Gina Berriault's "The Lights Of Earth" is a wonderfully intimate novel which explores feelings of guilt, pain and betrayal in a woman novelist Ilona on the verge of losing a lover who's taken off to high places. Using beautifully lyrical prose, she insinuates and entices, then reels and draws you in. Ilona's sense of foreboding when she meets the hosts of the dinner party she attends with Claud foreshadows not so much her breakup with Martin but more significantly her discontinued relationship with her older semi-retarded brother Albert whom she had deliberately left behind. The feelings of guilt, pain and loss that these later chapters evoke are so real and true they moved me to tears. Berriault's genius lies in the economy, intimacy and emotional accuracy of her writing. I think Ilona realised at the end that the world isn't made of two kinds of people, those "blessed" and those not. Ilona's distress from Martin's departure is mirrored in Albert's hopeless pining for his sister to make contact and this is what gives the novel a balance and roundness that makes "The Lights Of Earth" such an excellent novel. I don't know if this is the place to discover Berriault. I do know however that I enjoyed it immensely and if the proof of the pudding isn't in the eating, where then lies it ?

This is a deeply affecting and exquisitely written book. I've gone from Women in the Beds to The Son to The Lights of Earth and feel priviledged to have spent reading time with such a talented writer. What troubles me is that I didn't know about her until she won the National Book Critics Circle Award and that I might never have known of her if Counterpoint Press and Northpoint Press before them hadn't had the courage to publish her.

This is a great little book: a rare combination of great writing and deep emotional and intellectual insight. There are people writing today who are accomplished prose stylists but who just don't have a lot to say. And, conversely, there are writers of great depth whose writing is, well, adequate. Gina Berriault is one of a few great writers alive today who can write and think at the same time. Her honesty and complex literary style which help make her a great writer probably hurt her popular acceptance. She is not a part of the "you go girl" kind of Stalinist social realism that is so popular today which portrays things not as they are, but as they should be in order to be politically correct. Nor is she a pulp fiction romance novelist. She is more interested in reality and writing great fiction. She is not perfect and I do have some small criticisms. In The Lights of Earth, Ilona, the main character, receives a couple of notes from her neglected brother who is apparently mildly retarded. My criticism is that the notes seem a little too well written for even a mildly retarded person. Also, I believe she may be a little too generous sometimes towards her male characters , giving them a compassion or understanding that in reality may be something more controlled and manipulative. I want to emphasize that these are small criticisms of a wonderful book. As I said at the begining, her writing is beautiful, and dense with emotional and intellectual meaning. At her best her writing is poetic, even Shakespearean. If you love great writing, then buy and read this book.

This story is subtitled "A Fable for All Ages". The idealistic message of this beautifully-crafted tale is one that both children and adults will find enchanting. Petrowski, an orphaned parrot who lives somewhere in North America, discovers his natural talent for opera the night of the season's opening. Adored, feted, revered, known as the most talented voice of his generation, Petrowski nonetheless feels compelled to seek the place of his birth, where Petrowski remembers "...trees as high as city buildings, their tops an endless canopy, monkeys with golden manes, and cats much larger than any city cats, and pounding rains, and curling leaves that caught the rain for the birds and insects who never came down to the ground." Shunning fame and fortune, Petrowski flies off into the rain forest, where he trains an entire corps of parrots as singers. They venture out of their habitat to spread the message, through song, that the rainforest must be preserved else the very air we breath may be destroyed along with the vegetation of the great Amazonian basin. The suspense about how they find a key to preserving the rainforest, and whether they succeed, make this a truly exemplary tale.

The story shows clearly, at both the metaphoric and plot levels, that individuals make a difference, that fame and fortune aren't measures of success, and that art is as necessary to us as the air we breathe.

