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Canada
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Fiction (2012)"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."
When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.
His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.
Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he once knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.
A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of America's greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a modern classic.
When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.
His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.
Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he once knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.
A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of America's greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a modern classic.
420 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2012
About the author
Richard Ford
197 books1,541 followersRichard Ford, born February 16, 1944 in Jackson, Mississippi, is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day, The Lay of the Land and Let Me Be Frank With You, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories. Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy.
His novel Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1996, also winning the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year.
His novel Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1996, also winning the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 3,717 reviews
July 23, 2020
Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford’s latest novel begins:
Ford gently but steadily builds tension from the opening sentence, when we know murders are coming, to the event itself. In the meantime we come to care about our narrator, Dell Parsons, and have a rooting interest in how he will fare once it does.
Richard Ford - Image from Columbia University
Part One of the novel takes us through events up to and including the robbery, after which Dell and his twin sister, Berner, are all but abandoned in their home in Great Falls, Montana. Surely a town name with some resonance. Berner takes off, leaving Dell to await rescue by a friend of their mother’s. In Part Two, this woman offers Dell her gentle strength en route to a remote Saskatchewan backwater where she delivers him to her brother, Arthur, a charismatic person with a history of violence, the biggest fish in a small, local pond, a king, in a way. Part Two is the meat of the book, the part that Ford began writing twenty years ago. Part One was written more recently, a mechanism for getting Dell across the border.
How much of who we are, who we become, is determined by where we find ourselves? Is it the physical events of life that are the most significant? Is it how we feel, what we remember? There is much here about crossing of lines, whether geographic boundaries or behavioral limits. Once certain boundaries have been crossed, can one ever go home again? Can one ever grow down? What can any of us do if we misunderstand the world? Dell struggles to understand as much as he can, knowing that his father’s misunderstanding of the world he found on his return from World War II contributed to his demise. A peripatetic life certainly did not help. Does such motion seek or escape?
Canada is a coming of age tale. Dell is an introspective, analytical fifteen-year-old, with a penchant for chess and an interest in bee-keeping. He walks us through his thoughts as he tries not only to adapt to life, which seems bent on buffeting him from place to place, but specifically, as he tries to figure out this latest home in which he finds himself. On a broader landscape, he tries to make sense of the world as a whole, attempting to suss out the rules for living his parents never got around to teaching him, learning to discern moral differences and make decisions based on that understanding. One specific image stood out for me, Dell discovering the rusting remnants of a defunct carnival. What an outstanding way to represent the end of innocence!
In addition to immersing us in the events of his fifteen-year-old life, Dell speaks to us from the vantage point of a mature adult. So we know, at the very least, that he survives. But we do not know in what shape or situation. Knowing this alters our concern level. If we know that Dell will survive his ordeal, there is that much less to be concerned about on his behalf. It removes us a bit from the action and lets us ponder Dell’s world the way he does. But Ford does not let us float too far above the events and lose our affection for a kid just trying to figure things out. He is a decent sort and we want him to be ok.
My exposure to Richard Ford is slim, having only read The Sportswriter previously. But it seems that Ford is working in familiar, comfortable themes. Examining one’s life, coping with expectations, reasonable and not, figuring out how to live in the world, all told in beautiful language. The physical world plays a larger role in this book, a landscape Ford mines for bleak, if dramatic resonance. There are stark, wide open spaces that mirror the open, still-forming character of young Dell and also serve to reinforce the harshness, the remoteness of his dark protector. Local wildlife is usually shown either as potential targets for hunters or in other battles for survival.
The beautiful, spare writing reminded me of Kent Haruf (Plainsong and Eventide) and David Malouf (An Imaginary Life, The Conversations at Curlow Creek). There is a softness to the text. Many years ago, while driving north on the Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx, I saw a vision that has haunted my dreams ever since, a car heading southbound on the other side of the divider, with traffic, but gliding by on its roof. There was no sound associated with this, no crashing, screeching, horn-blowing. Ford’s writing reminds me of this. Serious things are going on, but without the noise. The even tone makes the darkness, the challenge, somehow more effective.
Always on the lookout for signposts (maybe too much) I found some items that led me nowhere, but they were probably not really signs anyway. Arthur Remlinger’s assistant, Charlie Quarters, clearly has homosexual tendencies, but nothing much is made of this other than the discomfort it entails for Dell. Naming seemed like it might offer some insight. Dell’s family name is Parsons. One of the cops who arrest his parents is named Bishop. And the Lutheran church across the street from their house crosses the stage for a scene or two, but that thread peters out. One might take the name of the town in which Dell finds himself, Partreau, which means plateau, and see in this a high place from which Dell gets to observe and learn from those around him, perhaps a reinforcement of Dell’s intellectual approach, above, in a way. It might just be a counterpoint to a character whose name means valley. Or it could just be a place name toting no symbolic value. Don’t know. Ford’s selection of Saskatchewan was not specific. When he was asked why he chose to send Dell there, he said, "he had to go somewhere." Ford had never been to Saskatchewan when he set his story there.
None of that matters. Canada is an outstanding work of literature, a beautiful, stark book, and an absolute must read.
PS
I can’t help but imagine Terence Malik going to town on this one. Please, oh please.
Also, I came across a lovely interview with Ford from early 2011, before he had finished writing the book. A significant portion of the 54 minute audio recording addresses Canada.
UPDATES
6/26/2012 - Stephen Colbert did a wonderful short interview with Ford. In which we learn, among other things, why he keep his manuscripts in the freezer.
Canada was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for 2013
First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened laterReally, could anyone read those lines and not want to see what follows?
Ford gently but steadily builds tension from the opening sentence, when we know murders are coming, to the event itself. In the meantime we come to care about our narrator, Dell Parsons, and have a rooting interest in how he will fare once it does.
Richard Ford - Image from Columbia University
Part One of the novel takes us through events up to and including the robbery, after which Dell and his twin sister, Berner, are all but abandoned in their home in Great Falls, Montana. Surely a town name with some resonance. Berner takes off, leaving Dell to await rescue by a friend of their mother’s. In Part Two, this woman offers Dell her gentle strength en route to a remote Saskatchewan backwater where she delivers him to her brother, Arthur, a charismatic person with a history of violence, the biggest fish in a small, local pond, a king, in a way. Part Two is the meat of the book, the part that Ford began writing twenty years ago. Part One was written more recently, a mechanism for getting Dell across the border.
How much of who we are, who we become, is determined by where we find ourselves? Is it the physical events of life that are the most significant? Is it how we feel, what we remember? There is much here about crossing of lines, whether geographic boundaries or behavioral limits. Once certain boundaries have been crossed, can one ever go home again? Can one ever grow down? What can any of us do if we misunderstand the world? Dell struggles to understand as much as he can, knowing that his father’s misunderstanding of the world he found on his return from World War II contributed to his demise. A peripatetic life certainly did not help. Does such motion seek or escape?
Canada is a coming of age tale. Dell is an introspective, analytical fifteen-year-old, with a penchant for chess and an interest in bee-keeping. He walks us through his thoughts as he tries not only to adapt to life, which seems bent on buffeting him from place to place, but specifically, as he tries to figure out this latest home in which he finds himself. On a broader landscape, he tries to make sense of the world as a whole, attempting to suss out the rules for living his parents never got around to teaching him, learning to discern moral differences and make decisions based on that understanding. One specific image stood out for me, Dell discovering the rusting remnants of a defunct carnival. What an outstanding way to represent the end of innocence!
In addition to immersing us in the events of his fifteen-year-old life, Dell speaks to us from the vantage point of a mature adult. So we know, at the very least, that he survives. But we do not know in what shape or situation. Knowing this alters our concern level. If we know that Dell will survive his ordeal, there is that much less to be concerned about on his behalf. It removes us a bit from the action and lets us ponder Dell’s world the way he does. But Ford does not let us float too far above the events and lose our affection for a kid just trying to figure things out. He is a decent sort and we want him to be ok.
My exposure to Richard Ford is slim, having only read The Sportswriter previously. But it seems that Ford is working in familiar, comfortable themes. Examining one’s life, coping with expectations, reasonable and not, figuring out how to live in the world, all told in beautiful language. The physical world plays a larger role in this book, a landscape Ford mines for bleak, if dramatic resonance. There are stark, wide open spaces that mirror the open, still-forming character of young Dell and also serve to reinforce the harshness, the remoteness of his dark protector. Local wildlife is usually shown either as potential targets for hunters or in other battles for survival.
…we saw a big coyote in the road with a rabbit in its mouth. It paused and looked at our car approaching, then walked into the tall wheat out of sight. We saw what our father said was a golden eagle, poised in the perfectly blue sky, being thwarted by crows wanting to drive it away. We saw three magpies pecking a snake as it hurried to get across the pavementPeople are gonna die.
The beautiful, spare writing reminded me of Kent Haruf (Plainsong and Eventide) and David Malouf (An Imaginary Life, The Conversations at Curlow Creek). There is a softness to the text. Many years ago, while driving north on the Henry Hudson Parkway in the Bronx, I saw a vision that has haunted my dreams ever since, a car heading southbound on the other side of the divider, with traffic, but gliding by on its roof. There was no sound associated with this, no crashing, screeching, horn-blowing. Ford’s writing reminds me of this. Serious things are going on, but without the noise. The even tone makes the darkness, the challenge, somehow more effective.
Always on the lookout for signposts (maybe too much) I found some items that led me nowhere, but they were probably not really signs anyway. Arthur Remlinger’s assistant, Charlie Quarters, clearly has homosexual tendencies, but nothing much is made of this other than the discomfort it entails for Dell. Naming seemed like it might offer some insight. Dell’s family name is Parsons. One of the cops who arrest his parents is named Bishop. And the Lutheran church across the street from their house crosses the stage for a scene or two, but that thread peters out. One might take the name of the town in which Dell finds himself, Partreau, which means plateau, and see in this a high place from which Dell gets to observe and learn from those around him, perhaps a reinforcement of Dell’s intellectual approach, above, in a way. It might just be a counterpoint to a character whose name means valley. Or it could just be a place name toting no symbolic value. Don’t know. Ford’s selection of Saskatchewan was not specific. When he was asked why he chose to send Dell there, he said, "he had to go somewhere." Ford had never been to Saskatchewan when he set his story there.
None of that matters. Canada is an outstanding work of literature, a beautiful, stark book, and an absolute must read.
PS
I can’t help but imagine Terence Malik going to town on this one. Please, oh please.
Also, I came across a lovely interview with Ford from early 2011, before he had finished writing the book. A significant portion of the 54 minute audio recording addresses Canada.
UPDATES
6/26/2012 - Stephen Colbert did a wonderful short interview with Ford. In which we learn, among other things, why he keep his manuscripts in the freezer.
