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Joseph Cowley
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Xlibris
ISBN-10: 0738850861
Type: Fiction
Pages: 177
Copyright: 2001
LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES is the story of a family struggling to survive on a dairy farm in upstate New York during the Great Depression and how, despite their defects of character, love enables them to endure and ultimately prevail against defeat.
This novel placed eighth out of the ten top winners in a nationwide contest for unpublished novels.
Joe Williams gives up his secure job as a policemen to take over, with the help of his family (wife, father, and two sons), a bankrupt dairy farm in upstate New York during the height of the Great Depression. This is the story of their struggle to survive. Told from the viewpoints of the various characters involved, it begins with the recollections of twelve-year-old Tracy.
Excerpt
Maggie Conover was very fat, but the thing I remember most is her laugh. It was a harsh laugh, low and gutteral. So when I think of her at all, that is what I remember, that and the hardness of her small eyes buried in the mountains of her face. And with thast scrap of memory the long summer afternoons come back to me, a breeze stirring the curtains of the old farmhouse, flies buzzing against the low, water-stained ceiling, and Maggie in the rocker between the windows fanning herself with a piece of cardboard she has retrieve from the kindling box behind her, while the world drones on in the long, heat-filled afternoon as if they have be captured in a bubble of eternity.
The boy in the window seat on the other side of the gray, fieldstone fireplace stares vacantly through the rusted screen at the rivulet, dried now by the August heat, and at the shorn fields shimmering in the sunlight, the murmur of the women's voices backdropped by the burr of cicadas. Occasionally he catches a snatch of what they are saying: "The Rose cow calved...," "Vie Myerson says....," before tuning out.
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