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(More customer reviews)Annie Dillard is one of those writers who is all or nothing. Many people don't "get" her and find her bewildering. But to some of us, she speaks to some unspoken hunger in our souls that we never knew we had.The year after a personal tragedy I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm incessantly, finding in Dillard's thoughts and imagery a necessary verbalization of my pain and spiritual confusion. She is able to capture in one short phrase the complex muddle of emotions found at certain times in one's life and the reader knows that she's been there. To filch a line from another book: "When one walks in the shadow of insanity, the finding of another footstep on the sand is something close to a blessed event." I do not exaggerate when I say Holy the Firm saved my mind.
This is not to say that Dillard is all gloom-and-doom. Many of her lines are extremely witty and can make you burst out laughing with her insight and sardonic humor.
Either she clicks with you or she doesn't. But for those of us with whom she does, Dillard is wonderful.
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In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.
This is a profound book about the natural world -- both its beauty and its cruelty -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard knows so well.
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