Canada was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for 2013
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 7, 2020
”The world doesn’t usually think about bank robbers as having children--though plenty must. But the children’s story--which mine and my sister’s is--is ours to weigh and apportion and judge as we see it. Years later in college, I read that the great critic Ruskin wrote that composition is the arrangement of unequal things. Which means it’s for the composer to determine what’s equal to what, and what matters more and what can be set to the side of life’s hurtling passage onward.”
What do you do when your parents turn out to be bank robbers?
Dell Parson’s and his twin sister Berner, age fifteen, find themselves orphaned by the federal justice system after their parents make the fateful and unwise decision to rob the Agricultural National Bank in Creekmore, North Dakota. Despite being twins they are very different from one another in appearance and personality. ”Nature doesn’t rhyme her children.”Before the system can catch up with them and make them wards of the state Berner decides to strike out on her own for California and Dell is spirited away across the border into Canada to live with the brother of a friend of his mother. This is the quick and dirty synopsis of the first half of the book. I struggled with this part of the book and had a near crisis of faith in my veneration of the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Ford.
The second half was vintage Richard Ford. My heart sang. My head buzzed. I inhaled pages and then turned back to inhale them again. I had to go out on my back deck, smile at the sky, and breath a bit of oxygen heavy air to make sure my mind was working at maximum capacity to appreciate the final chapters of this book. VINDICATION!!!
Back in 1986 Vintage Books launched this concept of publishing really cutting edge literature in a trade paperback format. They skipped releasing a hardcover edition of these books and never even considered a mass market paperback. The idea was to eventually eliminate the other publishing formats. It worked and it didn’t work. I was employed at Publisher’s Book Outlet in a mall in Phoenix, Arizona and we sold these books as fast as we could get them back in stock. Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, which I read with eyes wide open and an elevated heart rate, was a book that I felt as if I was being spoon fed important life changing information. Richard Russo’s Mohawk was also part of the series and was another book that gave the reader a good thump to the head. Russo also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. An editor at Vintage knew what they were doing when they signed these two guys up for this program.
I don’t know if I can be objective about Richard Ford. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him several times. When his book Independence Day was released, a follow up to The Sportswriter, I was waiting with great anticipation for his arrival in San Francisco on tour. My son had other plans. He was born on the day of Ford’s presentation. One of my friends informed Richard Ford about this celebrated moment in my life and he signed and inscribed a book to my son.
The book resides in a bookshelf with a beautiful ornate glass door that had belonged to my grandmother where I keep all the most precious books in my collection.
Ford’s eyes are crisp pale blue that don’t look at you, but look through you. I felt as if I didn’t have to say a word and he could just gaze at me and write my biography.
Richard Ford
Now there was a moment in the lives of the twins parents that I wish happened to more married couples more often. Sometimes we all get so crushed by monotony. Our marriages tend to get whittled down to more of a business arrangement than a relationship, but there are these moments when we remember why we signed up for kids, a mortgage, and a soul sucking career.
I remember that night, now, as the best, most natural time our family had that summer--or any time. Just for a moment, I saw how life could go forward on a steadier, more reliable course. The two of them were happy and comfortable with each other. My father appreciated the way my mother behaved toward him. He paid her compliments on her clothes and her appearance and her mood. It was as if they’d discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life.
Sometimes we just hang on to the wrong memories of each other.
Saskatchewan Prairie where Dell found himself relocated.
Dell Parsons found himself in Canada living in a stucco house with holes bigger than rats in the walls that necessitated him creatively piling boxes of someone else’s leftover memories against the walls to keep the weather at bay. He was under the guidance of Arthur Remlinger a man long on charisma and haunted by shadowy moods. He was colored by a violent past that chose that six weeks in the life of Dell Parsons to come explosively to light. Dell had to assimilate quickly.
I hadn’t been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with others or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn’t so hard and risky and didn’t need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I’ve already said, becoming someone else--but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt.
Remlinger had an assistant named Charley Quarters who claimed to be a member of the Metis tribe. He was assigned to teach Dell to work which mainly involved unskilled labor like digging goose pits for hunters and carrying luggage up to rooms in the hotel. Like Remlinger he was a man with a past and an unhealthy obsession with Hitler, rouge, Stalin, mascara, Mussolini, and lipstick. Needless to say he made Dell uneasy.
”You always think you know the worst thing. But it’s never the very worst thing.” Charley Quarters
Dell while trying to decide a new course for his life discovered a new relationship with time.
Possibly being a town boy (in town, time matters so much) and being suddenly set down in an empty place I didn’t know, among people I knew little about, left me more subject to the elemental forces that mimicked the experience I was undergoing and made it more tolerable. Against these forces--an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving--time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance and should.
I can’t imagine the circumstances that would allow TIME to loosen the choke hold around my neck. I’m always so conscious of time, even the amount of time that I’m taking to write this review and I’ve TAKEN TOO MUCH.
”It’s hard going through life without killing someone.” Charley Quarters
Richard Ford is a lyrical writer. You will be exposed to beautiful, sparse prose. If you have not read Richard Ford before I would still recommend reading The Sportswriter first, although, in my experience men tend to like that book better than women. It is the book where I feel all his ideas about a self-analysed life coalesce into perfect expression.
Others may have liked the first half of this book better than I did, but the second half tugged at my own memories, my own insecurities, and even had me tearing up in a particular scene with his sister. It made me appreciate the decisions that I’ve made that have been mostly right and also respect the fact that one misstep could have landed me in circumstances that are less than ideal. We are in some ways caretakers of the dreams of that 15 year old and that 25 year old and that 35 year old that resides in all of us. I do wonder if I stood before a panel of my past selves would they be mortified or would they shrug and give me a tentative thumbs up.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
What do you do when your parents turn out to be bank robbers?
Dell Parson’s and his twin sister Berner, age fifteen, find themselves orphaned by the federal justice system after their parents make the fateful and unwise decision to rob the Agricultural National Bank in Creekmore, North Dakota. Despite being twins they are very different from one another in appearance and personality. ”Nature doesn’t rhyme her children.”Before the system can catch up with them and make them wards of the state Berner decides to strike out on her own for California and Dell is spirited away across the border into Canada to live with the brother of a friend of his mother. This is the quick and dirty synopsis of the first half of the book. I struggled with this part of the book and had a near crisis of faith in my veneration of the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Ford.
The second half was vintage Richard Ford. My heart sang. My head buzzed. I inhaled pages and then turned back to inhale them again. I had to go out on my back deck, smile at the sky, and breath a bit of oxygen heavy air to make sure my mind was working at maximum capacity to appreciate the final chapters of this book. VINDICATION!!!
Back in 1986 Vintage Books launched this concept of publishing really cutting edge literature in a trade paperback format. They skipped releasing a hardcover edition of these books and never even considered a mass market paperback. The idea was to eventually eliminate the other publishing formats. It worked and it didn’t work. I was employed at Publisher’s Book Outlet in a mall in Phoenix, Arizona and we sold these books as fast as we could get them back in stock. Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, which I read with eyes wide open and an elevated heart rate, was a book that I felt as if I was being spoon fed important life changing information. Richard Russo’s Mohawk was also part of the series and was another book that gave the reader a good thump to the head. Russo also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. An editor at Vintage knew what they were doing when they signed these two guys up for this program.
I don’t know if I can be objective about Richard Ford. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him several times. When his book Independence Day was released, a follow up to The Sportswriter, I was waiting with great anticipation for his arrival in San Francisco on tour. My son had other plans. He was born on the day of Ford’s presentation. One of my friends informed Richard Ford about this celebrated moment in my life and he signed and inscribed a book to my son.
The book resides in a bookshelf with a beautiful ornate glass door that had belonged to my grandmother where I keep all the most precious books in my collection.
Ford’s eyes are crisp pale blue that don’t look at you, but look through you. I felt as if I didn’t have to say a word and he could just gaze at me and write my biography.
Richard Ford
Now there was a moment in the lives of the twins parents that I wish happened to more married couples more often. Sometimes we all get so crushed by monotony. Our marriages tend to get whittled down to more of a business arrangement than a relationship, but there are these moments when we remember why we signed up for kids, a mortgage, and a soul sucking career.
I remember that night, now, as the best, most natural time our family had that summer--or any time. Just for a moment, I saw how life could go forward on a steadier, more reliable course. The two of them were happy and comfortable with each other. My father appreciated the way my mother behaved toward him. He paid her compliments on her clothes and her appearance and her mood. It was as if they’d discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life.
Sometimes we just hang on to the wrong memories of each other.
Saskatchewan Prairie where Dell found himself relocated.
Dell Parsons found himself in Canada living in a stucco house with holes bigger than rats in the walls that necessitated him creatively piling boxes of someone else’s leftover memories against the walls to keep the weather at bay. He was under the guidance of Arthur Remlinger a man long on charisma and haunted by shadowy moods. He was colored by a violent past that chose that six weeks in the life of Dell Parsons to come explosively to light. Dell had to assimilate quickly.
I hadn’t been taught to assimilate, a person perhaps assimilated without knowing it. I was doing it now. You did it alone, and not with others or for them. And assimilating possibly wasn’t so hard and risky and didn’t need to be permanent. This state of mind conferred another freedom on me and was like starting life over, or as I’ve already said, becoming someone else--but someone who was not stalled but moving, which was the nature of things in the world. I could like it or hate it, but the world would change around me no matter how I felt.
Remlinger had an assistant named Charley Quarters who claimed to be a member of the Metis tribe. He was assigned to teach Dell to work which mainly involved unskilled labor like digging goose pits for hunters and carrying luggage up to rooms in the hotel. Like Remlinger he was a man with a past and an unhealthy obsession with Hitler, rouge, Stalin, mascara, Mussolini, and lipstick. Needless to say he made Dell uneasy.
”You always think you know the worst thing. But it’s never the very worst thing.” Charley Quarters
Dell while trying to decide a new course for his life discovered a new relationship with time.
Possibly being a town boy (in town, time matters so much) and being suddenly set down in an empty place I didn’t know, among people I knew little about, left me more subject to the elemental forces that mimicked the experience I was undergoing and made it more tolerable. Against these forces--an earth rotating, a sun lowering its angle in the sky, winds filling with rain and the geese arriving--time is just a made-up thing, and recedes in importance and should.
I can’t imagine the circumstances that would allow TIME to loosen the choke hold around my neck. I’m always so conscious of time, even the amount of time that I’m taking to write this review and I’ve TAKEN TOO MUCH.
”It’s hard going through life without killing someone.” Charley Quarters
Richard Ford is a lyrical writer. You will be exposed to beautiful, sparse prose. If you have not read Richard Ford before I would still recommend reading The Sportswriter first, although, in my experience men tend to like that book better than women. It is the book where I feel all his ideas about a self-analysed life coalesce into perfect expression.
