East of the mountains / David Guterson.
Summary:
Record details
- ISBN: 0151002290
- Physical Description: 279 p. : map ; 24 cm.
- Edition: 1st ed. Hardcover
- Publisher: New York : Harcourt Brace & Co., c1999.
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Genre: | Adventure stories. Psychological fiction. |
Available copies
- 1 of 1 copy available at South Interlake Regional Library.
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- 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Stonewall Library | FIC GUTERSON (Text) | 0000076281 | Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
More information
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Monthly Selections - #1 January 1999
/*Starred Review*/ Dr. Ben Givens, retired heart surgeon, is dying. With his beloved wife already dead and the cancer in his colon--a carefully kept secret--growing intolerably painful, he decides on a suicide that will spare his family the burden and himself the suffering of a lingering death. He will go bird hunting with his dogs, traveling from his adult home in Seattle to the Eastern Washington sageland of his youth, and there stage a fatal accident. Though the plan seems simple and straightforward, its execution is delayed, detoured, and finally undermined by encounters that cast his thoughts back to his boyhood, his courtship of his wife, and his experiences in World War II, and by emergencies that force him to act in the present. Life intervenes. It intervenes most tellingly in a migrant worker's trailer at the farthest point in his journey, where Givens must perform a harrowing delivery, resurrecting skills learned decades ago and never practiced. Leaving the trailer at first light, he is struck by the change wrought in the last few hours. "Things looked different now," he realizes, and he returns home not to fight his cancer, but to endure it and to accept his death. It is an acceptance that seems fully earned because Guterson has traced its unsteady progress with extraordinary honesty, skill, and understanding. The author's second novel makes good on the promise of his first, the extravagantly successful Snow Falling on Cedars (1994). Readers who put that book near the top of the best-seller lists will clamor for this one, and they should not be disappointed. With the same general concerns of love, war, and death and the same searching examination of the relationship between past and present, it is leaner, more direct, and altogether more compelling. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1999)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews - BookPage Reviews : BookPage Reviews 1999 April
Guterson offers a moving story of one man's final pilgrimageInterview by Alden Mudge
"It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had," says David Guterson. "When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case withme after Snow Falling on Cedars."
For Guterson the "amazing success" of that 1994 first novel also raised the specter of the dreaded second book syndrome. "I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged."
But David Guterson's many fans have nothing to worry about. His second novel, East of the Mountains, not only lives up to the promise of Snow Falling on Cedars, but it suggests just how expansive David Guterson's maturing talent may be.
East of the Mountains describes the final hunting trip of Ben Givens, a 73-year-old retired surgeon recently diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer. Givens sets out from Seattle to revisit the rural, apple-growing region of Washington State, where he grew up and met his wife of nearly 50 years, Rachel, who has recently died. His plan is to kill himself and make it appear to be a hunting accident. Crossing the mountains into eastern Washington, Givens wrecks his car, and from there his real journey begins.
"I feel that I've written a story that is in the most long-standing tradition of human storytelling," Guterson says. "The journey story is pervasive across the planet and across time. I owe a debt to every story that's ever been told in that tradition. Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young."
As Ben Givens's hunting trip goes awry, as he encounters people on and off the roads and in the villages of the Columbia Basin, and as he erratically makes his way toward his boyhood home, he reflects on his past and on his decision to die. Through a series of flashbacks, Guterson presents us with a fuller portrait of the man. "I see Ben's life as dividing into three parts," Guterson says. "The first part takes us up until he is fighting in Italy in World War II. That is an innocent life in which he takes great pleasure in hunting with his brother and father, among other things . . . After the war, he is done with hunting, and he is done with guns. He puts them out of his life and becomes a surgeon and a healer. Then his wife dies 19 months before the book opens, and he returns to the recreation of his youth. In this third part of his life he reverts to an earlier self. So part of what this book is about is the tension between these two selves. Part of Ben's journey is to come to a realization of who he really is."
That journey takes Givens through a varying landscape that is beautifully described. "I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years," says Guterson. "I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years." He adds that the semi-arid steppe desert of central Washington, where Givens wanders and has a dramatic encounter with a pack of coyote-hunting wolfhounds, proved "advantageous because there is a long tradition of desert sojourns, and the desert is a place for meditation, solitude, wandering. It's just such a happy coincidence that I happen to have this desert here to work with, the same sort of landscape that Moses wandered through."
"I've only recently come to realize," he says, "that I start just as powerfully with a sense of place and, ultimately, with a love of place, which seeks expression, which wants to use me to express itself. I felt that way about western Washington when I wrote Snow Falling on Cedars, and I felt that way about eastern Washington when I wrote East of the Mountains. It's almost as if I'm compelled to sing these places. I can't seem to stop them from becoming central. Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it."
Guterson lavishes attention on getting the details of his places and events correct. For a scene in which Givens's injured hunting dog is cared for, he visited a number of veterinarians. For the flashbacks of Givens's experiences during World War II, Guterson acknowledges a host of books and experts he consulted. It's a process Guterson says he enjoys, and he jokes that it takes him so long to write a book because he gets sidetracked by the enticing byways of his research. "It's amazing to find out what sort of things people do. Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is."
Guterson's ambition seems to be to portray the full complexity of these worlds, and his ability to do so grows with each new work. One of the big surprises of East of the Mountains is that it is so stylistically different from Snow Falling on Cedars. Yet in its fashion it is at least as lyrical as its predecessor.
