Book notes | Pale Horse, Pale Rider
Katherine Anne Porter’s lyrical short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider was the primary focus on August 27 when UMRA’s Fourth Friday Book Club (aka Book Club II) met over Zoom.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the third and final tale in Porter’s 1939 volume of the same name, draws on her own experiences as a young woman. It features a 24-year-old Denver newspaper writer, Miranda, caught up in a just-blossoming love affair with a soldier during the overlapping horrors of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. (Miranda was a child and adolescent in the multigenerational first tale Old Mortality.)
Book Club II participants also discussed the mesmerizing middle tale Noon Wine, about a quiet Swede from North Dakota whose years as a hard-working, harmonica-playing farmhand in Texas abruptly culminate in tragedy.
When the ruins are cleared away
Throughout the discussion, the sheer power of Porter’s writing was repeatedly praised. Many passages stand out as arrestingly poetic in and of themselves, apart from the narrative; to cite just one example, the final sentence of Pale Horse, Pale Rider is elegiac: “Now there would be time for everything.” That sentence deftly captures Miranda’s hollow desolation on learning of an irremediable loss just as she begins to recover from a weeks-long, near-death experience.
More than a century after the timeframe of Miranda’s harrowing illness and intertwined heartbreak, the parallels with today’s COVID-19 pandemic and current wars struck Book Club II participants as eerie. Although Porter does depict the joys of a budding romance, she somberly foregrounds the timeless complexities of nightmares, religion, workplace and wartime politics, emotional and physical suffering, and ultimately death. As she herself once stated, the arts “are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.”
Upcoming meetings:
September 24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
October 22. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
November 26. Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
For more information, please contact Book Club II facilitators Dorothy Marden or Margaret Catamby .
—Mary Knatterud, UMRA Book Club II member
Book Club II to meet August 27
Fri, Aug 27 2021, 2pm
Katherine Anne Porter’s searing short novel “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” will be the focus of discussion when UMRA’s Fourth Friday Book Club meets at 2 p.m. on August 27 over Zoom.
“Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” the third and final tale in Porter’s 1939 collection of the same name, centers on a young Denver newspaper writer, Miranda, who is dating a soldier during the throes of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. She was a child and adolescent in Porter’s multilayered first tale, “Old Mortality.” (The harrowing middle tale, “Noon Wine,” features a taciturn Swede from North Dakota who becomes a Texas farmhand.)
As Alice McDermott, a National Book Award-winning novelist and Johns Hopkins University professor, asserted on NPR in 2006, “There is enough intelligence, wit, heartache, profundity, and marvelous prose in the 50 pages of this short novel to have kept demand for it high, even across the seven [now nearly nine!] decades since it was first published.”
The Fourth Friday Book Club (aka UMRA Book Club II) welcomes new members.
Please contact Dorothy Marden or Margaret Catambay to learn more.
—Mary Knatterud, Book Club II member
Upcoming Events
The May 20 hike will start at the Historic Lift Bridge in Stillwater and go along the river to the new bridge, cross over and then back on the Wisconsin side, a total of approximately 5 miles. Most of the route is paved. We will eat lunch after at Brian's Bar and Grill in Stillwater. Car pooling will be available.
Climatologist and meteorologist Mark Seeley joined the U of M faculty in 1978 and has been a weekly commentator on Minnesota Public Radio since 1992. We are honored to welcome him as our guest speaker for UMRA’s May Luncheon Forum and 2024 Annual Meeting. He is always entertaining and informative.
UMRA’s Fourth Friday Book Club welcomes back, for the second time, author Julie Schumacher, U of M Regents professor of creative writing and English, for a conversation about her novel The Shakespeare Requirement.
We are in for a treat on June 3! Lynn Anderson, will lead us on trails at two parks near her Monticello home. Bring a bag lunch and we will gather in Lynn's yard along the Mississippi River for eating and socializing after the hike.
Get out to the ballpark with fellow UMRA members for the annual U of M Day at Target Field as the Minnesota Twins take on the Oakland Athletics on June 14 at 7:10 p.m.
Please join us at 9:30 on June 17, 2024 for a walk around Lake Como in St. Paul before attending the UMRA Summer Social and Picnic starting at 11 at the Como Pavilion. A perfect opportunity to get in a walk before we gather to celebrate summer.
Picnic under the covered, open-air Como pavilion, gaze at the water, spy some birds, catch up with friends and former colleagues, and meet new members. We’ll have lunch with plenty of time for visiting and then compete in teams as we are challenged by our Quiz master(s)!
Healthy aging, mindfulness, fighting ageism, and more will be the focus of the third annual Age-Friendly University Day to be held on the U of M Twin Cities campus.