"How does one speak to a man sitting wrapped in the silence of a spring day -- sitting wrapped in the majesty of a plaid shirt on his own doorstep, Stella thought." (131)
A quote from Sheila Watson's Deep Hollow Creek (1992), a short novel she wrote before the publication of her best known and most influential novel, The Double Hook (1959). The quote comes late in the book, in the last ten pages, and they and the other ten before them depart from the more-or-less unresolved tensions that preceded them, making these last pages almost a misplaced prelude, and why I love this book so much; a book that, if it were published today, would be considered out of time, as it was when Watson wrote it -- in the 1930s.
photo: Maurice Boote
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