Others may have liked the first half of this book better than I did, but the second half tugged at my own memories, my own insecurities, and even had me tearing up in a particular scene with his sister. It made me appreciate the decisions that I’ve made that have been mostly right and also respect the fact that one misstep could have landed me in circumstances that are less than ideal. We are in some ways caretakers of the dreams of that 15 year old and that 25 year old and that 35 year old that resides in all of us. I do wonder if I stood before a panel of my past selves would they be mortified or would they shrug and give me a tentative thumbs up.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
July 11, 2015
What an odd read!!!
The antithesis of a thriller!
There are no surprises in this. You know from the opening sentence that his parents are going to rob a bank. You know that there are going to be murders. You know in advance that his sister is going to run away. You know that he is going to Canada.
Maybe some books are like a river tumbling down from the mountains - fast paced, gathering speed, sweeping all along on its rush to the sea. But this is a book like a lazy stretch of water on the coastal plain - meandering, backtracking, some parts stagnant, some parts eddying around obstacles, languid. I can't even say this narrative is a "slow reveal" because it is all there, teasing the reader to dip their toes in the water to find the depths of the narrative.
There were many times when I wanted to shake Dell and have him take a more active role in his own life. To me it wasn't a coming-of-age story because Dell never took this responsibility. It had a stronger flavour of we-are-who-we-are and the impact of parenting. Dell seemed to be just an observer ... too remote from his feelings to even be described as melancholy ... maybe pathologically innocent would be the closest.
It is calm, detailed, teasingly repetitive, bleak, engrossing and annoying!
The antithesis of a thriller!
There are no surprises in this. You know from the opening sentence that his parents are going to rob a bank. You know that there are going to be murders. You know in advance that his sister is going to run away. You know that he is going to Canada.
Maybe some books are like a river tumbling down from the mountains - fast paced, gathering speed, sweeping all along on its rush to the sea. But this is a book like a lazy stretch of water on the coastal plain - meandering, backtracking, some parts stagnant, some parts eddying around obstacles, languid. I can't even say this narrative is a "slow reveal" because it is all there, teasing the reader to dip their toes in the water to find the depths of the narrative.
There were many times when I wanted to shake Dell and have him take a more active role in his own life. To me it wasn't a coming-of-age story because Dell never took this responsibility. It had a stronger flavour of we-are-who-we-are and the impact of parenting. Dell seemed to be just an observer ... too remote from his feelings to even be described as melancholy ... maybe pathologically innocent would be the closest.
It is calm, detailed, teasingly repetitive, bleak, engrossing and annoying!
June 25, 2022
I am starting to feel sorry for those who reside in backwater towns across either America or Canada. There always seem to be an unjust stigma attached for no fault of their own as to how they go about leading their lives. And Richard Ford has done what countless other writers have done before him with the following...
There is a dangerous individual who lives in a trailer outside of town. The blinds are generally always down, the interior looks like a grenade went off, it's surrounded by junk, and most often than not a rusty old flatbed truck minus the wheels sits alone, half camouflaged by weeds and grass that has never seen a mower. The individual has a six pack of beer, cigarettes or drugs and a gun within a three feet radius at all times, on the eye they don't look right (in this case a man wearing makeup), are up to no good, and planning bad things.
But this would come later.
Now back to where it all started, Great Falls, Montana...
Richard Ford's novel in simple terms, explores the impact of parental foolishness on a son's and daughter's life, predominantly the son, Dell Parsons, who narrates the story as a 66 year old man looking back on the events that changed his ordinary and dull childhood. His father Bev, an ex-serviceman runs into financial difficulties after getting mixed up in some dodgy business involving stolen cattle, and the selling of steaks. Both his mother and father are simplistic people who have never crossed the line into crime, and appear way out of their depths when planning to rob a bank further up north, of course all doesn't end well.
With parents in lock-up, sentences pending, both fifteen year old Dell and sister Berner are for the first time in their lives not only alone, but having to come to terms with the fact their parents may or may not be bank robbers. To avoid Montana authorities where both children would be taken into care, the mother arranges for them with a friend to go to Canada, but after Berner runs away, it's Dell who is left solely to face the daunting prospect of living with strangers in, to him anyway a strange land.
Although a big book with a slow-burning nature that takes time to get of the ground, it didn't ever feel that way, even though the bank robbery, when it is finally described almost one hundred pages in, is reconstructed in low-key fashion, it's outcome a foregone conclusion. What is important here is not the event, but its long aftermath. Tantalisingly Ford's haunting prose works wonders most of the time, the huge open spaces of Montana create something vast within, as the essence of innocence it fractured from the sudden tragic rupture in the fabric of an ordinary family life that's blown to pieces. The narrative takes all the inner insignificance things of everyday life and gives them more meaning, wet leaves hanging outside a window, the smell of rain on the horizon, creatures running for cover on an empty highway, or the lonely siblings, bemused and detached starring off into the distance mulling over just what's out there. Ford can stretch a sentence, often beautifully, to paragraph length, but his writing is much more straightforwardly descriptive than it has been in the past, had this been an early Terrence Malick film there would no doubt be huge tracking shots of stunning, sweeping landscapes, and slow close-ups of people as a warm breeze gently blows through their hair, whilst the camera lens reflects the sun. This is the feel the first half of the book advocates before turning all the more unpleasant, and sadly towards the end familiar territory.
Dell's clandestine live would get more downbeat in Canada where he takes a job working for a mysterious American fellow exile named Arthur Reminger, he in turn has a oddball friend, Charley, who Dell would hang around with, mostly goose hunting on the prairie. When Reminger's own dark past catches up with him, Dell becomes an unwitting accomplice in a ruthlessly executed crime and for the second time in his life, Dell would again be spirited away to the unknown.
This doesn't read like a crime novel, nor is it supposed to be, those hoping for that will end up disappointed. Ford is not interested in the crimes themselves, but how they shape ones life and the way of being in, and responding to, the world. Throughout, Dell's calm and measured voice suggests someone not so much damaged but just trying to work things out. There are several moments in Canada where Dell seems on the verge of some great epiphany, but arrives instead at a smaller understanding of the strange trajectory of his past. A past he must leave in the past, to build the foundations of a better life in the future.
In a roundabout way, there are faults and flaws here and there, but they amount to small cracks in the pavement rather than holes in the road. Some will find it over long, boring, where nothing really happens, well, go and watch a Spaghetti Western instead. This is a delicately structured work, with Ford casting a progressive powerful spell over the reader, with deft hands that carry a voice of pure grace. 4/5
June 26, 2012
Yaaawn.. I must say it is very well written and I could picture all the boring details and bleak scenes.. which seemed to go by at an excruciating, belabored pace. It was like watching a train-wreck in super-duper slow motion, frame-by-frame: Two train-wrecks to be more precise, for this poor little slob of a main character.
This is one of those books that may actually translate into one of those acclaimed "films".. which, if it does, I will then have wished that I had waited for the film to come out, because it would have gone by much quicker. The scenes are already described in so much detail that all you would have to do is look at them on the big screen and listen to this poor kid's narration (much faster that way).
Bottom line: Wait for the "film" to come out, THEN pretend to like it.
Ps: I noticed that there is a box at the bottom to check to hide the review because of "Spoilers". I don't think Richard has to worry about that because he does it himself all the way through this book.. I kept reading because I thought there might be some wonderful, shocking twist at the end of the story. I could see the train coming toward our train and knew what the end of it would be, but I just couldn't get off the track.
This is one of those books that may actually translate into one of those acclaimed "films".. which, if it does, I will then have wished that I had waited for the film to come out, because it would have gone by much quicker. The scenes are already described in so much detail that all you would have to do is look at them on the big screen and listen to this poor kid's narration (much faster that way).
Bottom line: Wait for the "film" to come out, THEN pretend to like it.
Ps: I noticed that there is a box at the bottom to check to hide the review because of "Spoilers". I don't think Richard has to worry about that because he does it himself all the way through this book.. I kept reading because I thought there might be some wonderful, shocking twist at the end of the story. I could see the train coming toward our train and knew what the end of it would be, but I just couldn't get off the track.
March 14, 2013
Sometimes I feel that the publishing world has a sickly fear of boring the reader. In the YA world, which is the world I inhabit as a writer, the pressure is never-ending for the novel to clip along at a lively pace less you lose your young hyper-active reader. It's almost as if we must do all we can to give TV and Video Games and Instant Messaging a good run for their money. So it is good to read authors who are willing to give their readers a different kind of pleasure - one that requires a shift to a different way of inhabiting time, a different, more leisurely, more contemplative consciousness. Richard Ford does this well. His writing does not sparkle with brilliant metaphors. He writes the way a not very literary person would write a memoir, which is what Dell, the young narrator of his book is doing. But this "prosaic" narration full of Dell's "ordinary" mind engages you, brings you in, into a quieter, slower and eventually rich world. The book is not for everyone. You may find it slow at times. But if you stick with it, the slowness itself will be its gift to you.
June 8, 2012
"First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later." That's the first two lines of the book.
Beyond the vast ocean of Saskatchewanian wheat fields, burrowed with the detritus of past lives and half-lives, a fifteen-year-old boy is marooned on a forgotten prairie land with fugitives and transients, like a scrap of driftwood or a windblown, bone-cracked bottle. His surname is a mystery for twelve chapters; it's released, finally, like a swift, soft teardrop.
Ford's great American/Canadian novel is a coming-of-age adventure tale about realizing one's own identity through narrative, memories, and self-examination. Moreover, it's about crossing, dissolving, and abnegating boundaries, physically as well as psychically, and generating rapport between our internal selves and the external world. At the heart of this story are the borders we cross and the crosses we bear. Symbolic, too, is that Saskatchewan is the only Canadian province with no geographic physical properties to denote boundaries. The abandoned young Montanan hero redefines divisions and indivisible spaces with deep reflection.
"If anything, the similarity to America made its foreignness profound..."
This half of a twin, living as if he were an orphan, tells us his story with tender wit and optimism amidst the garbage heap of objects and dwellings inhabited by outlaws and goose hunters. He was taught to "always know something that I could relinquish." And he was able to see the world as its opposite, and draw strength from that.
The view of melting pot America ultimately merges with the cultural mosaic of Canada, and becomes a theme. In lesser hands, many aspects of this book could have seemed repetitive, tautological, but Ford amplifies the meaning of every revolving concept by mining it to its irreducible essence. Nothing is diminished in this masterpiece. The themes are potent, and not diluted with hollow slogans.
The story's hero narrates dramatic, life-changing events that happened to him and his twin sister, Berner, after their parents robbed a North Dakota bank in 1960. The twins' father, Beverly Parsons, was an Air Force bombardier from Alabama, a smiling, talkative, self-serving handsome six-footer who returned from the war ultimately misunderstanding the world he came home to, and unsuited to the woman he fell in love with. But he embraced all that America stood for.
