The Best of 2006 (x0.5): Book

{Note: because of Typepad's service FUBAR, this is the draft version of this post.  I'm trying to get the actual final version that appeared yesterday back together.  Apologies. --Ed.}

So many really good books have crossed my desk the first half of this year that picking one is a difficult task for me.  Yet the one that I've chosen, Debra Falconer's The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, not only stands out as the strongest piece of fiction I've read this year but it also defied some pretty long odds to make it to the top of my half-year list.  For one, I'm not a fan of historical fiction.  Second, the Inner Snob wanted to know just what a woman writer from Australia* could possibly know about a lesser historical figure from Custer's Seventh Cavalry.  I mean, come on, research is one thing, but turning the research into a piece of fiction that will keep my interest is still another.  Snob was screaming, "Suspension, disbelief!"  In fact, had the book been heavier--it's a mere 150pp.--I might have kept pushing it down the stack to a place somewhere in the vicinity of Vollmann's Europe Central.  Along with it's brevity, it had another thing working for it: it comes from the folks at Soft Skull, and that's usually a good thing.

So once I'd beaten away the Snob, I took up Falconer's novel.  Let's just say that I regret that I waited as long as I did.  The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers takes place on the last day of the life of Captain Frederick Benteen, a man who survived Little Bighorn.  Benteen has received a letter from a young boy who wishes to rescue the captain's reputation, a reputation that has been mired in controversy because some felt that Benteen had abandoned Custer and his troops to the Indians.  Although he mostly has hidden from the public for the twenty years since Big Horn, Benteen, now retired and living in Georgia with his wife Frabbie, can't resist the boy's questions and the recollections that the boy's letter inspire make up the book that Falconer has given us.  And what she's given us is much more than just the typical "War is hell and so is life" thoughts of a veteran mulling over his war days, trying to reconstruct his lost thoughts in the best light possible. Instead, this man on the margins of history comes alive through this imagined memoir of sorts and it's the beautifully written prose that convinces you that what you're reading could have been nothing less than Benteen's actual thoughts, as if Falconer had summoned him from his grave to tell us just what happened and why it had to happen like it did.  So much so that by the end, it becomes overwhelming to realize that millions of men in graves long since forgotten occupy these margins and will never have a biographer or a novelist tell their stories.  I guess that's why I'm thankful that the Benteens of history have writers like Falconer who see the richness of their lives and are able to mine such gems from the rough, so to speak. 

+  See also: Colleen Mondor's review at Bookslut.

*  The Inner Snob can be a bit of a pig.

{Up next: film}

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

Great post Jeff. Great idea to begin with, and great post. I've been "this" close many times in terms of nabbing this book. Now I will for sure.