Title: A World Lost, 1996
Author: Wendell Berry, b. 1934
Genre: Fiction, American
Themes: family, childhood-boyhood, death, sorrow, agriculture, and land
Review: I’m hooked up to Wifi, typing this review at our local Wegman’s supermarket/eatery/lounge… Jeremy is sitting beside me reading A World Lost and he’s laughing.
“Why are you laughing?” I keep asking him. Wendell Berry’s A World Lost begins with a death, a murder.
But Jeremy is right, Berry’s 104 page novella about the death of Andrew Catlett—beloved uncle, brother, husband, drifter, drinker, dancer, and farmer—in Port William, Kentucky, 1944 is as funny as it is sad and mournful.
A World Lost is narrated by 9 year-old Andy Catlett—Andrew Catlett’s nephew and #1 admirer. Andy recounts the way his Uncle Andrew talked (“Gimme one mo’ cup of that java, Miss Judy-pooty”), what he wore (“an old felt hat, corduroys, the tan canvas hunting coat”), how he smelled (“the mingled smell of sweat and pipe tobacco”), and how he behaved (like “some large male animal who might behave as expected one moment and the next do something completely unforeseen and astonishing”).
A World Lost is one of 8 novels and 32 short stories written by Wendell Berry about the Catlett family, their neighbors, and their hometown of Port William. I’ve read three of the eight novels so far, including A World Lost, and each gives me the distinct feeling of entering a material, living, flesh and blood world that is occurring right now and to which the reader is a distinctly privileged and welcomed visitor.
In A World Lost, we are Andy’s particular guest. He tells us everything he thinks, learns and remembers about his Uncle Andrew. He lets us see intimate moments, like his father breaking down in tears after Uncle Andrew’s funeral, and his grandmother mourning, years and years later, as she:
“came slowly up the stairs, the banister creaking under her hand as though now, alone with her thoughts, she bore the whole acculumated weight of time and loss. As she came up, she would be saying to herself always the same thing: ‘Oh, my poor boy! Oh, my poor boy!'”
But Wendell Berry and his characters are never without hope. As a Christian author, Berry tethers despair with love. My favorite part of A World Lost is Andy’s conclusion, now as an adult, about the nature of suffering:
“That light (the light of heaven) can come into this world only as love, and love can enter only by suffering.”
Love entered by suffering. Christ entered by suffering. Through Christ’s suffering, we can understand and grasp His infinite love—and likewise, in our own despair, we can experience His love again and again.
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