Mother, Neeva, was a bespectacled intellectual from Tacoma, the daughter of educated Jewish immigrants, a woman who didn't want to assimilate with the people and land of Montana. The mismatch of parents created a terrible, unresolved tension that was chronicled in Neeva's journal and left as part of a legacy of loneliness for the children to untangle or inherit.
This nerve-shattering story is filled with vivid incidents and characters alike, propelled by charm and clarity, provocative as it is diverting. Short, fluent chapters maintain a lyrical, vibrating rhythm. It is accessible, engaging, eloquently woven and plotted, not one word out of place, not one event unnecessary. The prose is unprepossessing and yet noble, austere but lush, stark yet playful, elegiac but bright, polished with all the messiness of life.
It moves with the alacrity of a gazelle, spins together with effortless grace. As radiant and moving as a cinnamon sun and as sublime as a silver moon. This is a sensuous departure from the Frank Bascombe novels. The understated narrator's voice is flawlessly vulnerable, wry, and lightly brushed with a mournful surrender.
As an addendum, I read that Ford is planning to write more novels set in Canada. According to Harper Collins, "We are thrilled to be publishing the first of Ford's novels to be set in this country" (north of the 49th parallel).
Beyond the vast ocean of Saskatchewanian wheat fields, burrowed with the detritus of past lives and half-lives, a fifteen-year-old boy is marooned on a forgotten prairie land with fugitives and transients, like a scrap of driftwood or a windblown, bone-cracked bottle. His surname is a mystery for twelve chapters; it's released, finally, like a swift, soft teardrop.
Ford's great American/Canadian novel is a coming-of-age adventure tale about realizing one's own identity through narrative, memories, and self-examination. Moreover, it's about crossing, dissolving, and abnegating boundaries, physically as well as psychically, and generating rapport between our internal selves and the external world. At the heart of this story are the borders we cross and the crosses we bear. Symbolic, too, is that Saskatchewan is the only Canadian province with no geographic physical properties to denote boundaries. The abandoned young Montanan hero redefines divisions and indivisible spaces with deep reflection.
"If anything, the similarity to America made its foreignness profound..."
This half of a twin, living as if he were an orphan, tells us his story with tender wit and optimism amidst the garbage heap of objects and dwellings inhabited by outlaws and goose hunters. He was taught to "always know something that I could relinquish." And he was able to see the world as its opposite, and draw strength from that.
The view of melting pot America ultimately merges with the cultural mosaic of Canada, and becomes a theme. In lesser hands, many aspects of this book could have seemed repetitive, tautological, but Ford amplifies the meaning of every revolving concept by mining it to its irreducible essence. Nothing is diminished in this masterpiece. The themes are potent, and not diluted with hollow slogans.
The story's hero narrates dramatic, life-changing events that happened to him and his twin sister, Berner, after their parents robbed a North Dakota bank in 1960. The twins' father, Beverly Parsons, was an Air Force bombardier from Alabama, a smiling, talkative, self-serving handsome six-footer who returned from the war ultimately misunderstanding the world he came home to, and unsuited to the woman he fell in love with. But he embraced all that America stood for.
Mother, Neeva, was a bespectacled intellectual from Tacoma, the daughter of educated Jewish immigrants, a woman who didn't want to assimilate with the people and land of Montana. The mismatch of parents created a terrible, unresolved tension that was chronicled in Neeva's journal and left as part of a legacy of loneliness for the children to untangle or inherit.
This nerve-shattering story is filled with vivid incidents and characters alike, propelled by charm and clarity, provocative as it is diverting. Short, fluent chapters maintain a lyrical, vibrating rhythm. It is accessible, engaging, eloquently woven and plotted, not one word out of place, not one event unnecessary. The prose is unprepossessing and yet noble, austere but lush, stark yet playful, elegiac but bright, polished with all the messiness of life.
It moves with the alacrity of a gazelle, spins together with effortless grace. As radiant and moving as a cinnamon sun and as sublime as a silver moon. This is a sensuous departure from the Frank Bascombe novels. The understated narrator's voice is flawlessly vulnerable, wry, and lightly brushed with a mournful surrender.
As an addendum, I read that Ford is planning to write more novels set in Canada. According to Harper Collins, "We are thrilled to be publishing the first of Ford's novels to be set in this country" (north of the 49th parallel).
August 23, 2016
In Canada, Richard Ford has written a long and contemplative story. The book sleeve calls it “a visionary novel of vast landscapes, complex identities and fragile humanity; which questions the fine line between the normal and the extraordinary, and the moments that haunt our settled view of the world.” A more true description would be hard to find.
The opening sentences of the story are “First, I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later”. How could you fail to read on after that?
Dell Parsons is a sixty-five year old teacher; an American living in Canada who is looking back at the year 1960 when he was fifteen. He and his twin sister Berner are “air-force brats”, their father Bev, a southerner, flew in that final bombing of Japan and the family are now stationed in Great Falls, Montana. Neeva, their mother, is an educated, artistic Jewish school teacher, often at odds with her husband and who keeps her children from assimilating in Great Falls. So Dell's life, so far, has been lonely, he is introspective, has no friends and finds himself "mainly waiting and anticipating". Bev is restless, newly decommissioned and soon involves himself in illegal activities. When Bev and Neeva rob a bank and are apprehended, the twins separate; Berner heads for California and Dell flees to Canada to avoid being taken into state care.
Here, in the deserted and inhospitable Fort Royal near the US/Canadian border, he finds himself under the care of Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic, secretive hotel owner; a man with a shadowy past who eventually involves Dell in an illegal and shocking incident. Dell is thrust into a life he never imagined; living alone in a run-down shack, working for Arthur digging goose-pits for hunters with Charley, a member of the Metis people who personally has a penchant for Hitler and Mussolini and who wears mascara and rouge. In the bleak Canadian landscape, Dell's true essence of character will emerge as he is forced into adulthood in harsh and unlovely circumstances.
Ford builds a story of slow, gentle anticipatory tone ; his pace is subtle, he never hurries; almost forcing the reader to adjust their own pace to suit the story. There is a wonderful symmetry between the physical location and the character aspect; the vast, open prairies of Canada reflect the open canvas of the young Dell's nature. His writing is beautiful, evocative and compelling with a clear and pure sparsity; it did remind me of Ernest Hemingway to whom Ford has been likened. The depth of character and location also made me think of Richard Russo although there is no evidence of Richard Russo’s trademark humour here. I have the strongest feeling that Ford will become one of my favourite authors. If you are looking for a breathless, exciting novel, then this will not be for you. But if you want a novel of fine literary fiction, then this will be one you will enjoy. Richard Ford will be the measure of the truly serious reader and Canada will not disappoint. 4.5★
The opening sentences of the story are “First, I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later”. How could you fail to read on after that?
Dell Parsons is a sixty-five year old teacher; an American living in Canada who is looking back at the year 1960 when he was fifteen. He and his twin sister Berner are “air-force brats”, their father Bev, a southerner, flew in that final bombing of Japan and the family are now stationed in Great Falls, Montana. Neeva, their mother, is an educated, artistic Jewish school teacher, often at odds with her husband and who keeps her children from assimilating in Great Falls. So Dell's life, so far, has been lonely, he is introspective, has no friends and finds himself "mainly waiting and anticipating". Bev is restless, newly decommissioned and soon involves himself in illegal activities. When Bev and Neeva rob a bank and are apprehended, the twins separate; Berner heads for California and Dell flees to Canada to avoid being taken into state care.
Here, in the deserted and inhospitable Fort Royal near the US/Canadian border, he finds himself under the care of Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic, secretive hotel owner; a man with a shadowy past who eventually involves Dell in an illegal and shocking incident. Dell is thrust into a life he never imagined; living alone in a run-down shack, working for Arthur digging goose-pits for hunters with Charley, a member of the Metis people who personally has a penchant for Hitler and Mussolini and who wears mascara and rouge. In the bleak Canadian landscape, Dell's true essence of character will emerge as he is forced into adulthood in harsh and unlovely circumstances.
Ford builds a story of slow, gentle anticipatory tone ; his pace is subtle, he never hurries; almost forcing the reader to adjust their own pace to suit the story. There is a wonderful symmetry between the physical location and the character aspect; the vast, open prairies of Canada reflect the open canvas of the young Dell's nature. His writing is beautiful, evocative and compelling with a clear and pure sparsity; it did remind me of Ernest Hemingway to whom Ford has been likened. The depth of character and location also made me think of Richard Russo although there is no evidence of Richard Russo’s trademark humour here. I have the strongest feeling that Ford will become one of my favourite authors. If you are looking for a breathless, exciting novel, then this will not be for you. But if you want a novel of fine literary fiction, then this will be one you will enjoy. Richard Ford will be the measure of the truly serious reader and Canada will not disappoint. 4.5★
November 10, 2019
I feel honored when a book teaches me something new about reading, when a writer has the confidence in his story to pull no punches with his writing, trusting in the reader’s intelligence to absorb a story without telling her what she should feel.
What Richard Ford teaches me with the exquisite Canada is patience. He teaches me to pull back, hold on, allow the plot to reel out while keeping a closer eye on the characters and their actions and reactions. What he offers in return for my patience is writing that makes me nearly weep with envy: clean yet evocative, each detail chosen to express character and place without eclipsing the reader's imagination.
The narrator, Dell Parsons, looks back across five decades to 1960, the year his mother and father robbed a bank in a small town in the plains of eastern Montana. From Dell's tone - sometimes tender, sometimes ironic but always mild and thoughtful - you are fairly certain he turns out okay, despite the crises he endured during his formative years. These crises take a while to unfold. Ford introduces the bank robbery in the novel's opening line, but maintains a brilliant balance between tension and torpidity by circling around the incident for more than one hundred pages.
In the interim he builds the portrait of a family who misses the mark of the American Dream. Bev Parsons, a husband with a handsome head in the clouds, leaves the Air Force and settles his wandering family in Great Falls, believing his charisma will lead to easy success, free from the structured demands of the military. He is mis-matched physically and intellectually with Neeva, his diminutive wife who rarely looks up from the drudgery of her life lest she be forced to acknowledge her disappointments. Their offspring - an awkward daughter saddled with an ugly face and the unfortunate name of Berner, and her younger-by-six-minutes twin, Dell, blessed with his father’s looks and an accommodating spirit – are raised with love, if not much stability.
Dell looks back at the decisions his parents made, at the moments when they approached the cliff and could have turned around, without judgment or bitterness. This is remarkable, because their foolishness upended his life; the bank robbery is only the beginning of a free fall that ends in murder, suicide and the dissolution of his family.
