Word: cravener
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...years ago, and considering the delay, one might assume that the manuscript, scribbled by some tribal chieftain, had perhaps moldered under a totem pole until discovered by a nosy anthropologist or Royal Canadian Mountie. Not so. The author is an energetic, white-haired American woman, now 72, named Margaret Craven. The history of her book, from benign neglect to some national celebrity, offers wry commentary on the ways of commerce and the world of publishing...
Nine years ago, dutifully wearing a skirt because she'd been told that Canadians can't stand American women in slacks, Miss Craven journeyed north by small boat from Vancouver into the Queen Charlotte Straits of British Columbia in search of adventure and material. Her trip ended at the top of King-come Inlet, in a village of the Kwakiutl Indians. Kingcome is a place of icy water, deep, fir-trimmed inlets, returning salmon, foraging killer whales, overwhelming beauty and, for the once proud Kwakiutls, overwhelming sadness. Even the young are not sure they can face going "outside...
...Margaret Craven, a journalist and short-story writer, stayed on for weeks at Kingcome: listening, interviewing, taking notes. Like many another writer in similar circumstances, she resolved that she would get it all down before it was gone forever. What she finally produced was I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a blend of fact and imagination that can better be described as a prose elegy than a novel...
Boiled Candlefish. The device that transforms the book into fiction is rude enough. Everything that Margaret Craven swiftly experienced and loved about the Kwakiutls is gradually learned by a young Anglican vicar, Mark Brian. He is fatally ill but does not know it, and has been sent to the village by his bishop to "learn enough of life to be ready to die." Much of Mark's story is presented as a marvelously compact and compelling semidocumentary. The reader meets the old and the young of the village, learns that much of the tribe's food is customarily...
...Burr, Vidal (1 last week) 2-Come Nineveh, Come Tyre, Drury (2) 3-I Heard the Owl Call My Name, Craven (10) 4-Postern of Fate, Christie (9) 5-The Honorary Consul, Greene (3) 6-Theophilus North,Wilder (4) 7-The Loo Sanction, Trevanian (8) 8-The Hollow Hills,Stewart (7) 9- The First Deadly Sin, Sanders (6) 10- Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red, Kemelman...