Book Around the Corner

I’ve just finished Heed the Thunder by Jim Thompson and I will write a billet about the book later. I already know that I won’t have anywhere to include Thompson’s descriptions of landscapes and seasons in this billet. So, here are three quotes, just for the pleasure of sharing a good piece of literature and a few thoughts about these descriptions.

Here’s the opening paragraph of the book, as we arrive to Verdon, Nebraska along with Mrs Dillon, one of the characters of the novel:

It was five o’clock when the train stopped at Verdon, and the town and the valley still lay under the gray dark of pre-dawn. Along the crest of the sand-hills, a few snaky fingers of sunligt had edged down through the hayflats, dipping shiveringly into the icy Calamus, darting back through driftfence, scurrying past soddy and dugout; but the rich valley rested undisturbed, darkly, luxuriously. Like some benevolent giant resting until the last possible moment for the day’s prodigious labors, it clung to the darkness; and the dimmed light of the train stood back against the night, satisfied with their own dominion. The long station platform was a brown field of plank, harrowed with age and drought and rain.

Time goes by and winter comes:

Winter fell like a harlot upon the valley. One day there was only the musky odor of her, the rustle of her skirts; the next, she lay sprawled across the land in all her white and undulant opulence, and the valley groaned and shivered uxoriously.

When I read this, I couldn’t help thinking about this painting by Alexandre Hogue, even if Thompson evokes a snowy landscape and Hogue is more about showing a bare land during the Great Depression:

Erosion n2 Mother Earth Laid Bare by Alexander Hogue. 1936

Thompson continues in the same fashion a few chapters later, when spring comes:

Spring slipped like a virgin into the bed of the valley. Now cloying, now rebellious, she struggled and wept against the brown giant. She touched him with fearful fingers that lingered more and more with each touching; she stroked him, brazenly. She gasped, then panted against him, and at last she sighed and her breath came warm and even. And the harlot winter slunk from the couch, jeering.

It is a very sensuous way of imagining the passing of seasons and of picturing the land embracing a new lover every three months. What I find fascinating is that for me the genders are all wrong. Winter and spring are both masculine names in French while valley is feminine. I have a hard time picturing winter and spring as women and the valley as a man. I just wonder: do the genders used for these personnification come from Thompson’s writing or are they commonly used? Out of curiosity, how do you pick genders for personnifications in English?

PS: I checked on Wikipedia, Verdon really exists. I wonder if it was founded by French or French Canadian settlers, because for me, the Verdon is a river in Provence, famous for its splendid gorges.