At the end of his life as he knows it, Dells sets out on a melancholy Odyssey from adolescence to adulthood. His internal journey first parallels a literal one as he is moved from Great Falls to Partreau, Saskatchewan, a near-ghost town in the desolate prairies of central Canada. And from there his story continues as he fends for himself in a small world of cast-off adults.
Canada's story is created by a landscape of reflection and resolution, of lives that turn on a dime, where the border between possibility and no turning back can be crossed only once, but consequences follow forever.
Ford’s deliberative style is like a skilled horse rider’s loose hold on the reins – he doesn’t need to make the obvious moves to steer the horse – it takes only a slight movement of thigh or heel to communicate his desires. Equally, Ford communicates soul-shifting menace through the subtleness of his characters and his setting- what he leaves out speaks to the power of what remains.
What Richard Ford teaches me with the exquisite Canada is patience. He teaches me to pull back, hold on, allow the plot to reel out while keeping a closer eye on the characters and their actions and reactions. What he offers in return for my patience is writing that makes me nearly weep with envy: clean yet evocative, each detail chosen to express character and place without eclipsing the reader's imagination.
The narrator, Dell Parsons, looks back across five decades to 1960, the year his mother and father robbed a bank in a small town in the plains of eastern Montana. From Dell's tone - sometimes tender, sometimes ironic but always mild and thoughtful - you are fairly certain he turns out okay, despite the crises he endured during his formative years. These crises take a while to unfold. Ford introduces the bank robbery in the novel's opening line, but maintains a brilliant balance between tension and torpidity by circling around the incident for more than one hundred pages.
In the interim he builds the portrait of a family who misses the mark of the American Dream. Bev Parsons, a husband with a handsome head in the clouds, leaves the Air Force and settles his wandering family in Great Falls, believing his charisma will lead to easy success, free from the structured demands of the military. He is mis-matched physically and intellectually with Neeva, his diminutive wife who rarely looks up from the drudgery of her life lest she be forced to acknowledge her disappointments. Their offspring - an awkward daughter saddled with an ugly face and the unfortunate name of Berner, and her younger-by-six-minutes twin, Dell, blessed with his father’s looks and an accommodating spirit – are raised with love, if not much stability.
Dell looks back at the decisions his parents made, at the moments when they approached the cliff and could have turned around, without judgment or bitterness. This is remarkable, because their foolishness upended his life; the bank robbery is only the beginning of a free fall that ends in murder, suicide and the dissolution of his family.
At the end of his life as he knows it, Dells sets out on a melancholy Odyssey from adolescence to adulthood. His internal journey first parallels a literal one as he is moved from Great Falls to Partreau, Saskatchewan, a near-ghost town in the desolate prairies of central Canada. And from there his story continues as he fends for himself in a small world of cast-off adults.
Canada's story is created by a landscape of reflection and resolution, of lives that turn on a dime, where the border between possibility and no turning back can be crossed only once, but consequences follow forever.
Ford’s deliberative style is like a skilled horse rider’s loose hold on the reins – he doesn’t need to make the obvious moves to steer the horse – it takes only a slight movement of thigh or heel to communicate his desires. Equally, Ford communicates soul-shifting menace through the subtleness of his characters and his setting- what he leaves out speaks to the power of what remains.
March 7, 2016
Things happen when people are not where they belong.
Reading this I did know moments of enervating toil – a couple of times the narrative seemed to hike off the beaten track; or perhaps circle repeatedly around the houses would be a better metaphor. They say editors dare not question the cartography of established writers – Murakami’s 19Q4 being the best example – and you definitely have the sense here that were this a novel by a debut author a landscape gardener would have been called in. However it was worth it in the end. In many ways Canada is an alternative to Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Del is Roth’s Swede, an individual blustered by a single act of violence across the border of his comfort zone into a kind of dystopian hinterland where he has no coordinates. Arthur Remlinger is Ford’s Merry except, unlike Roth who only gives us the briefest glimpse of Merry’s life subsequent to her terrorist act, Ford gives his terrorist the spotlight. We are shown the deracinated and miscarriaging conditions of what it is to be an outcast from the law. In both novels one extraordinary act seeps out of the ordinary drift of days with barely a creak of a hinge. And in both novels there is the theme of guilt by association and the subsequent imperative to reassemble the building bricks of identity. One of the questions Ford asks is, is there an inevitability to what befalls us. Del with his youthful enthusiasm for chess and bee hives might already be shoring himself up against a premonition of future chaos with these two utopian templates of harmony and an almost foolproof order. Del’s twin sister has a boyfriend who, in his skittish unhinged qualities, foreshadows the two men Del will later be exiled in Canada with. So there’s a sense that, yes, there is a certain inevitability about what befalls us, though in a poignant passage not long before Del’s parents rob the bank Ford shows us how even this inevitability might be avoided –
I remember that night, now, as the best, most natural time our family had that summer--or any time. Just for a moment, I saw how life could go forward on a steadier, more reliable course. The two of them were happy and comfortable with each other. My father appreciated the way my mother behaved toward him. He paid her compliments on her clothes and her appearance and her mood. It was as if they’d discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life.
Sometimes we just hang on to the wrong memories of each other.
Reading this I did know moments of enervating toil – a couple of times the narrative seemed to hike off the beaten track; or perhaps circle repeatedly around the houses would be a better metaphor. They say editors dare not question the cartography of established writers – Murakami’s 19Q4 being the best example – and you definitely have the sense here that were this a novel by a debut author a landscape gardener would have been called in. However it was worth it in the end. In many ways Canada is an alternative to Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Del is Roth’s Swede, an individual blustered by a single act of violence across the border of his comfort zone into a kind of dystopian hinterland where he has no coordinates. Arthur Remlinger is Ford’s Merry except, unlike Roth who only gives us the briefest glimpse of Merry’s life subsequent to her terrorist act, Ford gives his terrorist the spotlight. We are shown the deracinated and miscarriaging conditions of what it is to be an outcast from the law. In both novels one extraordinary act seeps out of the ordinary drift of days with barely a creak of a hinge. And in both novels there is the theme of guilt by association and the subsequent imperative to reassemble the building bricks of identity. One of the questions Ford asks is, is there an inevitability to what befalls us. Del with his youthful enthusiasm for chess and bee hives might already be shoring himself up against a premonition of future chaos with these two utopian templates of harmony and an almost foolproof order. Del’s twin sister has a boyfriend who, in his skittish unhinged qualities, foreshadows the two men Del will later be exiled in Canada with. So there’s a sense that, yes, there is a certain inevitability about what befalls us, though in a poignant passage not long before Del’s parents rob the bank Ford shows us how even this inevitability might be avoided –
I remember that night, now, as the best, most natural time our family had that summer--or any time. Just for a moment, I saw how life could go forward on a steadier, more reliable course. The two of them were happy and comfortable with each other. My father appreciated the way my mother behaved toward him. He paid her compliments on her clothes and her appearance and her mood. It was as if they’d discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems only right and expectable for married people. They caught a glimpse of the person they fell in love with, and who sustained life.
Sometimes we just hang on to the wrong memories of each other.
April 28, 2013
I waited patiently for something to happen. I was tired of hearing how short his Jewish mother was & how tall his Alabama father was & how he had a twin sister... It finally did happen around 160+ pages, but fizzeled out again. Came to, near the end alittle.
I thought it was a real downer...
Had to convince myself to stick to it w/ the hope that the story might ingnite into something interesting. It was heavy with describing things, which the author did over and over.
The parents, having financial difficulties, decide to rob a bank. They go to jail and the children end up being tossed into living on their own separately.
Characters:
Mother Neeva -from Seattle, Father Beverly -from Alabama & was in the Armed services, sister Berner & bother Dell last name Parsons. They traveled around as their father was transferred to different bases.
Book was narrated by Dell.
I thought it was a real downer...
Had to convince myself to stick to it w/ the hope that the story might ingnite into something interesting. It was heavy with describing things, which the author did over and over.
The parents, having financial difficulties, decide to rob a bank. They go to jail and the children end up being tossed into living on their own separately.
Characters:
Mother Neeva -from Seattle, Father Beverly -from Alabama & was in the Armed services, sister Berner & bother Dell last name Parsons. They traveled around as their father was transferred to different bases.
Book was narrated by Dell.
February 25, 2013
So here was a list of things I was thinking about to mock and/or reference when reviewing Canada:
1) O Canada
2) Hockey
3) Canadian bacon - The meat
4) Canadian Bacon - The movie
5) Mounties (e.g. Dudley Do-Right, Sergeant Preston, the guy from Due South)
6) This
7) America’s 51st state
8) Wolverine
9) Alpha Flight
10) Celine Dion
11) The McKenzie brothers
12) Brandon’s beard
Ah, but sadly, this book depressed me too much to dig into this treasure trove of material so I guess I’ll just have to stick to reviewing it instead.
In 1960, fifteen year old Dell Parsons’ world is turned upside down when his parents commit a bank robbery and are arrested. With no other family willing to take them in, Dell and his twin sister Berner are on the verge of being taken into custody by the state of Montana, but Berner runs away while Dell is whisked over the border into Canada by a friend of his mother’s. Dell is left in the boonies of Saskatchewan under the care of Arthur Remlinger, the owner of a hunting lodge who has his own dark and tragic secrets.
There was a great deal I liked about this one. Ford’s writing has a melancholy beauty to it, and he builds up the characters incredibly well. By the time that Dell’s parents rob the bank, Ford has explored every corner of the family dynamic so that you understand completely why two law-abiding citizens become a half-assed version of Bonnie & Clyde. Most of the book is Dell’s coming to terms with how that one act forever alters his life, and it’s almost physically painful to read about how a bookish naïve boy who was dreaming of joining the school chess club winds up isolated and living in a shack on the Canadian prairie.
However, the mystery fan part of me was a little perplexed by this. When you get a Pulitzer Prize winner writing a book that hinges on a criminal act, you know it’s not going to play out like a genre piece, but I can’t help but think about other stories I’ve read by guys like Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake or Dennis Lehane in which they show the impact of a crime on the lives of ordinary people.
What bugged me about this is that the basic set-up is in the first paragraph of the book jacket summary, yet the robbery and Del’s flight to Canada don’t occur until about the half-way point in the book. The personalities and mis-matched nature of the parents as well as the relatively minor crisis that triggers the robbery are explored well in the first half. You feel like you really know these people, but I kept thinking that I’ve read crime genre books that didn’t require nearly as much time to create complex characters and believable reasons for their illegal actions.
But this is one of those books that is about the writing itself as much as the story, and in that aspect it succeeds. I just can’t but wonder what a good crime writer would have done with this story, and I can’t shake the feeling I probably would have liked that version a bit better.
