
Leslie Martinelli
El Paso Days
Elroy Bode
Nonfiction – Memoir
Wings Press, pp. 160
Cost: $16.00
The title leads the reader to anticipate a memoir about life in Texas, a literary landscape of arroyos and tumbleweeds. While El Paso is the backdrop, the book is a memoir of a piece of Bode's life, a nonlinear autobiography, seasoned liberally with the author's musings about life, death, and the cosmos. The reader travels across the timeline of Bode's life, stopping to observe a remembered event here, a cherished vision there. He explains in the opening note that his book is "a journal of thoughts, scenes, happenings, sort of month by month: not a record of a specific year but a kind of recent generic year." Through these scenes and thoughts we see a portrait of the author, somewhat abstract, with pieces missing, owing to the prevailing undercurrent of loss.