![]() ![]() One is his father’s, which has a Scottish burr and a rhythm tied to the seasons and necessities of sheep-farming. One is his own, of course - a distinctive, insistent, poetic voice. The question of voice in this book is hard to pin down, for a memoir, because Doig is trying to create three voices. It is a kind of terroir deeper than any vine can grow. In the end, it’s Doig’s contention (which he never quite makes explicit) that one shapes the other and the other shapes one, in ways we may never quite understand. This comes from the two driving forces of the book smashing together: voice and place, place and voice, tangling and rushing as if there were nothing different about the two and yet everything to separate them. Ivan Doig’s memoir about his childhood and adolescence in rural Montana, This House of Sky, is an interestingly angular book, all joints and rough skin and knobby knees. ![]()
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