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Téa Obreht Biography

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“Whoever had thought to instate a watering hole in this spot could not have been a woman. It was impossible to linger here without feeling observed. The goblin barrens rose up on either side of the path ahead; bulbous gnomons; knotted terraces; wedge-headed hoodoos, each a narrows into some otherworld. Eastern dudes were known to pay good money to be brought through here and stand around in their frills, trying to guess where, in this maze of stone, some outlaw or another had laired in the old days... --------------------- All of her boys had augured themselves in this valley. Rob -- her son through and through, bullheaded and quick-tempered, beloved abroad and withdrawn at home -- was a wild and unheeding child of the silver camps. In the eerie, misshapen stones of this valley, he had recognized what he most loved of the world. Today, this rock might resemble the Green River railhead; tomorrow, a buffalo -- shapes he had pursued through dime novels... --------------------- Where Rob saw abstractions of the world, Dolan saw facts, the plain passionless truth of things: stone carved by water and wind, and nothing more. He dismantled Rob's visions accordingly; of a geographic depression resembling a woman's skirts, he had once said, "That's just a bajada, you idiot -- can't you see?... --------------------- And then there was Toby, of course -- a man apart. Where the goblins were concerned, he went in for the old prospectors' stories: the stones were maidens, usually, endungeoned or cursed with immobility, awaiting some providential intercession... This one makes me sad Mama, he'd once said of a caravan of knotty lumps. Why lamb? It's a lost remuda, and they're trying to get home. And they never will. It makes me sad.”

Hoodoos
Book:Inland
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