Fidelity: Five Stories

I loved every part of the stories!!! Felt like I was living there with the different characters.

As with most Wendell Berry, this is a splendid work. Each of the five stories are beautifully wrought. A treasure.

Quiet, homey stories. I might have liked this better if I had read any of the longer Port William books first. As it was, for some of the stories there wasn't enough background for me to fully enter into the relevance of the details.
"Fidelity" is the best, full of understated humor at how the locals put one over on the city detective, and also a valuable teaching in how far our current society has come from providing a good death for our elderly. "Making It Home" is forgettable, and seems so at odds with the current PTSD of so many of our returning vets. "A Jonquil for Mary Penn" drags on, tho I do like the way it ends.

Lyrical. That's the word I use when I can't describe concise, simple, beautiful prose. I learned about Wendell Berry from a LT group about nature or the outdoors. He is not a nature writer, however. He is an agrarian, human-nature writer.

These family stories are all beautiful. "A Jonquil for Mary Penn" is one of the best stories I have ever read concerning, love, friendship, loyalty, teamwork, community. "Fidelity" may change my feelings that Tolstoy ("The Death of Ivan Ilyich", "Master and Man") wrote the best stories about death and dying.

Berry seems to be up there with Steinbeck, Delillo, Hemingway and McCarthy. I've hundreds of books on my TBR pile, from Aristotle to Zola. 'Looks like I'm going to add a few more from this wonderful Kentuckian.

A lovely collection of stories of a time and a life gone by when people back in the hills still farmed with horses and roamed the hills freely, hunting and just enjoying the world. These sketches show me the insides of people I have never known nor could never be, but explain them to me. There is a soldier returning from WWII, still not sure what it was all about or if it was worth it except to keep his buddies alive. There is a good man shot dead by a friend, another fairly good man, who was simply despondent about losing his farm and got drunk and went out of his mind. He killed himself when he sobered up. The two families went on being close friends as they had always been. One story is about a man who rescues his aged, dying father from a hospital and a life support system to let him die in the woods where he was happy. All of the stories have depth and tenderness from a writer who knew about the people in his region and loved them and saved their stories, and their land, for future generations. The land descriptions are very real and very beautiftul, through the eyes of the people who lived on it and loved it. The farming and the town was dying out as the younger generation grew up and moved away, leaving behind he ties that had bound the families together for so long, through hardships and pain, and leaving behing the land that had sustained them.

Slow, gentle, thoughtful and thought-provoking.

The short story Fidelity in this book is a must-read for physicians. We are often not as wise as we think in our dealings with patients.