a number of them by sight, just hitherto not by name.

Enjoy this Christieish bouquet…

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Tags Agatha Christie, novels, detective fiction
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What I Learned from Agatha Christie, Part 4: More Visual Vocabulary

March 7, 2023 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Lisle thread

My March 2023 issue of Theology & a Recipe deals with “Miss Marple’s Low Anthropology”… which was, of course, a transparent excuse for going back and re-reading all the Miss Marple stories and novels. And, as I’ve documented before, Agatha’s trickily plain prose once again expanded my visual vocabulary. Hence, these fruits of my re-reading for your enjoyment…

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Tags Agatha Christie, novels, detective fiction
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Mimesis 2: The Sequel

December 27, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

My title for this post is a joke. I’m not sure there is anyone alive today qualified to write a sequel to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, an astonishing survey of the literature of Western civilization and its spiritual-moral-humanistic underpinnings.

Just for starters, Auerbach apologizes that he can’t read the Russian novelists in the original language, which he considers an embarrassing flaw in no way compensated for the fact that he did read the original Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and English of the other books he considers—and not only the modern iterations thereof but in all their chronological variety.

He also apologizes that, because he had to write this book in exile in Istanbul, he didn’t have his library to hand, so he had to work from memory.

So, let me admit that I am not worthy even to untie the straps of this scholar’s sandals.

That said, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. This was such an amazing book that I want to record my thoughts about it, and also offer some speculations about what it implies for where literature has gone since he left off his story in the early twentieth century…

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Tags literature, novels
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The Backstory of "A-Tumblin' Down"

November 29, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

The very first scenes of A-Tumblin’ Down were written in 2006 or 2007, when I was in a little fiction writing group in grad school. Donald and Kitty arrived on the scene first, fully formed and self-named. Donald was already haunted by his imposing grandfather and the historical veracity of the battle of Jericho; Kitty’s council was more real to her than any human beings. Some of the bits of the first two chapters involving them survived to the present novel.

I filed the tiny seeds of this story away in the deep freeze and went on with another dozen or so years of life…

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Tags novels, Thornbush Press
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Last But Not Least, Slovak Novel(la)s in English #42: That Alluring Land

June 14, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In all fairness, this should have been “Slovak Novels in English #1” (that honor went somewhat haphazardly to The Year of the Frog instead), because it is the very first work of Slovak literature in English that I ever read.

The year was 1998, and the discovery was online used booksellers. Those who came of age after the internet revolution and yet are bibliophiles cannot even fathom the limitations on voracious readers then. We had what bookstores physically carried—and even if a well-curated collection beyond the boilerplate bestsellers, there’s just only so much a Waldenbooks in the mall could stock, much less make a profit on selling. Libraries had more range, but inevitable limitations as well. I remember having heard of books that I knew I’d never find, or seeing “Also by this author” in beloved books and knowing it was a lost cause. Even used bookstores tended to focus on mass market paperbacks in high-volume genres like mystery or romance.

So really, you just can’t fathom what wonder opened up when you could type in a title and author—find the book—and buy it…

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Tags Slovak novels in English, Slovakia, novels
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One More Excerpt from "A-Tumblin' Down"

May 28, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Sunday afternoons found Donald on the old corduroy sofa, inert, a glass of sweet tea shedding tears of condensation all over a coffee table too wretched to protect with coasters. Most of his parishioners would be in the same position, though alert, not inert, a six-pack near at hand, suffering through the spectacle of the Angels creaming the Yankees with a superstitious attention that reminded Donald of Luther’s dictum: if only I could pray the way my dog looks at a piece of meat. He accepted the dictum but not the beer—there are limits to what post-Holiness piety can enjoy in good conscience. Communion wine was his only indulgence on that score, and he suffered no small amount of ribbing from his colleagues for it. Occasionally Donald considered spreading a rumor that he was a recovering alcoholic, as that seemed to be the only acceptable excuse for abstinence. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to lie.

As a rule, baseball was just compelling enough to absorb Donald’s depleted post-church consciousness, but on this day, by the innocent fault of the Sunday School, he was instead back in the grip of his mental debate with Grandfather Abney.

After the service, Donald had led Bible study for the adults upstairs in the sanctuary while the children trooped downstairs to sing with Mrs. Forrad and Ms. Gross. Afterwards they split up into makeshift classrooms partitioned by dividers hanging from the ceiling. When the education hour was over, Pastor Donald came downstairs to pray everyone safe and healthy through the week ahead before the mass exodus to baseball or football or lunch or shopping in Kuhsota.