"The style is leaner. There's less density to the prose than there was in the last novel," Guterson says. "There's more understatement, and there's something a bit more clear from sentence to sentence. That's something I did intentionally. I felt it was consistent with the particular themes and subject matter of this book."
He adds, "At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices. There's also the matter of the maturation of your style, which happens concurrently with your maturation as a human being. Because you grow and change as a person, ultimately and inexorably your prose style grows and changes throughout your writing life."
With the publication of East of the Mountains, David Guterson proves that he continues to grow in exceptional ways.
Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California. Copyright 1999 BookPage Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 1999 January #2
The many admirers of Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) won't be disappointed by this affecting, often superbly lyrical account of the final hunting trip undertaken by an elderly westerner dying of colon cancer. Echoes of Faulkner's great story ``The Bear'' and even Tolstoy's ``The Death of Ivan Ilyich'' resound throughout the painstakingly detailed description of the journey that 73-year-old Ben Givens plans to end with a suicide arranged to seem his accidental death. He's a retired thoracic surgeon, recently bereft of his wife of 50 years, and a longtime resident of the Washington State wild country where he grew up on his father's ``apple farm.'' Extended memory-flashbacks detail Ben's closeness to his widowed father and elder brother (who would become a WWII casualty), and his idyllic love for sweetheart Rachel, who would serve as an army nurse in France while Ben saw combat duty in Italy, bringing away from the war years both his bride and a commitment to save lives instead of taking them. Guterson juxtaposes these memories against a sequence of experiences that challenge the moribund Ben's resolve to die: he survives the wreck of his car and an attack by coyote-hunting wolfhounds; meets a couple who seem destined to live forever, a compassionate veterinarian, and, later, a tubercular migrant worker, then a girl enduring a dangerous childbirth and learns that his life-giving skills remain unimpaired. The denouement feels both hurried and flat, and its ending uninspired but it's rescued time and again by the beauty and clarity of Guterson's prose, a virtuosic blend of crisp declarative sentences and long, seductive, image-filled extended meditative statements. Thinly imagined but quite beautifully written and (the nicely named) Ben Givens's appealing integrity and compassion undoubtedly guarantee that his story will be another major popular and critical success. (First printing of 500,000; Literary Guild main selection; $500,000 ad/promo) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1998 December #1
After Snow Falling on Cedars, the story of a terminally ill doctor on a quest through the American West. A Literary Guild main selection. Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 1999 February #2
Mourning his wife's recent passing and facing his rapidly progressing colon cancer, retired surgeon Ben Givens decides on suicide rather than lengthy suffering for himself and his remaining family. After mapping out his demise in a shooting "accident," Ben drives into the mountains of Washington State for a final bird hunt with his Brittany spaniels. Almost immediately his meticulous plans are disrupted. A car accident propels Ben into unexpected physical and emotional terrain, where his subsequent adventures force him to reexamine his convictions about mortality, morality, and identity. Ben's odyssey is told in the controlled yet passionate prose that characterized Guterson's first novel, the acclaimed Snow Falling on Cedars (LJ 8/94). Guterson draws compelling characters and creates a haunting sense of place and of humankind's paradoxical relationship with the natural world; a passage describing a desperate encounter with a pack of Irish wolfhounds compares favorably with the best of Hemingway. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/98.] Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA Copyright 1999 Library Journal Reviews - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 1999 January #2
A good and decent man's passage through life as reflected in his memories and his experiences on what he intends to be his last day on earth is the burden of Guterson's (Snow Falling on Cedars) deeply felt, honest and quietly powerful new novel. Dr. Ben Givens, a 73-year-old retired thoracic surgeon in Seattle, has terminal colon cancer, a fact that he has kept from his daughter and grandson. Widowed recently after a loving marriage, he decides to forgo the ordeal of dying in stages, and instead to commit suicide in what will look like an accident during a day of quail hunting in the apple-growing country where he was born. But fate interferes with Ben's plan. His van is wrecked when he runs off a slick road, and he is rescued in the first of several encounters that turn into a two-day ordeal. During the cold October night in the sagebrush desert, the narrative rises to a harrowing crescendo when Ben's two dogs are the victims of a marauding pack of Irish wolfhounds. With subtle symmetry, Guterson uses Ben's darkly picaresque misadventure to provide graceful segues into the events of his past. A series of poignant memories occur in flashback Ben's mother's death; his tender courting of Rachel, who became his wife; his soul-lacerating experiences in combat in WWII and his life-defining epiphany at an army field hospital in Italy which chart the growth of a man with a strong sense of humanity and responsibility and a steadfast work ethic. The novel begins slowly, and at first one fears that Guterson's attempt to establish a sense of place will result in a dense recital of geographical names. But his unsparingly direct, beautifully observed and meticulously detailed prose creates an almost palpable atmospheric background. At the end of his journey, Ben achieves an understanding about the meaning of life and the continuity of commitment. Wise and compassionate about the human predicament, Guterson's second novel confirms his talent as a writer who delves into life's moral complexities to arrive at existential truths. Agent, Georges Borchardt. 500,000 first printing; $500,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild main selection; author tour; rights sold to U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Holland, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark; simultaneous release by BDD audio. (Apr.) FYI: Universal Pictures will release the film of Snow Falling on Cedars in fall 1999. Copyright 1999 Publishers Weekly Reviews