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    Provinces of Night
    Provinces of Night
    Provinces of Night
    Audiobook11 hours

    Provinces of Night

    Written by William Gay

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It's 1952, and E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman's Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he's been gone ever since he gunned down a deputy thirty years before. Two of his sons won't be home to greet him: Warren lives a life of alcoholic philandering down in Alabama, and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with. His third son, Brady, is still home, but he's an addled soothsayer given to voodoo and bent on doing whatever it takes to keep E.F. from seeing the wife he abandoned. Only Fleming, E.F.'s grandson, is pleased with the old man's homecoming, but Fleming's life is soon to careen down an unpredictable path hewn by the beautiful Raven Lee Halfacre.

    In the great Southern tradition of Faulkner, Styron, and Cormac McCarthy, William Gay wields a prose as evocative and lush as the haunted and humid world it depicts. Provinces of Night is a tale redolent of violence and redemption-a whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel whose indelible finale is not an ending nearly so much as it is an apotheosis.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMar 25, 2005
    ISBN9781596005938
    Provinces of Night
    Author

    William Gay

    William Gay is the author of the novel The Long Home. His short stories have appeared in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and New Stories from the South 1999 and 2000. He was awarded the 1999 William Peden Award and the 2000 James A. Michener Memorial Priz

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    Reviews for Provinces of Night

    4/5

    104 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Loved this book. Gay's humor relieves some of the darkness of the Gothic night.
    • 4/5
      It's 1952 when Fleming Bloodworth's father take off from Lewis County, Tennessee for Detroit to tack down the peddler that ran away with his wife. This leaves seventeen-year old Fleming to shift for himself in the sharecropper's cabin, which he'd much rather do than move in with his grandmother and his supposedly psychic Uncle Brady. Fleming's summer of freedom with his friends takes an unexpected turn when his banjo-picking grandfather, E.F., shows up after a twenty-year absence. The dialog is so true to life, the characters so vividly drawn, and the tale so fascinating that you don't realize until you've finished that you've read 293 pages (11 hours on audio) of a tale full of things that are much more entertaining to read about than to live through: moonshine-guzzling, gun-fights, knife-fights, con games, vendettas, airplane crashes, fornication, hexes, share-cropping, near-crazed preaching, and plenty of drunk driving. Readers are forewarned that Hohenwald resident Gay's prose is rich in adjectives and images and short on punctuation.
    • 5/5
      There’s a solid timelessness to William Gay’s writing, a sense that this particular world has existed and will continue long after the story is done. E. F. Bloodworth returns to his home in rural Tennessee, where he abandoned his wife and sons twenty years earlier to live as an itinerant musician. Bloodworth’s trouble was whiskey and women, “boldeyed women staring up at him out of the hot electric dark who seemed to be hanging on to nothing save the night itself.” Bloodworth’s grandson Fleming, knowing his grandfather for the first time, becomes the now old man’s protector. But it’s apparent from the outset that Fleming is made differently from the rest of the family and won’t fall into the same traps as his father and Bloodworth’s other sons have. Gay creates a sense of place: rural Tennessee in the 1950s. The people and mores provide the bulk of it, but nature, as always, is threaded throughout the story and receives some of his most evocative description. Thunder is “a coarse incoherent whisper, just a madman mumbling to himself in the eaves of the world.” “Tilting blackbirds burnished by the noon sun gleamed like contrivances of tinfoil.” “In the east a reef of salmoncolored clouds was rimlit by a bright metallic color he had no name for.” “Somewhere out there in the dark beyond the levee the Mississippi rolled like something larger than life, like a myth, like a dream the world was having.” Gay’s writing summons you to hang onto every word in every sentence. If you drift, something will be missed.
    • 3/5
      Beautiful poetic writing and at times hilariously funny. There's a family and a collection of other people who whose lives basically revolve around drinking moonshine, doing as little as possible to get by, and wondering aimlessly through life. There are two characters with gifts, a grandfather and grandson, that are misunderstood and unappreciated by the people who've known them all their lives. These two form a close bond. All the while, everyone seems completely oblivious to the TVA project that will flood and put a lot of the region underwater.
    • 4/5
      William Gay has an intense and beautiful grasp of the English language. The lyricism in this novel is superb although there are some repetitious and weak comparisons when it feels like he's just stretching it a bit too much. The Bloodworth family's story is an intriguing one and Gay writes about their calamitous ruin with a deft grace that captivates until the end of the novel.
    • 3/5
      In the hands of another writer this story could have gotten sentimental instead of just emotional. Gay knew how to tread that line. I didn’t love it as much as a couple of his other novels only because there wasn’t a real plot to this one. Things just happened and people reacted. Not too surprising and fairly gentle in terms of violence and cruelty, some things he’s gone deeply into with other books. There isn’t a villain and there isn’t a hero; these are just folks trying to get by.Stand out lines -“Childhood polio had marked him with a warped leg that limped still when he walked and left him perhaps as well with other warpings not as visible to the naked eye.” p 23“He had begun to fear for his sanity, felt that madness tracked him like a homeless dog, needed only a kind word or gesture to throw its lot with him forever.” p 34“Some from so far back in Godforsaken hollows the owls and chickens bedded down together just for the company.” p 67“Together they knitted whole the fabric of night where violence had rent it.” p 78“There was something oddly restful about the fireflies. He couldn’t put his finger on it but he drew comfort from it anyway. The way they’d seemed not separate entities but a single being, a moving river of light that flowed above the dark water like its negative image and attained a transient and fragile dominion over the provinces of night.” p 161“He thinks the world is his front yard, and everything else, people or whatever, that’s just stuff left lying around for him to play with.” p 215 (what a perfect description of a sociopath!)“Mama might have been a schoolteacher instead of a drunk. You men are always breaking things you don’t know how to fix.” p 217 (a girl explaining the effect her father's desertion had on her mother)“Well I’ll be damned, he said. He grinned ruefully. The sky was black with chickens coming home to roost, he could see them settling about the trees.” p 264
    • 4/5
      Still a very good book with some strong anecdotes and heartbreaking prose as is typical of Gay. But while it's his best-known and best-reviewed novel, it seemed the most mainstream and debut-like to me. Just a bit too on the nose in parts. In any case, a worthwhile read.
    • 4/5
      Loved this book. Gay's humor relieves some of the darkness of the Gothic night.
    • 5/5


