Simon the Fiddler
Paulette Jiles, 2020
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062966742
Summary
The critically acclaimed, bestselling author of News of the World and Enemy Women returns to Texas in this atmospheric story, set at the end of the Civil War, about an itinerant fiddle player, a ragtag band of musicians with whom he travels trying to make a living, and the charming young Irish lass who steals his heart.
In March 1865, the long and bitter War between the States is winding down.
Till now, twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin has evaded military duty thanks to his slight stature, youthful appearance, and utter lack of compunction about bending the truth.
But following a barroom brawl in Victoria, Texas, Simon finds himself conscripted, however belatedly, into the Confederate Army. Luckily his talent with a fiddle gets him a comparatively easy position in a regimental band.
Weeks later, on the eve of the Confederate surrender, Simon and his bandmates are called to play for officers and their families from both sides of the conflict. There the quick-thinking, audacious fiddler can’t help but notice the lovely Doris Mary Dillon, an indentured girl from Ireland, who is governess to a Union colonel’s daughter.
After the surrender, Simon and Doris go their separate ways. He will travel around Texas seeking fame and fortune as a musician. She must accompany the colonel’s family to finish her three years of service.
But Simon cannot forget the fair Irish maiden, and vows that someday he will find her again.
Incandescent in its beauty, told in Paulette Jiles’s trademark spare yet lilting style, Simon the Fiddler is a captivating, bittersweet tale of the chances a devoted man will take, and the lengths he will go to fulfill his heart’s yearning. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1943
• Where—Salem, Missouri, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Missouri
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives near San Antonio, Texas
Poet, memoirist, and novelist Paulette Jiles was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and moved to Canada in 1969 after graduating with a degree in Romance languages from the University of Missouri at Kansas City.
She spent eight years as a journalist in Canada, before turning to writing poetry. In 1984, she won the Governor General's Award (Canada's highest literary honor) for Celestial Navigation, a collection of poems lauded by the Toronto Star as "...fiercely interior and ironic, with images that can mow the reader down."
In 1992, Jiles published Cousins, a beguiling memoir that interweaves adventure and romance into a search for her family roots. Ten years later, she made her fiction debut with Enemy Women (2002), the survival story of an 18-year-old woman caged with the criminally insane in a St. Louis prison during the Civil War. Janet Maslin raved in the New York Times, "This is a book with backbone, written with tough, haunting eloquence by an author determined to capture the immediacy of he heroine's wartime odyssey." The book won the Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction (U.S.) and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (Canada).
In her second novel, 2007's Stormy Weather, Jiles mined another rich trove of American history. Set in Texas oil country during the Great Depression, the story traces the lives of four women, a widow and her three daughters, as they struggle to hold farm and family together in a hardscrabble world of dust storms, despair, and deprivation. In its review, the Washington Post praised the author's lyrical prose, citing descriptions that "crackle with excitement."
A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Jiles currently lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.
Books
1973 - Waterloo Express (poetry)
1984 - Celestial Navigation (poems)
1985 - The Golden Hawks (children)
1986 - Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma Kola
1986 - The Late Great Human Road Show
1988 - The Jesse James Poems
1988 - Blackwater (short stories)
1989 - Song to the Rising Sun (poems)
1992 - Cousins (memoir)
1995 - North Spirit: Travels Among the Cree and Ojibway Nations and Their Star Maps (memoir)
2002 - Enemy Women
2005 - Flying Lesson: Selected Poems
2007 - Stormy Weather
2009 - The Color of Lightning
2013 - Lighthouse Island
2016 - News of the World
2020 - Simon the Fiddler
Awards
Governor General’s Award for Poetry,Canada (Celestial Navigation)
Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, Canada (Enemy Women)
Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction, U.S. (Enemy Women)
Extras
From a 2007 Barnes & Noble interview:
• When I lived in Nelson, British Columbia, there were three or four of us women who were struggling writers; we were very poor and we had a great deal of fun. We shared writing and money and wine. Woody (Caroline Woodward) had a great, huge Volkswagen bug—green—named Greena Garbo. When any of us managed to publish something there were celebrations. It was a wonderful time. They always managed to show up at my place just when I'd baked bread. One time Meagan and Joanie arrived to share with me a horrible dinner they had made of cracked wheat and onions—we were actually all short of food. I had just made lasagna—and they ate all of my lasagna and left me with that vile dish of groats and onions. And then we all got married and went in different directions.
• I have a small ranch that keeps me busy—two horses, a donkey, a cat, a dog, fences, a pasture—I and spend lots of time preventing erosion, clearing cedar, etc.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays by Northrop Frye gives a clear and cogent analysis of the various sorts of imaginative narratives, among them the quest story. It does not assign value to any one type of story. I came upon Frye's The Well-Tempered Critic in college and loved it. It has the same sort of descriptive brilliance as Anatomy. It was a relief from the contemporary insistence that only the novel of psychological exploration was of literary value."
Other influential books include The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway; All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
The reader is treated to a kind of alchemy on the page when character, setting and song converge at all the right notes, generating an authentic humanity that is worth remembering and celebrating.
New York Times
[Jiles's] description of Simon and Doris traveling on separate journeys across the Texas landscape is superb, causing us to feel the elation and sense of possibility that rises in the hearts of man, woman and beast in setting out on the road.
Wall Street Journal
Endearing…. And when the final battle royal arrives in San Antonio, it’s just the rousing ballad we want to hear.
Washington Post
Jiles’ sparse but lyrical writing is a joy to read…. A beautifully written book and a worthy follow-up to News of the World.
Associated Press
In Simon the Fiddler we once again accompany a cast of intriguing characters on a suspenseful Texas-based quest just after the Civil War.… A crackling-good adventure tale.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Luminescent prose.… Jiles’ timeworn territory provides a cozy escape.
Los Angeles Times
Jiles’s gritty and richly atmospheric seventh novel returns to the post–Civil War Texas she explored in News of the World.… Jiles immerses the reader in the sensory details of the era…. [Her] limber tale satisfies with welcome splashes of comedy and romance.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Imbued with the dust, grit, and grime of Galveston at the close of the Civil War,… Jiles brings… her written word as lyrical and musical as Simon's bow raking over his strings. Loyal Jiles readers… will adore the author's latest masterpiece.
Booklist
(Starred review) [A]tmospheric adventure… [with] clever plotting …true to Jiles' loving but cleareyed portrait of Texas' vibrant, violent frontier culture. Vividly evocative and steeped in American folkways: more great work from a master storyteller.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for SIMON THE FIDDLER … then take off on your own
1. Talk about Simon Boudlin; what kind of a person is he? Is he an idealist, a realist, a romantic … or all three?
2. In a particularly lyrical passage, Jiles writes of her hero:
To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play.… It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.
How does the passage describe not just Simon but all of us—especially our capacity to sense the transcendent nature of art? Does art—music, painting and sculpture, literature, or drama—affect you in a similar manner?
3. Describe the land of Texas and the turmoil of its people as the Civil War winds down. Consider the Union occupying forces, the poverty, disease, and violence.
4. What do you think of Doris. Talk about her "situation" vis-a-vis Col. Webb, which is just as precarious as Simon's.
5. Some reviewers (New York Times and Wall Street Journal) feel that the romance between Simon and Doris hits a false note, that it is "ludicrously melodramatic." Others have found in it the promise of hope in a troubled world. What do you think?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)