The Farm in the Green Mountains (NYRB Classics) Paperback – May 2, 2017 by Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer (Author), Ida H. Washington (Translator), Carol E. Washington (Translator), Elisa Albert (Introduction) (NYRB Classics)

This is a quiet, thoughtful, and almost relaxing book to read. Comforting in contrast to the tumultuous times we are living in, and especially the tumultuous times it was written during. The book consists of almost instructional details on farming and subsistence living mixed well with some genuinely charming anecdotes and life philosophies. I found Alice Herndan-Zuckermayer’s voice personable and sophisticated with no trace of arrogance, overt self-awareness or an agenda. I should caveat that while I don’t believe the choice to discuss very little of world war II itself is an agenda of omission, some may feel it’s scarcity within these pages suspicious as it is indeed the reason for the Zuckmayer family’s life in Vermont to begin with.

It’s tough to recommend this to just anybody though. At some level, if you have any interest in these people or this area of the world, or an interest in farming, you’ll probably enjoy this book a great deal. If you are coming for a more memoire of how we survived the war type story, I think you’ll be bored and should look elsewhere. Despite being well written, funny, and insightful, there are definitely long asides that didn’t interest me, and sections that decay almost into lists. This is a two star book with several strong five star sections. In fact, when I finished this and handed it to my wife to read, she was shocked to hear my final conclusion. Based on several of the amazing passages I had read aloud to her, she was expecting rave reviews. In truth, if one read only the chapters on the animals, the rats, and the library, and some select passages on Drude and the party line, one would assume this to easily be one of the finest books ever. But, like in life, and certainly in Alice’s life, there are long stretches where not a lot of interesting stuff happens, and perhaps its only fair to give it equal space.

Finally though, I must give this strong three and a half star book that final half star for the last chapter and epilogue, as these are actually two versions of the last chapter. These final pages should be studied in every writing class. They are so dissimilar narratively in that one is written much earlier and is a fantasy of returning to the farm, and the other is the actuality of returning, written much later. Some of the passages however are nearly verbatim in both. The tone is subtly dissimilar, still masterfully capturing the melancholic awareness that you can never really go back, but from such dramatically different perspectives. Even more jarring in reading these final two endings is the retrospective awareness it gives you into how carefully constructed the entire narrative has been. There is throughout the book a feeling of reading the words over Alice’s shoulder as she writes, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. She is in fact a craftswoman of considerable skill, which makes the book that much more impressive upon contemplation.

Afterword: skip the intro. It’s pugnacious and arrogant, and even worse, does a terrible job introducing the book. The tone is opposite that of the material and locks what could be viewed as a timeless text into a specific time and place. If you are a completionist, I recommend reading it after the book. It does reference some passages you may want to return to and is functional in that sense as an afterword.