“The Violet Hour” ~ #Writers Facing Death . . .

If you put — What does “the violet hour” mean? —  into Google, you’ll get, right at the top: 

Image Courtesy of RAWKU5 ~ http://www.freeimages.com/photographer/RAWKU5-50583

“Violet hour is the time when the sun is setting and the sky turns purple. The sunset scene and the violet color is usually representative of sadness and something fading away…”

That statement is followed by a link to a Wiki about a poem T. S. Eliot wrote—The Waste Land—which contains “the violet hour” twice; plus, “the violet air” and “the violet light”…

There’s also a place in Chicago, Il, USA called The Violet Hour that serves “artisanal cocktails”…

Here are a few books called The Violet Hour—by Katherine Hill, by Andrea L Wells, by Richard Montanari, by Whitney A Miller, and a play by Richard Greenberg…

There is at least one more book with that title—The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe—which is subtitled, Great Writers at the End…

Here are excerpts from three reviews of that last book…

First from Rachel Cooke on The Guardian:

“Katie Roiphe began writing The Violet Hour, her sixth book, when she was 12 years old – or at least, that was when the thread of the idea burrowed its way, wormlike, deep inside her head. She was then gravely ill, so unwell with pneumonia she was coughing up blood.”

“Her subjects are Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak and James Salter, names she chose mostly by instinct: ‘I’ve picked people who are madly articulate, who have extraordinary and abundant imaginations or intellectual fierceness, who can put the confrontation with mortality into words – and in one case images – in a way that most of us can’t or won’t.’”

“…I put down her book with the feeling – how to put this? – that she had blinked, that her ordinarily fierce heart had at some point grown faint.”

Next from Jennifer Senior on The New York Times:

“Ms. Roiphe does not claim there’s any special logic underlying her selections. She chose her subjects primarily based on love, admiration and a feral intuition, knowing they were ‘especially sensitive or attuned to death’ not just in their work but ‘in their letters, in their love affairs, in their dreams.’”

“She scotches the traditional linear narrative for something more epigrammatic and associative — a wise choice, seeing that death turns time into a jumble and occasions all kinds of reflection and stray reminiscences.”

“…these essays, at their finest, are often literary analyses.”

“But the point is: Her main interest is in looking at how her subjects wrestled generally with aging and dying, not the moment of death itself.”

And, last, from Heller McAlpin on the Los Angeles Times:

“Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour…is an analytical blend of journalism, literary criticism, and memoir that…tackles a personal obsession….an early brush with mortality…”

“Each essay begins at death’s door, rolls back time to explore the writer’s attitudes toward mortality before they were up against it, and finally describes their final moments on this mortal coil. Like death, the essays end with startling abruptness.”

“…her book is at once scholarly, literary, juicy — and unabashedly personal.”

“To reconstruct her authors’ dying days, Roiphe had to press their survivors for private details, resulting in some intriguing portraits of a variety of caregivers.”

“This unconventional, engaging book is clearly a form of therapy for Roiphe.”

Reviews of books are always colored by the personality of the reviewer, just as my reportorial excerpting of these three reviews depended on my personality (each of the reviews has more detail on some of the authors in Roiphe’s book)…

I thought about getting the book but will decline (mostly because I have what just might be the World’s Largest To Be Read List…).

But I have read a book about facing death by an author I greatly admire and I can unhesitatingly recommend it to Anyone reading this post…

It was written by John S. Hatcher, Professor Emeritus in English literature at the University of South Florida in Tampa (USA).

The title is Understanding Death: The Most Important Event of Your Life.

You can find it here:

Amazon (USA)

Google Books

Book Depository (free shipping, “world-wide”)

wordery (also, free shipping)
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POST PUBLICATION EDIT: Well after I thought I’d finished this post I realized that back on March 20th I did a short shout-out about an interview with Katie Roiphe on National Public Radio…
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Books You Probably Haven’t Heard of That You Might Want to Read

“A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists is an off-beat, genre-defying, head-spinning story that defies all the rules of narrative, space and time.”

Image courtesy of Eduardo Siqueira Filho ~ http://www.freeimages.com/profile/edududas

That intriguing elevator-pitch is from an article in The Sydney Morning Herald.

A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists is Jane Rawson‘s debut novel.

More from the newspaper article:

“A Wrong Turn has won this year’s Most Underrated Book Award, a literary prize sponsored by the Small Press Network, to reward titles that, for whatever reason, have not received fair recognition and the readership they deserved  when first published, following in the tradition of now-famous titles such as F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, overlooked or underestimated on release but which have since been declared classics.”

Other books that were sleepers:

Light Years by James Salter

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

Stoner by John Williams

And, a book that hasn’t been sleeping long at all—Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You.

From an article in The Guardian:

“She has beaten Hilary Mantel and Stephen King to win Amazon book of the year. Celeste Ng, the biggest writer you’ve never heard of…”

“’Writing is like shouting into the world’, she says. ‘So when someone shouts back, it’s a really big deal. To have people who read hundreds and hundreds of books a year say, “Hey, we thought this was really great”, that’s a huge self-esteem boost. All of this attention means, hopefully, I’ll be able to write another book.’”

“She’s also surprised by the fact that people are so keen to ask her questions about the book, since she’s only just coming to terms with the fact that it’s out in the world and being read. ‘It’s as if you’ve had a very vivid dream and you come down to the breakfast table. Without you saying anything about it, people start asking you questions about what happened in your dream. And you go, “Wait! How did you know what was in my brain?”‘”

Finally, if you’ve heard of these six books or read them, let us know in the comments  ( though, I suspect most folks who’ve read a few books have heard of The Great Gatsby :-)
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