TRAVELS WITH BILL
By Marietta Pritchard
The Impress Group
Amherst writer Marietta Pritchard has been an inveterate traveler for years, often with her husband, longtime Amherst College English professor William Pritchard, and sometimes on her own or with friends and family.
In her newest book, “Travels With Bill,” Pritchard looks back on her long marriage and her family history through the lens of her traveling, as well as overseas living with her husband when he was on sabbatical, as a way of taking stock of her life and her experience. She does it in part by examining old diaries and travel journals, both hers and her husband’s.
“Our son Will says he thinks travel is one of the real tests of a marriage, a truism that happens to be true,” she writes. “Why not interleave those journals and see what they say about us, about our travels, about traveling in general, about our marriage of six decades.”
Pritchard has plenty of material to draw on, including some dramatic family history. Her parents, who lived in Hungary in the years before World War II, were forced to flee to the United States in 1939 with Pritchard and their other young daughter because of the Nazis’ deadly anti-Semitic policies.
That background becomes fodder for trips she makes to central Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s to try to retrace some of her family’s past, including finding the Hungarian farms that her father once managed for her grandfather. (That’s a subject Pritchard explored in more depth in “Among Strangers,” her 2014 book about her family’s history.)
“Travels With Bill” is nicely illustrated with many photos of Pritchard, her husband, their children and others the author has traveled with over the years; there are images as well, including old postcards, of some of her destinations, from Europe to the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific coast. She also looks at what other writers have said about the pleasure — and headaches — of traveling.
In sum, the book offers a snapshot of the Pritchards’ life together, the way they have “been traveling, sometimes travailing, together as husband and wife,” Pritchard writes. By drawing on their diaries and journals, she adds, she has also assembled “a portrait — a collage, a mosaic, a diptych — of a 60-year marriage. As a wickedly astute friend suggested, the title of this book should be ‘He Said, She Said.’”
Marietta and William Pritchard will do a joint reading from “Travels With Bill” at Amherst Books on Friday at 7 p.m.
TERRA NULLIUS
By Claire G. Coleman
Small Beer Press
clairegcoleman.com
In a dry, hot land, settlers are having a hard time growing food. Sparse rain, as well as a lack of experienced farmers among the newcomers, means much of the colony is relying on food sent by ship from a distant homeland, provisions that are often half-rotten by the time they arrive.
Sure, there are some native plants that can be eaten, but the settlers generally find them repugnant. They find the native people repugnant, too. They’re dark, they’re lazy, their speech sounds like “jabber,” as a missionary nun sees it, even as she attends grimly to her job of bringing religion and education to the children of these “savages.”
But other settlers think that’s a waste of time and decide the best way to deal with the natives is to exterminate them.
If this sounds like something out of Australian history, you’re on the right track — but then again, maybe not quite. “Terra Nullius,” published by Small Beer Press of Easthampton, is a novel by Claire G. Coleman, a member of the Noongar Aboriginal people of western Australia, who has tapped Australian and indigenous histories and her own imagination to offer a unique take on a clash of cultures.
“Terra Nullius,” which has won or been nominated for a number of literary awards in Australia, takes its title from a Latin term meaning “No Man’s Land,” which the British used to justify taking land from Australia’s Aboriginal people — and killing or brushing aside the Aborigines themselves — when they began settling the continent in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The novel opens with one of its main characters, the native Jacky, fleeing a settlers’ homestead where he works as a servant and is frequently beaten. He heads into the Outback, where he’s pursued by Sgt. Rohan and men of the Colonial Troopers. Also looking to bring Jacky in is the head of the Department for the Protection of Natives, a man so cruel he’s known as “The Devil” by settlers and natives alike.
Not everyone is allied against the natives. Johnny Star, a former settler, now rides with various native comrades as an outlaw, while Esperance, a kind-hearted young woman, tries to protect a group of starving, free natives.
Eventually these different characters will come together, but in a way that, as one reviewer puts it, “upends the narrative with the revelation that the settlers are not what they seem.”
“With this twist,” Publishers Weekly writes, “Coleman universalizes the experiences of invaded indigenous populations in a way that has seldom been achieved. Artfully combining elements of literary, historical and speculative fiction, this allegorical novel is surprising and unforgettable.”