Petrowski Pulses with Song

In the very first paragraph of Gina Berriault's fable, "The Great Petrowski," we are told that her Amazonian parrot hero, Petrowski, "probably had not yet found what he was looking for." The book's 80 pages visit particular forms of questing and guidance, beautifully presented with the author's often bemused and always gracious wonderment. What author James Hillman has termed "In Search of Character and Calling," seems to me to be the subject of "The Great Petrowski." Petrowski follows his destiny in much the same way that Gina Berriault assuredly followed her destiny everywhere in her writing of this fable. Her writing itself could here serve as guidance in the art of writing. Keeping her genre in hand, she loves to play: with alliteration, as in "skyward sounds," itself a high order of sounds, and with childlike rhyme, as "On the backs of twelve yaks." She regularly shows us this parrot's world though this parrot's eyes: We hear him "strutting through rain puddles on the flat roofs," we sense "him settling in for the night." Keep an open eye for these bird images; they abound, as in the Opera Director's "feathery white hair," his "swallow-tail coat." Take pause, as well, to meditate a while upon Ms. Berriault's attendant illustrations. Music, the spirit's voice made audible-is here sung in the operatic tenor voice of Petrowski, a parrot, bird of many voices. The Opera Director, in tune with this bird's capacious attributes, and with an eye always on perfection, says to Petrowski, "Please, I beg of you. Sing only the tenor and nobody else." Music enheartens this entire book. You'll hear music in its language, music in its meaning. Running parallel with music is the essential reminder that we live "in times of great crises." Quite soon after Petrowski rediscovered his homeland, our now increasingly dispirited Brazilian rainforest, "A child began to cry." That cry deep within us all. The Profit Motive, as is its inclination, has come doggedly to wound our world. Will our planet even survive? Our very act of breathing is at stake. When Petrowski, in quest of spiritual guidance, climbs into the Himalayas where the air, though thin, remains pure, the Opera Director pauses to reflect: "I wonder. . .if air sounds like bells in all the little chambers of our lungs." Ultimately, Petrowski prophesies a day when "The Destroyers won't dare to blast or drill or saw or dig anymore." Gina Berriault has bestowed on us a fable, a parable of hope. How could her book be otherwise, threaded so intricately through as it is with her humor and insight and wisdom and wonder? However oft she herself might at intervals have doubted it, she brims with hope-Petrowski is her offering: "And how beautiful he was, this bird whose whole body was pulsing with song." On the book's very last page we read, "A curtain of clouds was lifting and the whole sky was a stage," this stage upon which the universal spirit comes to perform for us each and all. Those who knew Gina knew her spirit. Those who did not know her may come to know her spirit through reading this, the last book she was to write. This book pulses with song.

Gina Berriault is fantastically gifted writer. She writes with enormous subtlety and understatement BUT... it is true that due to the density and the "melancholy" and "malaise" present in many of her stories it's possible to O.D. if the reader doesn't come up for air. This is not to say that this book is not a "MUST OWN" particularly for anyone who would like to know more about people living in the Bay Area, and Cali, the Pacific Northwest. It is also a "must own" for writers and I suspect that if you don't allow yourself to become overwhelmed with your own expectations but go with the vision the writer has given you, you may come away with a bit of a different view of the world than you started with before trying this book of shorts, (great also that one can choose, hmm what would I like to read today?) expected.

Drenched in Reality. Recommended.

If you are looking for a blissful escape from reality (i.e. Disney's Fantasia), this collection may not be the ideal book for you.

If, however, you are enchanted by disturbingly subtle nuances, you will enjoy the book as much as I did. Gina Berriault creates characters I found identifiable from real life in San Francisco -- characters corresponding to people that most tourists ignore, avoid or categorize as "local color" -- and grants the reader a brief insight into their lives, hopes and fears. These stories do not all have happy endings. Welcome to life.

The stories are superbly written and unapologetic in their frankness. I recommend it highly.

A customer offering a review below suggests that only "a P.R. ploy" could account for the acclaim surrounding "Women in Their Beds." I reviewed the book for The Nation, and was so overwhelmed by its beauty that I reviewed it a second time, in Hungry Mind Review. I can tell interested readers that, far from having benefited from a P.R. plot, this collection received virtually no publicity whatsoever. It was published by a small press in DC, Counterpoint, and its author, Gina Berriault, was remembered only by San Francisco literati of the early 60s--she'd published several books, then disappeared. When Counterpoint published the present volume, it went unreviewed for months. When it was presented as a candidate to the National Book Critics Circle panel of judges, many of them had heard neither of the book nor of Berriault. By the time they'd all read it, however, word was spreading and reviews were appearing. The NBCC judges were uniformly blown away (read the minutes of the meeting: blown away). Readers who can only be "cheered up" by stories of good things happening to good people, or who read to escape reality will find the stories in "Women" not to their taste. But readers who like fiction that deepens their perception of reality, who are "cheered up" by integrity and honesty and beauty and truth in the face of the mysteries and heartache of the world--they will read this book with great joy. That it succeeded without publicity in a world utterly dependent on publicity (if not altogether created by it) makes the book even sweeter.

I have to say I wasn't entirely enthralled with this book throughout most of it (I definitely could not relate to the main character), and I was even less impressed as I came to the last 20 pages. I didn't finish it. Who knows - I could have missed something at the end that turns this book around; however, it wasn't worth my time to find out. It literally made me sick. I was excited to read "Women in their Beds," with all of its critical acclaim, but now I'm afraid to.

This is a stunning, ground breaking book. As a reader and a writer, I feel indebted to Counterpoint Press for reissuing it. My sadness is that not enough people know about it. All writers-in-training should read The Son to learn how dangerously deep one must go to write true literature. My other sadness is that Gina Berriault is not alive to hear my praise.