But when he arrived downstairs, the children were twitching with excitement, the teachers beaming proudly. Before he could even open his mouth to ask, he was informed that the whole Sunday School had prepared a special treat for him, and wasn’t it lucky that he had chosen Joshua out of all the lessons to preach on that morning? The teachers had decided that chapter 24 was a bit abstract for their small charges, but it was a great opportunity to cover the battle of Jericho—a real favorite when they were kids, how come it never came up in the Sunday lessons?—and they had a song to go with it. Maybe Pastor Donald knew the song. Would he like to sing along?

Of course he did, and of course he would…

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Tags novels, A-Tumblin' Down, serialization
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Introducing "A-Tumblin' Down"

May 17, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Donald rose with the sun, whatever the time of year. At the summer solstice that meant quarter to five and by Christmas nearly seven. Late August was a comfortable sort of time with a reasonable wake-up call of six o’clock. He made his own coffee. Carmichael scoffed at the “swill,” as she called it, that fueled him, and would not suffer her own coffee, brewed from beans dutifully toted northwards by her discriminating City parents or purchased at no small expense from the Shibboleth Co-op, to be wasted on his tastebuds. He was amused by her snobbery and made a point of smacking his lips on his “ditchwater” (another term of disapprobation) whenever she saw him drink it.

On this particular morning, the pleasure of sunrise, coffee, and quiet vanished the moment Donald flipped open his pastoral agenda to find the next Sunday’s lessons.

He should have seen it coming. It’s not like he hadn’t come across it before. Donald was on his fourth trip through the three-year lectionary, a curiosity that remained unfathomable to his assorted cousins and uncles, for whom there was no preaching but expository preaching, straight through one book of the Bible at a time, one verse at a time. Donald had in fact always taken wary note of this particular Sunday, the Fourteenth after Pentecost in Year B, for its distinction of featuring the one and only passage from the book of Joshua in the whole cycle…

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Slovak Novels in English #41: The Bride

May 3, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This is my second review of a work by Grosman, and one of a by-now not-insignificant number of Slovak novels not actually composed in Slovak.

Grosman was Slovak, and that was his primary language; moreover, as in The Shop on Main Street, the novel (or really novella—at 113 pp. and print the size of a YA novel from the 70s, I’d bet it’s not much over 20,000 words in length) is set in eastern Slovakia. Grosman’s adult career as a writer and film producer took place in Prague, however, where Czech was naturally the language of choice.

However, Grosman was not in residence in Prague when this novel was first published in the original language. The year of publication was 1969, but the year before was the Prague Spring, followed by the Warsaw Pact invasion…

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Tags Slovak novels in English, Slovakia, novels
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What I Learned from Agatha Christie, Part 3: What Would Happen Thereafter

April 5, 2022 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Passenger to Frankfurt is not exactly Christie’s most beloved novel. It’s a thriller, rather than a straight-up detective mystery, for one thing. In my recent quest to read all her novels, I discovered that she peppered a fair few thrillers in with the mysteries. She was never as good in this genre, but I can appreciate her need to change things up to keep her writing and imagination fresh.

That’s not the only problem with PTF, though. It came out in 1970, toward the end of her life and career, and it’s beyond question that her powers were waning at that point. (However, in all fairness, I think her silliest thriller of all was The Big Four, which was published in 1927, right as she was hitting her stride.) Christie fans know full well that she was of a conservative turn of mind, very irritable about high taxes, and generally unhappy at the drift of things, socially and culturally. That really shows through in PTF. But this too should be qualified: a novel like Third Girl reckons with what has become of “young people these days” and takes them at face value. It’s not all invective.

You can read a very thorough description of what passes for PTF’s plot on Wikipedia. The opening sequence in which the protagonist trades places with someone who is convinced that she will be killed if she takes her flight is one of the best in Christie’s work—it’s a shame the rest of the book didn’t follow through on the initial premise.

But here’s where it gets interesting. For one thing, the titular city is Frankfurt. An obvious choice for an international flight hub, but I can’t help but wonder if more lies behind it: namely, the so-called Frankfurt school, which unleashed Critical Theory in all its corrosive glory on the world. That would be utterly speculative on my part—except that in this book Christie actually mentions by name Herbert Marcuse (the leading proponent of the Frankfurt school)! Who knew that she was keeping up with, at that time, arcane philosophical movements? …

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Tags novels, Agatha Christie, detective fiction
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