Short and (sometimes) sweet stories of the heartland.

If it were not for an article published in the Star Tribune last year, I would have had no inkling that a small film called Sweet Land had recently been filmed in the rural streatches of western Minnesota. And if not for seeing the movie, I would have missed Will Weaver's 1989 collection of stories, the title story "A Gravestone Made of Wheat," being the inspiration for the screenplay. I just love it when coincidences all lead to an author that I had almost forgotten, and find a satisfying read in the process.

The stories in A Gravestone Made of Wheat and Other Stories all have connections to the small farming communities of the Midwest, particularly Weaver's home state Minnesota. Weaver's sense of the pull the land has on the Midwestern psyche is pitch perfect in his writing, creating characters that react to their various situations in ways that ring true. In the title story, elderly Olaf's intention to bury his wife Inge on their farm despite the objections of the local sheriff echoes the quiet determination and dignity the young couple faced when postwar prejudices led to snub Inge because of her German birth. With "The Bread-Truck Driver," Weaver creates a humorous take on a delivery man intent on wooing the bored wives of northern Minnesota's lake country, and "The Cowman" gave me a chill when I read the depiction of a marriage breaking under the strain of farming responsibilities. A few stories left me cold: "Heart of the Fields" never captured my interest, "Blood Pressure" was simply strange and "The Undeclared Major" was unremarkable in style and plot.

But in addition to the title story, I was taken with the final story, "You Are What You Drive." Following the ownership of a particular black Buick, the story reveals the cyclical pull of the seasons, life and relationships in a small town. It was a good close to a collection of solid, if not revolutionary writing, but satisfying none the less. Weaver has also released another collection of stories including some from Gravestone and newer publications, which I'll probably pick up soon. And the film is definitely worth checking out, a sincere and beautifully filmed portrait of Minnesota in the 1920s. One good film, a good read and the prospect of another enjoyable collection: not bad for one newspaper article.

A human story hidden in a disaster account.

This is as close as I get to a thriller. And Mark Levine’s F5: Devastation, Survival, and the Most Violent Tornado Outbreak of the 20th Century, a description of the freakish outbreak of storms in April 1974 has a definite ‘thriller’ feel to it. But with weather books such as this, there’s often the issue of exploitation hanging over writers (and readers) who are profit from or are entertained by other peoples’ astonishingly bad luck. Levine generally avoids that here; his account creates real, dignified people who are not entirely defined by the tornadoes that swept through their lives.

The April 1974 outbreak spawned hundreds of tornadoes over multiple states, killing hundreds and flattening more than a few communities. Levine examines the storms through the perspective of Limestone County, Alabama, which was struck twice within hours with deadly twisters. I especially like Levine’s opening scene with a young couple driving through the storm, a motif that reoccurs throughout the book. I should note that Levine, in addition to his journalism writings, is also a successful poet, a background that gives the language of F5 not only an immediacy but stark beauty as well.

Levine makes a few missteps, however. His efforts to cast the disaster in the light of Watergate woes, racial tensions and overall malaise slows the momentum and worse, runs against the notion of natural calamity appearing out of nowhere. Nixon may have been a conniving scoundrel, but the storms were not the result of a vengeful God smiting a morally bankrupt nation. Levine skips over most of the science behind the storms, and even that is mostly tied up in the work of Dr. Tetsuya (Ted) Fujita, at the time very much the public face of tornado research. It’s a humanity driven book, and that coupled with the strength of Levine’s writing, raises F5 a notch above most natural disaster books.

O editor, where art thou?

It seems appropriate that of all the characters in classic literature, Elizabeth Kostova chose to resurrect Dracula for her 2005 tome The Historian. There's no shortage of narrative threads to take up from Bram Stoker's original creation, but most importantly, the central character is notoriously hard to pin down to any one time and place. So voila, your novel can leap from locale to exotic locale, across several centuries and still have a reasonable shot at maintaining a plausible plot.

Kostova's detailed settings are the best aspect of The Historian, a novel that jumps from Cambridge, England, to the bazaars of Istanbul and into the dark forests of Romania and Bulgaria. The reason for all this travel is all a little murky, as the plot of the novel unfolds painfully slowly. The historian of the title is nominally a bookish diplomat, living in Amsterdam with his teenage daughter, who serves as the book's first narrator. She dutifully follows him on his diplomatic travels, but when he suddenly disappears following a trip to the University of Cambridge, she sets out to discover the truth. Coming upon a cache of her father's letters, she learns how intertwinded her history is with the legend of Vlad the Impaler, and how her father's love of scholarship and books sent him on a chase that would put him face to face with the legendary tyrant.

Kostova's plot echoes some of the points of The Da Vinci Code--legendary figures, clues hidden in libraries, mysterious forces trying to thwart intrepid scholars and of course the continuous border-hopping--but while that book had a breakneck pace to keep the reader occupied, The Historian unfolds at a painfully slow rate over its 642 pages. Kostova moves it along fairly well over the course of the first 200 pages or so, but then quickly becomes mired in details that I felt did little to add to the story. Adding to its ponderous pace is the use of several different narrators, a technique that only serves to lengthen the proceedings by requiring backstory for each. The germ of the story is a good idea, and there were portions where I was really gripped by the plot turns. But just as quickly, I was back to slogging through minutae. With tighter editing, The Historian would be more appealing, but asking someone to pick through over 600 pages is a request that only the most dedicated readers would likely undertake.

La vie en rose, Quebec style

The tiny hamlet of Rapide Blanc in northern Quebec would hardly garner anyone’s attention, even if the town still existed. Created in the late 1920s to house workers at the nearby hydroelectric plant, Rapide Blanc was just as summarily wiped from the map when a nationalized utility company determined the cost of manning the dam would be more than simply running it remotely. So in 1971, the people who had founded the town packed their cars and left the area to return to its natural state.

Rapide Blanc no longer exists, but Quebecois artist Pascal Blanchet creates a fine portrait of the town in his graphic novel White Rapids (his own translation from the original French). As far as plot goes, there’s not a whole lot: the bigwigs at the power company decide to build a dam and a town for its workers, people enjoy their lives far in the Quebecois wilderness, the town becomes more connected to the world, the power company decides to put an end to it all. That’s pretty much it. But the story is simply justification for Blanchet’s lovely, stylized silhouetted figures with a sort of composition reminiscent of 1950s era advertising. They’re warm, glowing images, colored in varying shades of brownish gray, brilliant whites and muted oranges. Blanchard’s art conveys not a utopia—this is a working town, not one founded on any particular moral premise—but a definite sense of camaraderie and whimsy. One particular image of a house party in full mid-50s swing practically pulses with the bonhomie of good music, good company and a fine summer night. In fact, not even the eventual decline of the town can cast a shade over the pictorials; the final sensation is not that of loss, but more like the natural passing that comes with sunset.

Blanchet’s errors are limited to the types of fonts chosen for the text. Some were virtually impossible to make out either due to letter design or color. The story of Rapide Blanc would hardly constitute a paragraph, but in graphic format it works. Blanchet has had little else published in either French or English, focusing instead mainly on illustration and cartooning. His other work La Fugue might be worth tracking down, or else hope that more of this talented artist’s work becomes available in the U.S.