1) O Canada
2) Hockey
3) Canadian bacon - The meat
4) Canadian Bacon - The movie
5) Mounties (e.g. Dudley Do-Right, Sergeant Preston, the guy from Due South)
6) This
7) America’s 51st state
8) Wolverine
9) Alpha Flight
10) Celine Dion
11) The McKenzie brothers
12) Brandon’s beard
Ah, but sadly, this book depressed me too much to dig into this treasure trove of material so I guess I’ll just have to stick to reviewing it instead.
In 1960, fifteen year old Dell Parsons’ world is turned upside down when his parents commit a bank robbery and are arrested. With no other family willing to take them in, Dell and his twin sister Berner are on the verge of being taken into custody by the state of Montana, but Berner runs away while Dell is whisked over the border into Canada by a friend of his mother’s. Dell is left in the boonies of Saskatchewan under the care of Arthur Remlinger, the owner of a hunting lodge who has his own dark and tragic secrets.
There was a great deal I liked about this one. Ford’s writing has a melancholy beauty to it, and he builds up the characters incredibly well. By the time that Dell’s parents rob the bank, Ford has explored every corner of the family dynamic so that you understand completely why two law-abiding citizens become a half-assed version of Bonnie & Clyde. Most of the book is Dell’s coming to terms with how that one act forever alters his life, and it’s almost physically painful to read about how a bookish naïve boy who was dreaming of joining the school chess club winds up isolated and living in a shack on the Canadian prairie.
However, the mystery fan part of me was a little perplexed by this. When you get a Pulitzer Prize winner writing a book that hinges on a criminal act, you know it’s not going to play out like a genre piece, but I can’t help but think about other stories I’ve read by guys like Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake or Dennis Lehane in which they show the impact of a crime on the lives of ordinary people.
What bugged me about this is that the basic set-up is in the first paragraph of the book jacket summary, yet the robbery and Del’s flight to Canada don’t occur until about the half-way point in the book. The personalities and mis-matched nature of the parents as well as the relatively minor crisis that triggers the robbery are explored well in the first half. You feel like you really know these people, but I kept thinking that I’ve read crime genre books that didn’t require nearly as much time to create complex characters and believable reasons for their illegal actions.
But this is one of those books that is about the writing itself as much as the story, and in that aspect it succeeds. I just can’t but wonder what a good crime writer would have done with this story, and I can’t shake the feeling I probably would have liked that version a bit better.
May 16, 2024
Çok beğendim. Uzun zamandır yalnızlığa, insanın içinde asla dolmayan boşluklara ve aile dinamiklerinin nasıl her şeyi mahvedebileceğine dair bu kadar güzel bir şey okumamıştım. Roman bir macera romanı gibi başlıyor sonrasındaysa başka bir yere savruluyor. Bu ton değişimi çok ustalıklı yapılmış. Ailenin hikayesinin nereye gideceğini daha en başından biliyoruz aslında. Buna rağmen Richard Ford, anlattığı aileye dair göze sokmadan öyle güzel detaylar veriyor ve bir şeylerin nasıl asla “olamayacağını” o kadar ustalıkla hissettiriyor ki hikayede ne olacağından ziyade karakterlere odaklanıyoruz. Böylece özellikle her şeyiyle baş karakterimiz Dell’in yaşadıklarını hissediyoruz. Çok kırık dökük, kederli bir yanı var Dell’in hikayesinin. Bir yandan çok gerçek. Hepsi birleşince ve romanın üçüncü bölümünü (yıllar sonra yaşanan bazı karşılaşmalar, gürültülü sessizlikler, hayatın bitmeyen tekrarları vs.) de işin içine katınca etkilenmemek elde olmuyor. Çok ama çok sevdim.
August 26, 2012
Well written and compelling tale of a 15 year old boy, Dell, coming to terms with the sudden disintegration of his family in northern Montana and his resilience during a period of being under the control of strangers with little concern for his situation or fate. Though that sounds like the story of a large population of kids from broken families who get placed into foster care, in this case Dell’s life gets disrupted due to his relatively ordinary parents committing a bank robbery. Instead of foster care, his mother’s friend intervenes after the parents’ arrest and sneaks him into an unfortunate living situation in Saskatchewan.
From my reading, the story is told wonderfully through Dell’s retrospective perspective. This approach takes away some of the drama and immediacy of directly rendering the tale from the young Dell’s experience. However, Ford doesn’t seem interested in melodrama, and the rendering of the tale by the Dell-to-be works in favor of engaging the reader’s empathy. It also allows Dell to prepare the reader for when shocking events are about to be portrayed, starting with disclosure of the bank robbery in the first sentence of the book.. In my view, the pleasure of Ford’s creativity lies in his portrayal of the process by which Dell comes to understand his parents’ mistakes and to survive the indifferent, exploitive, and scary situation he gets into in Canada. That his loving parents in effect cause the disaster to Dell’s life through ineptness highlights the precariousness of ordinary families. I loved Dell’s portraits of his ex-Army father, struggling to find work and dabbling in black market schemes, and his skeptical, aloof mother, unhappy in her unfulfilled academic dreams
As a character, Dell will stand in literary history as a relatively unique vision for a teen’s adaptation to tough circumstances. For example, in comparison to the tough and resourceful girls of action featured in Ward’s “Salvage the Bones” and Woodrell’s “Winter's Bone”, Dell survives primarily by going along and getting along, biding his time for favorable opportunities like the master chess players he admires. His twin sister (I didn’t mention he had a twin, did I?), perhaps resembles these other fictional heroes in taking a more self-reliant approach to survival. I didn’t give this book 5 stars because I am a sucker for more action-oriented characters. But which approach is more realistic or likely to survive in better shape?
From my reading, the story is told wonderfully through Dell’s retrospective perspective. This approach takes away some of the drama and immediacy of directly rendering the tale from the young Dell’s experience. However, Ford doesn’t seem interested in melodrama, and the rendering of the tale by the Dell-to-be works in favor of engaging the reader’s empathy. It also allows Dell to prepare the reader for when shocking events are about to be portrayed, starting with disclosure of the bank robbery in the first sentence of the book.. In my view, the pleasure of Ford’s creativity lies in his portrayal of the process by which Dell comes to understand his parents’ mistakes and to survive the indifferent, exploitive, and scary situation he gets into in Canada. That his loving parents in effect cause the disaster to Dell’s life through ineptness highlights the precariousness of ordinary families. I loved Dell’s portraits of his ex-Army father, struggling to find work and dabbling in black market schemes, and his skeptical, aloof mother, unhappy in her unfulfilled academic dreams
As a character, Dell will stand in literary history as a relatively unique vision for a teen’s adaptation to tough circumstances. For example, in comparison to the tough and resourceful girls of action featured in Ward’s “Salvage the Bones” and Woodrell’s “Winter's Bone”, Dell survives primarily by going along and getting along, biding his time for favorable opportunities like the master chess players he admires. His twin sister (I didn’t mention he had a twin, did I?), perhaps resembles these other fictional heroes in taking a more self-reliant approach to survival. I didn’t give this book 5 stars because I am a sucker for more action-oriented characters. But which approach is more realistic or likely to survive in better shape?
July 5, 2020
Canada by Richard Ford is about two unidentical twins whose parents in 1960 rob a bank. We are told right at the start murders will also occur. The twins are fifteen, one a boy the other a girl. The boy, Dell, tells us of that summer and the events that soon follow. He makes it very clear that this is his story and had his parents or his sister told of the events the story told would not be the same. The book is very much a character study, both of the twins and their parents. The story is primarily set in 1960 but we do briefly see he and his sister’s circumstances a full fifty years later. In the telling, he is reflecting back on his life.
Although a lot happens, the overall mood of the story is contemplative. Dell looks back and considers what he has done and the choices he has made, alongside the choices made by his sister and parents. We are to think and consider what we might ourselves do. The prose is stuffed full of lines put there to make you think. Is our fate / destiny set or is it so that "life is passed to us empty" and it is up to us to make something of it? Or think about this-- do we end up in a place because we have left another or because we intentionally want to go there? There is a difference!
You get very much into Dell's head, what it was like for him to be the son of bank robbers. I like how he points out that this is his story. I like how he shows us how "ordinary" the family was before the robbery and yet at the same time how complicated family relationships were.
Story weaknesses? The police in Great Falls, Montana, where the family lived, sent no one to care for the kids when their parents were taken to jail. This I found strange. That such can and does happen in small, insignificant backwater places is the excuse given. Had Ford left this unexplained, I would have had an even more critical view. On the whole, I found the story feasible. One might want a fuller description of the years between 1960 and 2010, explaining in more detail how Dell came to be who he was in 2010. Maybe, maybe not-- that might simply dilute the story. In my view the author gets his message across as it is, and shorter is better.
Life in Canada versus life in the States is not the central theme of the story, but differences are described and readers can of course compare and think about them.
The book is a slow burner. It is intended to make you think.
The audiobook is narrated by Holter Graham. I have given his narration four stars. He uses different intonations for different characters, and he does this well. I did wish at times he spoke a bit more smoothly; the jerky tempo did sometimes make it more difficult for me to follow Dell’s reasoning.
*************
Wildlife 4 stars
Canada 4 stars
Between Them: Remembering My Parents TBR
Although a lot happens, the overall mood of the story is contemplative. Dell looks back and considers what he has done and the choices he has made, alongside the choices made by his sister and parents. We are to think and consider what we might ourselves do. The prose is stuffed full of lines put there to make you think. Is our fate / destiny set or is it so that "life is passed to us empty" and it is up to us to make something of it? Or think about this-- do we end up in a place because we have left another or because we intentionally want to go there? There is a difference!
You get very much into Dell's head, what it was like for him to be the son of bank robbers. I like how he points out that this is his story. I like how he shows us how "ordinary" the family was before the robbery and yet at the same time how complicated family relationships were.
Story weaknesses? The police in Great Falls, Montana, where the family lived, sent no one to care for the kids when their parents were taken to jail. This I found strange. That such can and does happen in small, insignificant backwater places is the excuse given. Had Ford left this unexplained, I would have had an even more critical view. On the whole, I found the story feasible. One might want a fuller description of the years between 1960 and 2010, explaining in more detail how Dell came to be who he was in 2010. Maybe, maybe not-- that might simply dilute the story. In my view the author gets his message across as it is, and shorter is better.
Life in Canada versus life in the States is not the central theme of the story, but differences are described and readers can of course compare and think about them.
The book is a slow burner. It is intended to make you think.
The audiobook is narrated by Holter Graham. I have given his narration four stars. He uses different intonations for different characters, and he does this well. I did wish at times he spoke a bit more smoothly; the jerky tempo did sometimes make it more difficult for me to follow Dell’s reasoning.
