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The Lost Upland

For the past several months I couldn’t find a book to read. Many false starts with historical non-fiction, flippant chick lit, and the Cambridge Public Library Staff Recommendations left me prone to reading myself to sleep with magazines, which can’t quite induce relaxation like a book. But finally, I found The Lost Upland by WS Merwin, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet who dabbles in unclassifiable autobiographic prose (I found it in the Travel section). Set in a small town in southwestern France where Merwin vacations, the book leisurely examines the natives and their proclivities in language so rich that I scarcely note the lack of a sustaining plot to keep me going. Instead, I dwell on passages like these:

“How lucky I am,” she sometimes said, “to live here and have that lovely building to look at.” A pause. “Instead of living over there and having to look at our house. Besides, there has been no one of interest living over there for at least three hundred years.”

Jogging this morning on the Cambridge side of the Charles River Path, looking at the splendid Boston skyline, I could totally relate.

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