Item: Aug 9 - Fog
Rating: 4.5
Author: Catherine

Aug 9 - Fog⁠ by Kathryn Scanlan
Published by MCD
Publication date: June 4, 2019
Genres: Fiction, Literary

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What a pleasure to be able to start the week with a review for one of the most unusual novels I’ve read in a while. Not so much for its premise, but its backstory. The book is Aug 9- Fog and the author Kathryn Scanlan, who found a beat-up, mildewed, crumbling diary at an estate sale, took it home with her and forgot about it for 15 years. Until the day she started thumbing through its pages and was completely drawn into the life of an 86-year-old woman living in a small Illinois town from 1967-1972. Scanlan pulled bits and pieces of the diary and reassembled them to craft a tiny exquisite novel.

There are only 110 pages in Aug 9—Fog and each only has four or five sentences at most. They chronicle the weather and the minutia of an elderly woman and the people in her life. Nothing extraordinary happens, except life with its aches and pains, death, meals, visiting friends, and the weather. There are no revelations or words of wisdom and yet, reading it was a balm. This is a year in a life nearing its end with the days culled to the bare minimum and it’s beautiful.

For those who need complete sentences, properly used pronouns, and perfect grammar this is not the book for you. The same goes for other basic elements like story resolution or a full understanding of each character and their relationship to each other. There is none of that to be found in Aug 9—Fog. The narrator’s name is never used— it’s her diary, why would it be? Technically, this is hardly a novel and yet, with the briefest of sentences and the smallest of details I could picture this woman, her home, her cat, the people she loved. There was no story arc or even a plot beyond the seasons and yet, even though I’ve been DNFing books with abandon because they were too slow, this held me. I paused over sentences like

My pep has left me.

and felt the words in my bones.

Ultimately, this is one of those books that’s less about the writer than about the reader. The writing is so simplistic and bare it lays on the page waiting for the reader to imbue it with whatever meaning they find from their own experiences, memories, and feelings. For some, it won’t resonate at all. For me, Aug 9—Fog was contemplative, allowing my mind to still; the kind of book to be picked up time and again to sit with its pages.