*************
Wildlife 4 stars
Canada 4 stars
Between Them: Remembering My Parents TBR
December 22, 2014
Something is bothering me about this book, but I'm not sure what it is. In the beginning, I found the narratorial tic of Dell's constantly telling us that he'd already said something a bit much, though that tic faded as the novel went on. And though this book is long, I feel there's something missing. As Dell says later, there is no need to look for hidden or opposite meanings in his story, which is well-told and compelling in Ford's reliable prose, but perhaps 'meaning' is exactly what I feel I'm missing.
I realize the narrator is looking back on what happened to him when he was a teen, but, as a character, he seems to have that 'absence' in him that he accuses Remlinger of having and I'm not sure that was intentional. The other characters, however, are amazingly well-drawn; the settings are atmospheric; and the prose is mesmerizing: so perhaps I'm being too harsh.
In the acknowledgements Ford says his debt to William Maxwell would be obvious to any reader. It wasn't to me, though once I read that, I did see it. So now that I know I missed that, I'm thinking maybe I missed something else. But I think what is missing, at least for me, is that quiet epiphany I experience at the end of the few works by Maxwell I've read.
Or perhaps it's just that I felt the same as I felt about Wildlife, but I wanted to feel the way I did with The Lay of the Land.
I realize the narrator is looking back on what happened to him when he was a teen, but, as a character, he seems to have that 'absence' in him that he accuses Remlinger of having and I'm not sure that was intentional. The other characters, however, are amazingly well-drawn; the settings are atmospheric; and the prose is mesmerizing: so perhaps I'm being too harsh.
In the acknowledgements Ford says his debt to William Maxwell would be obvious to any reader. It wasn't to me, though once I read that, I did see it. So now that I know I missed that, I'm thinking maybe I missed something else. But I think what is missing, at least for me, is that quiet epiphany I experience at the end of the few works by Maxwell I've read.
Or perhaps it's just that I felt the same as I felt about Wildlife, but I wanted to feel the way I did with The Lay of the Land.
September 12, 2015
Ο Καναδάς είναι ένα από τα λίγα 500+ σελίδων βιβλία που κατάλαβα πως θα μου αρέσουν από τις πρώτες τους σελίδες. Η ιστορία του, μια ιστορία που κινείται γύρω από 2 σημαντικά γεγονότα στη ζωή του Dell Parson, τα οποία μάλιστα αναφέρονται στις 2 πρώτες προτάσεις του βιβλίου, ξεδιπλώνεται αργά και περίτεχνα από τον Ford, με τη γραφή του οποίου έρχομαι πρώτη φορά σε επαφή.
Η αργή ανάπτυξη του μυθιστορήματος, που όμως δεν υπολείπεται καθόλου σε πλοκή, βοηθά στο να αναπτυχθεί όμορφα ο χαρακτήρας του Dell αλλά και όλα τα περιφερειακά πρόσωπα της ιστορίας. Ο συγγραφέας εναλλάσσεται με άνεση ανάμεσα στις σκέψεις του Dell και στα όσα συμβαίνουν γύρω του.
Το βιβλίο είναι άβολο σε όλη τη διάρκειά του, από τις κύριες γραμμές και αφηγήσεις του, μέχρι τις μπόλικες, φαινομενικά ασήμαντες απέναντι στη μεγάλη εικόνα στιγμές του. Μοιάζει πραγματικά με βιογραφία, έχει την απλότητα της γλώσσας που δεν κουράζει και δε μοιάζει παράταιρη στην αφήγηση σε πρώτο πρόσωπο ενός μεσήλικα καθηγητή.
Υπάρχουν μερικές στιγμές στο πρώτο κομμάτι του βιβλίου που μοιάζουν λίγο forced και μερικές εκφράσεις λιγάκι παράξενες, αλλά είναι πραγματικά λίγες και δεν προλαβαίνουν σε καμία περίπτωση να χαλάσουν τη γεύση του συνόλου. Έτσι, ένα καθαρό 4*/5 μοιάζει ταιριαστό και είμαι περίεργος για το τι θα θυμάμαι ένα χρόνο μετά από τον Καναδά. Ίσως αυτό:
Η αργή ανάπτυξη του μυθιστορήματος, που όμως δεν υπολείπεται καθόλου σε πλοκή, βοηθά στο να αναπτυχθεί όμορφα ο χαρακτήρας του Dell αλλά και όλα τα περιφερειακά πρόσωπα της ιστορίας. Ο συγγραφέας εναλλάσσεται με άνεση ανάμεσα στις σκέψεις του Dell και στα όσα συμβαίνουν γύρω του.
Το βιβλίο είναι άβολο σε όλη τη διάρκειά του, από τις κύριες γραμμές και αφηγήσεις του, μέχρι τις μπόλικες, φαινομενικά ασήμαντες απέναντι στη μεγάλη εικόνα στιγμές του. Μοιάζει πραγματικά με βιογραφία, έχει την απλότητα της γλώσσας που δεν κουράζει και δε μοιάζει παράταιρη στην αφήγηση σε πρώτο πρόσωπο ενός μεσήλικα καθηγητή.
Υπάρχουν μερικές στιγμές στο πρώτο κομμάτι του βιβλίου που μοιάζουν λίγο forced και μερικές εκφράσεις λιγάκι παράξενες, αλλά είναι πραγματικά λίγες και δεν προλαβαίνουν σε καμία περίπτωση να χαλάσουν τη γεύση του συνόλου. Έτσι, ένα καθαρό 4*/5 μοιάζει ταιριαστό και είμαι περίεργος για το τι θα θυμάμαι ένα χρόνο μετά από τον Καναδά. Ίσως αυτό:
Loneliness, I've read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it's promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.
March 23, 2019
4.5/5
This book grabs you with its first paragraph, and, despite its slow moving and carefully considered narrative, keeps you reading all the way until the very last page. Here’s that opening paragraph:
“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.”
After that point there was no turning back; the book owned me.
The narrator is Dell Parsons, a fifteen year-old boy, who lives with his parents and his twin sister, Berner, in Great Falls, Montana. His father, Bev, is a southerner, an attractive and outgoing, if not too smart, man. Bev had had a career in the Air Force, so the family had lived in many different places until they settled in Great Falls about four years earlier. Dell’s mother, Neeva (short for Geneva), is a short dark-haired woman from Washington state, who, while attracted to Bev, continuously feels she might have had a better life elsewhere, as a poet or a professor. But once she got pregnant during a single early sexual encounter shortly after they met, she decided to marry Bev, despite her parents’ disapproval. She stayed with the marriage even though she felt she and Bev were mismatched. She works as a fifth grade teacher. Since he left the Air Force, Bev’s been seeking out work that suits him. He started selling cars, then used cars, then farm and ranch land. He’s less than successful at all these endeavors, which leads him to involve himself in selling stolen beef. As a result he ends up in debt to some threatening characters, hence his decision to rob a bank.
While Dell’s narrative is very much in the present of the fifteen year-old Dell, the narrative is told by the much older (age 66) Dell. That perfectly blended voice, speaking as a fifteen year-old but sometimes using language and flickers of insight that would have come from a more mature viewpoint, is what makes this book perfect. It was the voice that hooked me in. Richard Ford is an incredibly skilled writer. Those of you who read in order to read great writing can’t go wrong here. In addition, Ford tells a great story. Dell is a quiet young teen, who wants more than anything to start high school. He is interested in learning chess and keeping bees. The danger he is exposed to by the reckless behavior of his parents is just overwhelming. I could not escape the feeling of impending doom as I listened to the voice of this young and thoughtful narrator as he tries to figure out his situation and as he talks about the disruption his parents’ criminal behavior will cause his life. Yet Dell’s voice never turns towards anger or resentment. At times we hear his heart pound, but he never seeks vengeance. My own life has been nothing like Dell’s, but I found it deeply unsettling, even threatening, to watch evil and danger seep through his ordinary and almost familiar surroundings and completely upend his life. Surely danger lurks behind the most innocuous landscapes in all our lives.
The narrative is broken into three sections. The first half of the book takes us up to the point at which his parents are captured by the police. The second nearly half of the book follows Dell for several months in his life afterwards in a town in Canada just over the border with Montana. This section too is captivating. In many ways it is even stronger than the first section, as you don’t quite know who everyone is or what is likely to happen. At the end of the book, there is a third, very short section that takes place when Dell is sixty-six. Suffice it to say that Dell survives and turns out okay, and we find out how he got to where he is then. But then there is always that voice. It’s haunting, so much so that looking over some favorite passages to write this review, my heart started pounding again.
This book grabs you with its first paragraph, and, despite its slow moving and carefully considered narrative, keeps you reading all the way until the very last page. Here’s that opening paragraph:
“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed. Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.”
After that point there was no turning back; the book owned me.
The narrator is Dell Parsons, a fifteen year-old boy, who lives with his parents and his twin sister, Berner, in Great Falls, Montana. His father, Bev, is a southerner, an attractive and outgoing, if not too smart, man. Bev had had a career in the Air Force, so the family had lived in many different places until they settled in Great Falls about four years earlier. Dell’s mother, Neeva (short for Geneva), is a short dark-haired woman from Washington state, who, while attracted to Bev, continuously feels she might have had a better life elsewhere, as a poet or a professor. But once she got pregnant during a single early sexual encounter shortly after they met, she decided to marry Bev, despite her parents’ disapproval. She stayed with the marriage even though she felt she and Bev were mismatched. She works as a fifth grade teacher. Since he left the Air Force, Bev’s been seeking out work that suits him. He started selling cars, then used cars, then farm and ranch land. He’s less than successful at all these endeavors, which leads him to involve himself in selling stolen beef. As a result he ends up in debt to some threatening characters, hence his decision to rob a bank.
While Dell’s narrative is very much in the present of the fifteen year-old Dell, the narrative is told by the much older (age 66) Dell. That perfectly blended voice, speaking as a fifteen year-old but sometimes using language and flickers of insight that would have come from a more mature viewpoint, is what makes this book perfect. It was the voice that hooked me in. Richard Ford is an incredibly skilled writer. Those of you who read in order to read great writing can’t go wrong here. In addition, Ford tells a great story. Dell is a quiet young teen, who wants more than anything to start high school. He is interested in learning chess and keeping bees. The danger he is exposed to by the reckless behavior of his parents is just overwhelming. I could not escape the feeling of impending doom as I listened to the voice of this young and thoughtful narrator as he tries to figure out his situation and as he talks about the disruption his parents’ criminal behavior will cause his life. Yet Dell’s voice never turns towards anger or resentment. At times we hear his heart pound, but he never seeks vengeance. My own life has been nothing like Dell’s, but I found it deeply unsettling, even threatening, to watch evil and danger seep through his ordinary and almost familiar surroundings and completely upend his life. Surely danger lurks behind the most innocuous landscapes in all our lives.
