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    Fidelity: Five Stories
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    Fidelity: Five Stories
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    Fidelity: Five Stories
    Ebook196 pages2 hours

    Fidelity: Five Stories

    By Wendell Berry

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "Berry richly evokes Port William's farmlands and hamlets, and his characters are fiercely individual, yet mutually protective in everything they do. . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world." —New York Times Book Review

    Reissued as part of Counterpoint's celebration of beloved American author Wendell Berry, the five stories in Fidelity return readers to Berry's fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and the familiar characters who form a tight-knit community within.

    "Each of these elegant stories spans the twentieth century and reveals the profound interconnectedness of the farmers and their families to one another, to their past and to the landscape they inhabit." —The San Francisco Chronicle

    "Visionary . . . rooted in a deep concern for nature and the land, . . . [these stories are] tough, relentless and clear. In a roundabout way they are confrontational because they ask basic questions about men and women, violence, work and loyalty." —Hans Ostrom, The Morning News Tribune

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateAug 14, 2018
    ISBN9781640090767

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    Reviews for Fidelity

    4/5

    77 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Slow, gentle, thoughtful and thought-provoking.
    • 3/5
      A lovely collection of stories of a time and a life gone by when people back in the hills still farmed with horses and roamed the hills freely, hunting and just enjoying the world. These sketches show me the insides of people I have never known nor could never be, but explain them to me. There is a soldier returning from WWII, still not sure what it was all about or if it was worth it except to keep his buddies alive. There is a good man shot dead by a friend, another fairly good man, who was simply despondent about losing his farm and got drunk and went out of his mind. He killed himself when he sobered up. The two families went on being close friends as they had always been. One story is about a man who rescues his aged, dying father from a hospital and a life support system to let him die in the woods where he was happy. All of the stories have depth and tenderness from a writer who knew about the people in his region and loved them and saved their stories, and their land, for future generations. The land descriptions are very real and very beautiftul, through the eyes of the people who lived on it and loved it. The farming and the town was dying out as the younger generation grew up and moved away, leaving behind he ties that had bound the families together for so long, through hardships and pain, and leaving behing the land that had sustained them.
    • 5/5
      Lyrical. That's the word I use when I can't describe concise, simple, beautiful prose. I learned about Wendell Berry from a LT group about nature or the outdoors. He is not a nature writer, however. He is an agrarian, human-nature writer.These family stories are all beautiful. "A Jonquil for Mary Penn" is one of the best stories I have ever read concerning, love, friendship, loyalty, teamwork, community. "Fidelity" may change my feelings that Tolstoy ("The Death of Ivan Ilyich", "Master and Man") wrote the best stories about death and dying. Berry seems to be up there with Steinbeck, Delillo, Hemingway and McCarthy. I've hundreds of books on my TBR pile, from Aristotle to Zola. 'Looks like I'm going to add a few more from this wonderful Kentuckian.
    • 3/5
      Quiet, homey stories. I might have liked this better if I had read any of the longer Port William books first. As it was, for some of the stories there wasn't enough background for me to fully enter into the relevance of the details. "Fidelity" is the best, full of understated humor at how the locals put one over on the city detective, and also a valuable teaching in how far our current society has come from providing a good death for our elderly. "Making It Home" is forgettable, and seems so at odds with the current PTSD of so many of our returning vets. "A Jonquil for Mary Penn" drags on, tho I do like the way it ends.
    • 4/5
      The short story Fidelity in this book is a must-read for physicians. We are often not as wise as we think in our dealings with patients.
    • 5/5
      As with most Wendell Berry, this is a splendid work. Each of the five stories are beautifully wrought. A treasure.