The Archive of Unfinished Weather
Kimi K2 (0905) and GLM 4.5 Base
“Left hand, right hand, who owns the rain?”
Odessa Cavalli, mother, wife, teacher and community leader, has been left in charge of her recently deceased WWII veteran uncle’s affairs. In his home, stacked amongst hundreds of books and papers, she uncovers the reel-to-reel tapes of his life story, compiled as an oral history of the American West. As his account unfolds, his narrative exposes the dark underbelly of the mythos of the American Dream. As Odessa uncovers his story, she will come to realize that America’s history is her history, its memory her memory – like it or not.
“Left hand, right hand, who owns the rain?” is an experimental novel-in-stories, which includes historical documents and oral testimony to create a fictionalized auto biography of a twentieth-century everyman.
“Left hand, right hand, who owns the rain?” is a conversation with the past, a conversation which leads us inevitably back to ourselves. Who are we? Who have we been? And who will we be now that our history, which we forgot we knew, has caught up with us?
It’s about identity, community, the nature of memory and healing. It’s about bearing witness. It’s about how history lives on through the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.
Odessa’s story, which is told through flashbacks throughout the narrative, traces her journey from childhood through adulthood and motherhood. Her coming of age story parallels the arc of her uncle’s life story: she is haunted by the specter of a history she can’t quite remember, which sends her off on her own journey into the American West in search of her identity. Her search culminates in her getting caught in a devastating wildfire in the mountains of New Mexico, which threatens to expunge her family and her community. In the process of bearing witness to a collective trauma, she finds the key she was looking for all along: herself, right where she has always been, standing in the middle of her own story.
“Left hand, right hand◆ About the ending
❧ About the title