October House

In October House by Bonny Barry Sanders, we discover a sequence of memory segments that flash back and haunt us—sometimes with the fantasy of allegory, sometimes with painful realism—but with all segments united through the many years and between the four walls of an old house. The architecture of the house serves to suggest both an actual place and a conscious, mental construct of qualities. It evokes a transcendence. Bird song, musical structure, and strong assonance underpin this work. The architecture of the book, like the old house, is defined as well as fluid. Like the architecture of an orchestral piece, it begins with the tonic chord, moves, digresses, modulates, presents variations upon themes, and finally returns to the tonic chord. The book explores the ways we must find strength to return home, not necessarily to a place, but to "the language we would speak again."