Another author told me about Tom Robbins and the novel Still Life With Woodpecker. I fell in love with the way Robbins put a social commentary into a story. The excerpt I chose follows:
On the mainland, a rain was falling. The famous Seattle rain. The thin, grey rain that toadstools love. The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag. The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest. The shamanic rain that feeds the imagination. The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things. (Robbins 69)
Robbins makes it feel as if you are actually in the rain “The persistent rain that knows every hidden entrance into collar and shopping bag” (Robbins 69). It makes you remember times when you were out in the rain trying to remain dry, but still rain finds its way past your outer protection and onto your dry, warm skin. Also he uses personification to make the rain appear sly “The quiet rain that can rust a tin roof without the tin roof making a sound in protest” (Robbins 69). It sneaks up on the tin roof. If you have ever been in a room with a tin roof during a heavy rainstorm you know what the protest sounds like. As well the rain finds its way into shopping bags and collars slipping in between the cracks. The syntax that Robbins uses is interesting. His use of fragment sentences illustrates how the rain is continuous. The sentences seem to fall on the reader just as “the famous Seattle rain” does (Robbins 69). Lastly the line “The rain that seems actually a secret language, whispering, like the ecstasy of primitives, of the essence of things” seems to me to be a metaphor (Robbins 69). Rain is water and water is a necessity to life. I interpret that line as saying that at the bottom of every living thing plant or animal is water.
Amanda Walsh (345)
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