Böcker av Ardyth Kennelly

Part memoir, part confession, part journal, Bodies Adjacent is the story of two lives told by each one about the other. The novelist Ardyth Kennelly and her physician husband, the Jewish Viennese émigré Egon V. Ullman, began their unlikely love affair in the heart of Oregon's Willamette Valley in the 1930s and continued it for nearly three decades in Portland-contending first with the Depression, then the disruptions of the war, and finally sudden fame, as well as their own personal demons.Writing thirty years after Egon's untimely death in 1962, Ardyth looks back with a deeper understanding of their lives than she had possessed during her self-conscious younger years. She tells us something of her early life and of Egon's history; laments her ignorance of the love he must have felt for his home country; shares her impressions of the Jewish refugees and émigrés he knew in Portland; remembers his loving and indulgent care for her; confesses her sorrow and regret for how she treated him in his illness and death; and spins some fanciful stories to illustrate how their life together began and ended.In the middle of her memoir, Ardyth places the journal that Egon kept-at her suggestion-during the years when she was writing her first five novels (1947-56). His fascination with her talent, intellect, and charm never wavered through all their personal troubles. Their shared love of books and the desire to write brought them together and remained a major focus of their life in marriage.Bodies Adjacent is a captivating and singular love story-painfully honest, yet utterly enchanting and sweet.

The crowning literary achievement of Ardyth Kennelly, a best-selling novelist in the late 1940s and 1950s, is finally available--ten years after her death, and twenty years after the book was written. Fans of her previous books will love the fresh stories of life in Mormon Utah, and she is sure to gain many new admirers with this sweeping novel covering not only a century of Western life and history, but also the vast territory of the human heart.Thirteen-year-old Hindle Lee, her mother dead and her father on the run after leading the Mormons' 1857 massacre of a wagon train at Mountain Meadows, goes to work in a convalescent home and eventually takes on a career as an "eclectic physician of women's ailments." Her sister Lucitie travels to England and back and becomes part of a four-generation hairdressing dynasty. Through the comic, strange, and tragic stories of Hindle's patients, and through the authentic speech, sense of place, and experience of historical events that Kennelly re-creates for us, Salt Lake City of the nineteenth century comes alive. Drawing upon her sharp memory and meticulous research, the author takes us from ordinary households to millionaires' mansions, from wagons to motorcars, from brightly lit Main Street to the dark inner expanses of the old Constitution Building.The stories of that wondrous past, made mythic through the mind of a little Australian girl, are handed down to Hindle's granddaughter Rosetta, who comes of age in the changing times of the 1920s. With a spirit hungry for knowledge, Rosetta becomes a keen observer of the workings of the world and the human psyche. She and her cousin Lavonne, working as beauty operators and never separated for long, must deal all their lives with the hard truths about men, women, and beauty, and with different kinds of fanaticism and violence. All these elements are drawn together in a final reverberating event that only an artist could make meaningful.VARIATION WEST is an immense literary collage, with dozens of engaging characters and a wealth of both comic and tragic stories to tell. We see not only domestic life under Mormon polygamy, but also the sacrifices-including death and disfigurement-that women make in trying to fulfill society's expectations of female beauty; the unspeakable violence that men do; and how patterns laid down in the distant past resurface again and again. This book has all the wit, warmth, and storytelling genius of Kennelly's previous novels-but also the darker themes and more critical views that she was not able to express openly in that earlier, more reserved era.