The Ice Harp (The American Novels) by Norman Lock

The Ice Harp (The American Novels) Reviews

• 
  Sarah-Hope

  
  Norman Lock's
  The Ice Harp is a remarkable piece of fiction. It's set primarily in the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson, though there is also a physical, but less important, world in the background. Emerson is aging. He's forgetting words, forgetting events. What he doesn't forget is people. Some of those people are still living, some of them are dead; all of them make regular appearances before Emerson, who engages with them much more than his physical reality.
  
  Many of the people who make appearances in Emerson's mind are other well know transcendentalists and activists, among them Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Walt Whitman and John Brown. Emerson is coming to a personal reckoning, trying to understand, as his words abandon him, whether his life of the mind, his essays, his political stances have achieved any lasting good. The spirits he interacts with are clearly fond of him, but they also challenge him. Thoreau wants him to be more and think less; Muir probes his his perceptions of nature and the divine; Whitman argues with him through words and deeds; John Brown finds all his reasoning pointless in an unjust world that demands action.
  
  The experience of reading The Ice Harp is like being carried weightless through swirling water. As Emerson slips in and out of reality, from conversations with one dead friend to another, readers ride the current.
  
  Quite frankly, I feel incapable of expressing the complex mix of feelings and ideas The Ice Harp raised in me. I may come back to this review at some time for another try at doing justice to this novel. It is, as I said at the beginning, truly remarkable. For anyone who is aging (and, really, all of us are), for anyone who has wondered about purpose in life, The Ice Harp provides an experience that truly is transcendental.
  
  I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.
• 
  Nancy

  It is 1879, two years before the death of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Words escape him, hovering out of reach. He sees the ghosts of old friends, especially his dear friend Henry David Thoreau, but also Walt Whitman, John Muir, Margaret Fuller, John Brown, and his beloved first wife who died less than two years after their marriage. Emerson has interchanges with these people as he goes about his day, talking about their shared past and his current problems.
  
  Emerson has a decision to make. A former slave and soldier is fleeing to Canada. He has killed a man who abused him. Emerson had been a part of the Underground Railroad, supported John Brown. Does he harbor this fugitive, or turn him over to the law? It is a choice he wishes to avoid making, for abetting this man could mean a prison sentence, but not deciding is also a decision with consequences.
  
  Unable to rest, he walks through the night, visiting Thoreau’s cabin lake. It was here that he noted the sound made when he threw stones on the thin ice, calling it his ice harp.
  
  I am an old man alone in the dark and frightened for his mind’s sake.
  from The Ice Harp by Norman Lock
  
  In Emerson’s journey into the dark night of his soul he contends with the past and the future, considers his losses and looming death. Those who encounter him, like Louisa May Alcott, see his confusion and irrational behavior; she wraps him in a shawl and sends him home. His ghosts see him more clearly.
  
  Emerson’s dual reality is well portrayed. His interchanges with the living breaks into his dream-like interchanges with the dead. While his wife chastises him and tries to manage him, the ghosts hold forth conversations with greater insight into Emerson’s conflicted soul. Emerson needs their wisdom and advice to help him negotiate the decision he faces, and to help him cope with his awareness of lost abilities and coming death.
  
  Now that my mortal form has begun to dissolve, I can more readily believe that man is the master of nothing, except the mummery of his life.
  from The Ice Harp by Norman Lock
  
  Facing death, Emerson feels the uselessness of his life, how little he knows or accomplished. Still, he harbors lofty dreams of a world of mercy, equality, and harmony with nature.
  
  In his Afterword, Lock write, “So we must choose to act–not once, at a crucial moment in our personal histories, but as many times as we are confronted by injustice or abuse.”
  
  Injustice continues to demand moral decisions, not once, but daily. Do we have the courage and conviction to risk doing the right thing?
  
  The Ice Harp is Norman Lock’s tenth in his American Novels series. Each book uses personages and events from the past to illuminate America of today. The past is a mirror revealing the American psyche.
  
