Review: The Haunting of a Southern Family: Ghosts Haunted By Ghosts
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 27, 2012
Sometimes the line between poetry and prose is thin. In the case of BANYAN, a novella by Cynthia A. Williams, it is gossamer.BANYAN is a story about loss. It is about a family fatally flawed. It is the story of suffocating minds gone feral, of ghosts who are themselves haunted.The setting is the Cuvier family home, not unlike the Burroughs House in Ft. Myers. The time of the novel is elastic, moving back and forth through the lumberyard of the author's imagination, pirouetting around the year 1905 and what turns out to be the great tragic event of the family. Family members stay inside the house most of the time, out of touch, suffocating. Family ghosts persist, drunk with madness, unsure of their identity, haunting the house just as they are themselves haunted.In the second part of the novella, it is some fifty years later. Mrs. Dulcet conducts tours of the Cuvier home, now a national landmark and open to the public. A visitor thinks she sees a face in an upper-story window and Mrs. Dulcet, ever comfortable in her shoes, helps to disabuse visitors and readers alike of their preconceptions.A tour de force in the Southern literary tradition, BANYAN haunts the reader with its beauty, with the rich flow of the author's stream of consciousness, not unlike the growth of a Banyan tree. At the heart of BANYAN is poetic meaning incapable of distillation.I highly recommend reading the book at least once. I loved the Southern gothic feel of this novel, its creation of mood and the description of haunting and was shocked when the final mystery was revealed. Most of all, I loved the hurricane scene, a masterful piece of writing. I loved the character of Mrs. Dulcet. And I will always wonder who Bear is.