Banyan: A Short Novel,Used

Review'A masterful piece of writing.' Susan Russo Anderson, Author of the Serafina Florio mystery series.Sometimes the line between poetry and prose is thin. In the case of BANYAN, it is gossamer. A tour de force in the Southern literary tradition, BANYAN haunts the reader with its beauty, with the rich flow of the author's stream of consciousness. I loved the Southern gothic feel of this novel, its description of haunting and was shocked when the final mystery was revealed. Most of all, I loved the hurricane scene, a masterful piece of writing.Product DescriptionThat summer lasted so long. The summer after Father killed himself. Hot, my God. We thought it would never end. Gerry and Clara, brother and sister, live in seclusion in a once splendid house on a river in southwest Florida. As a tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico builds to hurricane force, Clara grows increasingly distressed over the bewildering emotions that accompany her confused memories of the dreaming time, and over her strange visions of houses she has never been in. Are the memories and visions only dreams, or are they the only reality, dimly remembered and tragically misinterpreted? Like the statue of Lorelei in her overgrown garden, a celestial being held captive by jungle vines, soft as sculpted moonlight, her dreaming face aglow under deep sea green, Claras essence is captive to forces too illusive for her to grasp. Yet it is from her complex interplay of memory and illusion that the unspeakable and heartbreaking crime committed in this house finally emerges.From the AuthorBelieve it or not, when I wrote BANYAN, I didn't know the name of the historic house that is the setting for the book. The Cuvier house in BANYAN is a fictionalized version of the Burroughs Home in Ft. Myers, Florida, a house I remember dimly from my childhood but whose name I never knew until after I had written the book. When my sister in Ft. Myers sent me a newspaper clipping showing the renovations that recently been made on the Burroughs Home, I learned that the house had a name, an interesting historyalthough I hope not as interesting as the one I gave it in BANYANand most amazingly, that it was still there.But not quite the same as I remembered it.In 1954, downtown Ft. Myers, with its charming 1920sstyle, SpanishMoorish architecture and its stately Royal Palms, was as prettily arranged on the bank of the great Caloosahatchee River as a table set for tea, the river that flowed past it winking sunlight and amusing itself in passing by annoying the little boats in the yacht basin.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Ft. Myers had been the winter home of wealthy industrialists, inventors and later, movie stars. Their estates had graced either side of First Street eastward from town. By the early 1950s, however, when my family arrived, few of these homes remained and these few would survive only until the last tottering member of the family fell, like an empty garment, into the grave.As a child too young to have read history or novels or anything but 'See Jane run' and the Bobbsey Twins, these places were just old houses to me, inhabited, I assumed, by ancients, entombed in them like mummies. You never saw the old people because in direct sunlight they would turn to dust.The Burroughs House, though, intrigued me, probably because it was hidden. A jungle of flowering bushes, fruit trees and many varieties of palms, gone mad with sun, with warm, heavy rain and steaming soil, had grown up around the house well past the roof line. This concealment of the house seemed purposeful, protective. Even its proper, white picket fence was inviolate. I dared not touch it as I stood one day gazing up at the widow's walk, the only portion of the house that I could see above the waving tips of palm fronds. I stood there for long minutes, lost in contemplation of the mystery of the house. Why? What was I absorbing from that perfect, white and empty