  Thanks to the publisher for a free book.
• 
  thewanderingjew

  The Ice Harp, Norman Lock
  Often, I was tempted to give up reading this book. Each sentence required a double reading to get its meaning. As metaphors flew off the page, my lack of literary knowledge was exposed. I wished that I was more literate with regard to the authors Emerson spoke to, so colorfully, in his imagination. Nathanial Hawthorne, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Muir are just some of the familiar and unfamiliar names that appeared as he conjured them up or actually engaged with them. John Brown and he debated about slavery. Louisa Mae Alcott appears and nurses his injured guest who is a runaway slave. Lidian, his second wife, supports women’s rights and the Underground Railroad. The history of the times is exposed through his ramblings. Even some of the vocabulary words required me to have a dictionary at hand, since I had no idea what promulge meant, or taphophobia, or defalcator, or aspergillum, to name just a few of the words that confounded me.
  Yet, I found the prose so brilliant, as Lock painted images on each page with his words, that I found that I could not give up on the book. Today one is hard pressed to find a book that is so well written, yet not dependent on politics, even though it appears throughout, not dependent on eroticism, though there are sexual innuendos, so not influenced by the “woke world”, though dysfunction existed then, as well as today. It was a welcome relief; so as hard as it was to read and comprehend, requiring extra time to reread and research some of the references and the language, it was one of the most positive experiences I have had in recent times. It restored my faith in the magic of good literature. Simply put, the author truly created a performance in the theater of my mind.
  The author described his version of Emerson’s descent into the darkness of the aging process as Alzheimer's/dementia, which he may or may not have truly suffered from, or succumbed to, took over his life. One cannot help but appreciate and commiserate with the victim who suffered the indignity and trauma associated with the failure of the mind. The loss of words was very painful to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a man who lived for his words, who put them down on paper and influenced everyone who read them.
  In this book, that imagines Ralph Waldo Emerson as a victim of hallucinations, his confusion and frustration are palpable to the reader. As he attempts to continue to function while he knows perfectly well that he is failing drastically in that effort, he is a catastrophe always waiting to happen. He starts fires, breaks windows, talks to strangers and to the friends in his imagination, some who are long dead. The tender and heartbreaking description of this brilliant man, as he falls deeper into a world without memories, feels very authentic. The author has deftly interwoven the political and social atmosphere of the day, and in one of Emerson’s final acts, he is conflicted about slavery and whether or not he should struggle actively against it, even if it is against the law to do so.
  There is humor and pathos, both, in this incredible illustration of a mind that is failing as a life nears its end. Because there are no defined chapters, there is little opportunity for respite in much the same way as Emerson’s decline is occurring. His discomfort becomes the reader’s discomfort.
  
• 
  Marvin

  I generally prefer literary fiction to popular or genre fiction. The one exception is historical fiction, which I thought is what I would find here, but this is unlike any other historical fiction I’ve read, which could be a good thing, but in fact this is too literary for me, with all its literary allusions (including lots of insults directed at Walt Whitman) and arcane ideas and vocabulary, most of whicht went over my head. And spending an entire novel, however short, inside the confused mind of an old man–Ralph Waldo Emerson a couple of years before his death converses with the spirits of Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, John Muir, John Brown, Margaret Fuller, and, briefly and improbably, Lajos Kossuth–is, well, confusing. And when it’s intelligible, it often seems to me pretentious and/or anachronistic. [I did not realize, until reading the Afterword, that this is the 10th in a series of “American Novels.” I now see that three years ago I actually read the first in the series, The Boy in His Winter. I have no memory of it, but my GoodReads review suggests that I didn’t like it any more than I did this one.]
  
• 
  Anne

  I'm not grading this book because I'm unsure how I feel about it. It is beautifully written. The language is reflective of the times and social milieu of place. But the premise is difficult for me in that Emerson is losing his memory but the text is nothing but the conversations and thoughts, built on his memories and imagined conversations.
  This is a political book. The afterword makes that clear. And while I agree with the author I just don't know if he "channeled" Emerson and his friends into the book. I admit, however, it has been a long time since I read Emerson
• 
  Chris Scott

  This is the tenth entry in Norman Lock's American Novels series, but the first I've read. I'd like to go back and read the others in time. I really enjoyed this intricate and sweet story imagining Ralph Waldo Emerson's reflections at the end of his life, riddled with imagined visits from figures like Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. I'm not sure how much The Ice Harp will mean to people not already well-versed in American Transcendentalism, but I've always enjoyed this stuff so I really dug it. Reminded me quite a bit of George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo.
• 
  Sherri

  I read American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work
  by Susan Cheever many years ago. I remember enjoying it very much and being inspired by these intellectuals, poets, and deeply sensitives spiritualist to read more classics. When I requested The Ice Harp from LibraryThings early reviewers I was very interested in reading about Mr. Emerson's last years suffering from dementia.
  
  I am glad the author wrote in the forward that the writing style was not traditional and at times was written as a long train of thought as someone with dementia might be talking. It was confusining at first and I wasn't sure I was understanding the book at all but when I decided to just read along and not try to figure out what was true or in Mr. Emerson's head I began to be moved by the book. My lack of literary knowledge bothered me in the beginning. I did spend some times looking up things to help me understand what he was speaking about which I do enjoy doing but again, after awhile I just began to see Mr. Emerson as just any other person struggling with knowing they are loosing their memory.
  
  Having 3 close relatives suffer from different types of memory desease, I felt great compassion for Mr. Emerson as well as for people I know in real life. This book helped me understand the frustration and feelings of loss they are going through and how the mind works in the throws of confusion. I feel Mr. Lock did a wonderful job putting the reader inside the mind of someone suffering from dementia. I feel this book will resonate with people who have loved ones in this position. It might help friends and family members be more empathetic and patient with their loved one.