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Season of Fury and Wonder
Season of Fury and Wonder | Sharon Butala
7 posts | 1 read | 8 to read
There are things that it is impossible to learn when you are young, no matter how much you read and study. The season of fury and wonder, in Sharon Butalas world, is the old age of women. These stories present the lives of old women women of experience, whove seen much of life, whove tasted of its sweetness and its bitter possibilities, and have developed opinions and come to conclusions about what it all amounts to. These are stories of todays old women, who understand that they have been created by their pasts. But theres another layer to this standard-setting example of cronelit. Not content to rest on her considerable literary laurels, Sharon Butala continues to push the boundaries of her art. The stories in Season of Fury and Wonder are all reactions to other, classic, works of literature that she has encountered and admired. These stories are, in their various ways, inspired by and tributes to works by the likes of Raymond Carver, Willa Cather, James Joyce, Shirley Jackson, Flannery OConner, John Cheever, Alan Sillitoe, Ernest Hemmingway, Tim OBrien, Edgar Allan Poe and Anton Checkov.
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shawnmooney
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shawnmooney
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Lindy
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All of the short stories in this collection are about old women. It's full of memorable characters and gorgeous prose and so, of course, I loved it. Winner of the City of Calgary WO Mitchell Book Prize.

#CanadianAuthor

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Lindy
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Ava was given, on occasion, to talking like a 19th c novel, rising verbally sometimes even to the height of a Henry James sentence, spieling it out as she gazed high up into space, although more often she got lost in her own sentences‘ complexities & had to let her voice trail away. Sometimes, though, she made it to the end, maintaining the relationship of the clauses & the phrases, not forgetting the original idea, 👇

Lindy at the close, tying a bow on the tail of a subdued snake. 4y
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Lindy
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In the weeks before the raven incident, the Americans, in a rage against ‘the elites,‘ (meaning anyone who knows anything—shades of the Red Guards!) elected a president whose ramblings, as well as being untruthful more often than not, frequently defied reason. I saw him as the purveyor of the original, many-formed mythological Lord of Chaos himself.
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TobeyTheScavengerMonk I keep thinking about how I will explain this time in history to my kids when they‘re older. I think I‘ve settled on “It was like a super villain was president. He was just as evil as Lex Luthor, but a lot dumber.” 4y
Butterfinger @Lindy @TobeyTheScavengerMonk those are my new names for him - Lord of Chaos and the dumb Lex Luthor. 4y
Lindy @Butterfinger 😆👍 4y
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Lindy
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Why should the life of an old person be a poor copy of the life of a young one? As if to be an old person was merely to be a failed young one. And then I began to wonder what the life of an old person could be on its own, as if there had never been a young person, with her ceaseless activity, her endless drama from excessive weeping to equally excessive excitement, inside this wrinkled and shapeless exterior.

charl08 Beautiful! 4y
Lindy @charl08 😘 4y
48 likes2 comments
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Lindy
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I have personally discovered over the years that if you constantly stifle your feelings out of concern for what you‘ve been taught is appropriate behaviour, you soon can‘t feel anything at all. Or at least, you have to dig very deep to figure out what your real feelings are, and that mostly this will not seem worth the trouble of doing.

Cathythoughts Sounds good ✨✨✨ 4y
Reggie 💥 Boom. 4y
Lindy @Cathythoughts It‘s a collection that will have me doing some work tracking down other stories, because each piece is a riff on someone else‘s story. The quote is from the author‘s response to Raymond Carver‘s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. 4y
Lindy @Reggie I‘m glad you recognized the power in this observation. 🤗 4y
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