Tag: Summerland

Fin: Summerland

November 19th, 2023

Michael Chabon’s Summerland is a wrap. 500 pages of weird, muddle, and baseball. Zero boredom though.

The final few chapters had some wonderful bits. The following is one of the most insightful thoughts on parenting and promises I’ve read:

It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can’t really make a summer day last forever. A home run can’t really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day, Ethan knew that better now than he had ever known before. But he was glad to have the promise nevertheless.
pp 480

Last year’s Mets should’ve had this hung in the clubhouse…

One lover of baseball cannot get a team out of the cellar, but two can turn a season around.
pp 496

And a concise compilation of all the beauties of playing small ball:

They noticed that there was more to baseball than hitting the ball as hard as you could, than waving your glove in the general direction of the ball and hoping for the best. They took pitches, turned double plays, and hit the cutoff man, and instead of trying to cream it every time they got up, they just did their best to advance the runner. They played like ferishers, with careful abandon.
pp 497

A few ideas to ponder if you’re deciding to read Summerland.

One – have a basic grounding of folklore and myth. In particular the meanings of the coyote, faeries, and Sasquatches. Quick Perplexity.ai refresh is all you need. Dive into deeper texts if compelled.

Two – Begin reading it during late summer and carry on through early fall. You may also finish all 500 pgs in a weekend, but bringing the fall classic vibes heightens the reading experience.

Three – Embrace the weird. Characters fly in and fly out of the story. Creatures appear, vanish, and reappear. The story jabs and cracks unexpectedly. Embrace it.

Four – Love baseball. Not a requirement. Ok, it’s a requirement.

Chabon, Michael. Summerland. United States, Thorndike Press, 2003. pp480
Rodrigo Buendía runs the Shadowtails practice

November 16th, 2023

It was Rodrigo Buendía. He had been quiet all morning, puffing away at a succession of cigars, walking back and forth across Diamond Green as if taking the measure of it. The confinement he and the others had undergone, in a lightless cell in the wagon sledge, had been hardest on him; Cinquefoil had told Ethan that the slugger even wept in his sleep. “Waste of time, dude. We should be out there warming up. Sprints. Bunt work–fielding and laying them down. And then a couple of hours of BP. You, little fox dude, you going to be in center today. When the last time you played ball?”

“Fifteen sixy-nine,” Cutbelly said at once. “I hit into three double plays.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Buendía said.

Chabon, Michael. Summerland. United States, Thorndike Press, 2003. pp460
Centerfielder Rodrigo Buendía’s origin story. From Summerland…

November 5th, 2023

He had played almost all of his career since his defection to the United States in the National League, first for the Phillies, and then for the Mets. He had played centerfield, and then as his legs gave out and the surgeries mounted he switched to right; but since coming to the American League he had played nothing but designated hitter, never taking the field, spending the whole game on the bench until his turn to bat came around. Sometimes an aging player can flourish as the DH, smacking home runs at a decent clip and stretching his career by a couple of years. But hitting, though he did it magnificently, had always been only one part of Rodrigo Buendía’s game. As a younger player he had been one of the top outfielders in the game, covering vast distances, making legendary catches, throwing out runners at home plate from deep in the outfield grass. He had not been moved to the DH position, so much as reduced to it.

Passages like this is why I’ve kept my ticket aboard the Summerland locomotive. There’s whole pages where I give it a blank stare, hoping it will all make sense at the end. But the baseball bits, here Rodrigo Buendía’s back story, where Ethan, Jennifer T., Thor and co have all “jumped” (a form of sort-of time traveling and teleporting?) to Buendía’s compound in some mini-verse Cuba?

Weird.

Chabon, Michael. Summerland. United States, Thorndike Press, 2003.
Ferisher Baseball

November 2nd, 2023

The ferisher baseball lay warm and almost animate, a living thing, in his fingers, he recalled Peavine’s words: “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”

Or a November evening.

For the Rangers, World Series Champions.

Chabon, Michael. Summerland: A Novel. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. (pp332)
“Secret Passages”

October 25th, 2023

“Secret Passages,” she whispered.

“Eh?” Taffy said. “What’s that?”

Jennifer T. got up and, carrying the handbook, began searching the walls of the cell for what the book described as Telltale Signs of a Secret Passage. “Look for a section of the wall,” the anonymous author had written, “or, as it may be, of the ceiling, which is of a different shade or hue, however slightly, than the rest.”

and

The next recommended technique was, of course, tapping. Jennifer T. knelt down at the bottom of the wall by the door and began to tap, working her way up and down, using the spine of the handbook itself, listening for that Telltale Hallowness.

It’s wonderful when fictions include facts, real or imagined. See The Fantastic Mr. Fox (film), when Mr. Fox, outlines the master plan to Kylie he tells him “Beagles love Blueberries”.

Or Chuck Dugan is AWOL. A novel stocked full of Naval “facts”. I suspect most are real.

These “facts” make the worlds they inhabit vivid.

Chabon, Michael. Summerland: A Novel. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. (pp 294-295)
Middling Thor and the sparkling mysterious stuff from outer space

October 12th, 2023

Middling Thor had been like one of those meteorites you heard about that fall from space and land at the bottom of the ocean. Though it lies half buried in mud and half encrusted in a skin of plankton and mollusks, though it is warmed by vents in the earth and gives shelter to all manner of fish, at its heart lie the chemicals and elements, the sparkling mysterious stuff of outer space.
Chabon, Michael. Summerland: A Novel. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. (pp 260)

Summerland is a strange book. Airships, a kid who believes he’s an android, a guilt filled female sasquatch, Mustang league baseball. It’s wild.

Most chapters I have no idea where it’s going, but it’s not boring.
Jennifer T. loves baseball. From Michael Chabon’s Summerland

August 6th, 2023

In the top of the fourth, Jennifer T. came up to bat again. She carried her slim blond bat over her shoulder like a fishing pole. She stepped up to home plate with her gaze at her shoetops. You could tell she that she was thinking, and that what she was thinking about was getting a hit. Jennifer T. was the only member of the Roosters–maybe the only kid on the whole Island of Clam–who truly loved baseball. She loved to wear a bright smear of green grass on her uniform pants and to hear her bat ringing in her hands like a bell. She could hit for average and with power, turn a double play all by herself, stretch a base hit into a triple and a triple into an inside-the-park home run. She never bragged about how good she was, or did anything to try to make the other players look bad. She did, however, insist that you call her “Jennifer T.,” and not just “Jennifer” or, worst of all, “Jenny.”
Chabon, Michael. Summerland: A Novel. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2002. (pp 22-23)

I’m picking up this book now because I’ve always wanted to read a book set in the season that I was living through. Summerland is that book. Bought it used, at the library ages ago. It sat on my shelf. Then it called out.

Also, I wanted to see if Summerland has been underrated. 21 years have past since it’s publication. Is it an overlooked gem in Chabon’s canon?