This review comes with a warning. Lost Lake has two stories that are quite brutal and difficult to read. One really stopped me in my tracks and for the author to experience what he saw (and I’m suspecting he did as a child) must have been shocking. I put the book aside for quite a while but the beautiful, lyrical writing drew me back.
“Set on the shores of Lost Lake, in upstate New York, these twelve tales tell of three generations of the small Czech community who have their their homes there, beside the water’s edge.”
The story Genesis is how the lake, man made, came to be. “Innocent enough in conception - a forty acre fishing hole with a float like a wooden rivet at its centre - Colby’s lake was the start of something, of many things, he could never have anticipated. Like a water hole on the savanna, like the original garden, bloodless and pure, it soon drew unexpected guests, and in this it was typical of all the things men dream and do. Dismantling one well, he erected, another, flooding one world, he exposed a dozen more. It could not have been otherwise.”
“Who among us hasn’t noticed it, the strange doubling of forms and faces - the echo in the world? The waves in rock, the veins in leaves, the ghostly flowerings of frost. As though god, deep in his labours, had suddenly run out of ideas, or, perhaps, surprised by the loneliness of his creation, had set out, in the eleventh hour, to stitch the world together: the sound of wind to the sound of water, the ruffling of field to the ruffling of fur, the memories of the living to the hopes of the dead.”
Captivating.

on a table