      Provinces Of Night by William Gay

      4.5*

      As we are introduced to Gay's characters, it's 1952 in rural Tennessee.
      Two important elements of the 1952 backdrop - the valley is about to be buried under a lake by the Tennessee Valley Authority and the nation enters the Korean War.

      E.F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to his mountain home "seventy miles back of Nashville, Tennessee.
      He's an itinerant bluesman, determined to abandon the life of vagrant banjo picker.
      He's returned home to make amends with the wife and 3 sons he'd abandoned years before, after a violent gunfight.
      It's not to be...
      Son Warren, a former war hero is now an alcoholic womanizer, with an equally destructive son.
      Boyd has abandoned his son Fleming and headed for Detroit, in revengeful pursuit of his wife and the peddler she ran off with.
      Brady still lives with his mother and tells fortunes, casts spells, places hexes as he chooses.

      We'll walk with each of these men and experience what motivates them.
      But, it's really 17year old Fleming's story.
      He's an aspiring writer trying to evade the violent, self destructive legacy of his family.
      "The youngest and best hope for the future of this family line resides with him."

      Grandfather EF and grandson Fleming choose to share the road of redemption in the little time allotted them.

      The story in compelling in an earthy kind of way.
      There is definite darkness but also some humor to balance it.

      It's hauntingly tragic.
      It was termed a "whiskey-scented, knife-scarred novel "

      I felt it was masterfully written and I highly recommend the read.
      In reviewing it, I can't do justice to the intensity of the novel.

      -------

      William Elbert Gay (October 27, 1941 – February 23, 2012)
    • 4/5
      A strange and absurdly poignant novel, with an intriguing cast of characters and a slew of intersecting plotlines that give you an almost gnarled bluesman's roadman of life in rural times. What William Gay does best is shape a world that seems to exist outside of the pages---character who still seem to be living even when they are outside the narrative.

      Fleming was one hell of a hero, and I could see a lot of myself in his thoughts and fears. EF, the old man, comes across as both genuine and lost, set adrift by thousands of bad decisions he's had a lifetime to fuck up. Strong, the archaic, almost atavistic, portrayal of the old fashioned Man. Jr Albright is a hilarious fool of a character, well meaning but silly beyond belief, like Cormac McCarthy's Harrogate mixed with a character from the Trailer Park Boys. Raven Lee was funny and charming, Boyd frustrating but intriguing, a mystery himself, the blood that flows thru Fleming. Brady is a mewling fool, as if he and Warren could make only one functioning man between them.

      Only the cobbled together conclusion, a wrap up, knocks this down from a 5. Truly funny and beautiful in many ways. The voices of dead bluesmen churning out their stories.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written. I tis 1052 and E. F. Bloodworth is finally coming home to Ackerman's Field, Tennessee. Itinerant banjo picker and volatile vagrant, he's been gone ever since he gunneddown a deputy thirty years ago. Two of his sons won't be home to greet him: Warren is an alcoholic philander down in Alabama , and Boyd has gone to Detroit in vengeful pursuit of his wife and the pedler she ran off with. Only Fleming, E. F.'s grandson, is pleased with the old man's homecoming.
    • 4/5
      Really great writing. Gay's sentences are poetic and compelling. The best southern writer that is writing today.
    • 3/5
      An interesting story of a family and their bonds during the early 1950's in the rural south. Fleming seemed, at first, to have no goals or outllok on life. As the story grew, so did Fleming's bond with his grandfather. Tough reading at times but very well written. Recommended reading.