The narrative is broken into three sections. The first half of the book takes us up to the point at which his parents are captured by the police. The second nearly half of the book follows Dell for several months in his life afterwards in a town in Canada just over the border with Montana. This section too is captivating. In many ways it is even stronger than the first section, as you don’t quite know who everyone is or what is likely to happen. At the end of the book, there is a third, very short section that takes place when Dell is sixty-six. Suffice it to say that Dell survives and turns out okay, and we find out how he got to where he is then. But then there is always that voice. It’s haunting, so much so that looking over some favorite passages to write this review, my heart started pounding again.
June 5, 2023
This felt soooo long to me. Ford appears to have taken what could have been an interesting story and rendered it thin and lugubrious. I can't decide if this is really one novella or two related short stories but, in any event, there is the sense throughout that it is excessive by a few hundred pages. From what I have read, it is the writing that was supposed to have kept me engaged and willing to linger. For whatever reason that just didn't happen (as it did in a similar book, "Plainsong", which was lovely). This one left me as cold as the Saskatchewan prairie in winter.
March 28, 2016
Firstly, I didn't finish reading this book. Secondly, I usually don't comment on/review the things I've read, but I was asked by someone on Facebook why I stopped reading Canada. This was my reply: I've never been a Ford fan and took a risk on this one based on all the hype here in Canada, which I can only now assume was based solely on the title. I thought the narrative was poorly executed and the characters just collections of words. Ford failed at turning those collections of words into the illusion of flesh and soul. In an effort to make them interesting, he just kept pouring over the parents and how they differed from one another (him amiable and tall and Southern; her reticent and dark and European). This could have been explained by the narrator in a couple of paragraphs, and reinforced/strengthened by *showing* their interaction and relationship through some actual story rather than having the relationship told/explained over and over again by the narrator. Rather than building depth and complexity, what it did was draw attention to the clumsy choice of narrator and point of view. I felt like he wrote himself into a bit of a corner and was too lazy to go back and make the necessary major changes. I made it pg. 195 and it took me 13 days. The kiss of death for any book I'm reading is when I’m consciously avoiding reading the book. I was sitting on the porch having just read two chapters, wondering if there was anything on TV I wanted to watch. I turned to my wife and said “I hate this book.” She urged me to stop reading it because she could see how miserable it was making me.
March 28, 2019
There is a dreamlike quality to this story. Ford has captured much of the fragility of humans choosing to focus primarily on the lost little boy. As a child he is exposed to the unusual guidelines of his parents, the loneliness and fear of being exiled to live among strangers, and the abuse that swirls around him. There is a quiet beauty that is nearly concealed as the story unfolds. These come in the form of kind words spoken, patient deeds, and sincere thoughts. The boy learns and grows. He adapts. This is a book I read slowly to catch and hold on to the messages Ford passes along. In the end, I understood this story to offer us a reminder that we should be prepared to lose everything, for if and when we do we will still have ourselves and a connection to life somewhere.
July 9, 2012
Who could possibly resist this opening?
First I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.
Well, I certainly couldn't, nor any one of the four hundred odd pages that followed. I did manage to do an hour's teaching, as well as process three pounds of sour cherries into something in jars that might decide to be jam, but only in order to allow myself to luxuriate in this warm bath of words without the (negligible) pangs of guilt that might follow the self-indulgence of reading all day.
Dell Parsons tells the mesmerising tale of the summer at the beginning of the sixties when he and his twin sister were fifteen and their parents, not in any way reckless people, ventured outside boundaries they knew to be right, and then found themselves unable to go back. It is clear from the onset what will happen (a robbery and murders), thus it is not merely suspense that kept me coming back for more (that too!), but rather the slow cumulative build of character: of the parents, the sister and of Dell himself, portrayed in a gentle, detached tone of slight bemusement, the slow cumulative build of the history and time, the slow cumulative build of insight and reading of weather.
Dell's shy bookish mother quotes a line of poetry at him: "For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.", which comes from that wonderful Yeats piece 'Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop':
I MET the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'
'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.
'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'
Dichotomies, fair and foul, body and soul, structure the whole of Canada. Shy, bookish, tiny mother, breezy, charming tall father. The twins, and the diametrically opposite paths laid out for them by the destruction of their family. Alabama and Montana. Canada and 'down below'. Crime and how it is expiated or compounded. Choices made and opposites reconciled.
And in the end, it is conciliatory, consoling. Dell writes this as an old man, looking back at the boy he once was:
My mother said I'd have thousands of mornings to wake up and think about all this, when no one would tell me how to feel. It's been many thousands now. What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly the good is often not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try. All of us. We try.
First I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.
Well, I certainly couldn't, nor any one of the four hundred odd pages that followed. I did manage to do an hour's teaching, as well as process three pounds of sour cherries into something in jars that might decide to be jam, but only in order to allow myself to luxuriate in this warm bath of words without the (negligible) pangs of guilt that might follow the self-indulgence of reading all day.
Dell Parsons tells the mesmerising tale of the summer at the beginning of the sixties when he and his twin sister were fifteen and their parents, not in any way reckless people, ventured outside boundaries they knew to be right, and then found themselves unable to go back. It is clear from the onset what will happen (a robbery and murders), thus it is not merely suspense that kept me coming back for more (that too!), but rather the slow cumulative build of character: of the parents, the sister and of Dell himself, portrayed in a gentle, detached tone of slight bemusement, the slow cumulative build of the history and time, the slow cumulative build of insight and reading of weather.
Dell's shy bookish mother quotes a line of poetry at him: "For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.", which comes from that wonderful Yeats piece 'Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop':
I MET the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'
'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.
'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'
Dichotomies, fair and foul, body and soul, structure the whole of Canada. Shy, bookish, tiny mother, breezy, charming tall father. The twins, and the diametrically opposite paths laid out for them by the destruction of their family. Alabama and Montana. Canada and 'down below'. Crime and how it is expiated or compounded. Choices made and opposites reconciled.
And in the end, it is conciliatory, consoling. Dell writes this as an old man, looking back at the boy he once was:
My mother said I'd have thousands of mornings to wake up and think about all this, when no one would tell me how to feel. It's been many thousands now. What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it-if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to subordinate, as Ruskin implied, to keep proportion, to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good, even if admittedly the good is often not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try. All of us. We try.
May 30, 2022
The way that a bridge can symbolize the connector of disparate sides, a border can stand for the divisor. With his flight over the border to Canada, Dell, the 15 year old protagonist and narrator, divides the two parts of his life, the first when he was part of a family and a fraternal twin to his sister Berner, and second, after his mother's plans kept him from entering Montana's child welfare system and made him a refugee over the border. Dell is always exploring lines or boundaries, what separates him and Berner, how his parents personalities and outlook on life differ, how Canada and the US differ, how Americans in Canada are different from native Canadians. This exploration gives us a coming of age story of a self-resilient and thoughtful boy in a likable voice.
Ford's construction of the book doesn't make the bank robbery a mystery, which we know of from the start. How it came to that, what family life was like before and during, what people think of themselves and how others see them (with hilarious and unfortunate self-deception on his father's part), and then what happens in the few months immediately afterwards, gives us the majority of the story. The separations - before and after the robbery, between the twins-also before and after the robbery, connections with people after his mother is no longer there to keep Dell apart from them, make for an interesting and moving read from a writer I really like.
Ford's construction of the book doesn't make the bank robbery a mystery, which we know of from the start. How it came to that, what family life was like before and during, what people think of themselves and how others see them (with hilarious and unfortunate self-deception on his father's part), and then what happens in the few months immediately afterwards, gives us the majority of the story. The separations - before and after the robbery, between the twins-also before and after the robbery, connections with people after his mother is no longer there to keep Dell apart from them, make for an interesting and moving read from a writer I really like.
October 17, 2016
Rough Riding in Saskatchewan
4.4 stars
Fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is forced to stand on his own after his parents are arrested for a bank robbery near Great Falls, Montana. An older Dell tells his story of the aftermath of his parents' arrests and convictions, when his twin sister Berner left him to a family friend who took him to live with another American, a mysterious and charming Arthur Remlinger (whose wickedness lurks beneath), on the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada.
The 2012 novel looks at what it's like for a teen boy to be left by his felon parents to live in a culture strange to him and then having to face his fears in the form of a furious evil. Ford writes a realistic, embracing and ultimately harrowing tale in lucid, nuanced prose with a shadowy poignancy to the wreath of weakness around humans thrust into a new environment with strangers.
4.4 stars
Fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons is forced to stand on his own after his parents are arrested for a bank robbery near Great Falls, Montana. An older Dell tells his story of the aftermath of his parents' arrests and convictions, when his twin sister Berner left him to a family friend who took him to live with another American, a mysterious and charming Arthur Remlinger (whose wickedness lurks beneath), on the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada.
The 2012 novel looks at what it's like for a teen boy to be left by his felon parents to live in a culture strange to him and then having to face his fears in the form of a furious evil. Ford writes a realistic, embracing and ultimately harrowing tale in lucid, nuanced prose with a shadowy poignancy to the wreath of weakness around humans thrust into a new environment with strangers.
December 10, 2020
Meine Mutter sagte, ich würde noch tausendmal morgens aufwachen und Zeit haben, über all das nachzudenken, ohne das mir jemand vorschreibe, was ich dabei fühlen sollte. Mittlerweile sind es schon viele Tausend gewesen. Ich weiß nur, dass man besser Chance im Leben hat - bessere Überlebenschancen - wenn man gut mit Verlusten umgehen kann; wenn man es schafft, darüber nicht zum Zyniker zu werden. […] Wir versuchen es. Wir alle. Wir versuchen es. ENDE
Dies sind die letzten Sätze eines großartigen Romans, der sich meines Erachtens einreihen kann in die Reihe der klassischen, amerikanischen Erzählungen. Dieser Satz über die Bedeutung des Umgangs mit Verlusten zur Erhöhung der eigenen Überlebenschancen ist das zentrale Leitmotiv in dem Buch, in dem wir die Geschichte von Dell Parson erzählt bekommen, der als 15jähriger im Jahr 1960 in einer Kleinstadt in Montana mit seiner Eltern und seiner Zwillingsschwester Berner in ruhigen Verhältnissen aufwächst. Dell erzählt die Geschichte in der ersten Person, aber nicht aus der Sicht eines Teenagers, sondern mit dem Abstand von 50 Jahren als angehender, pensionierter Lehrer. Auch wenn die Reflexionen dadurch nicht altersgerecht wiedergegeben werden, so bekommen die Beschreibungen der Menschen und der Dinge eine große Tiefe und die Schlussfolgerungen enden in solchen oben angeführten Weisheiten, die bestimmt noch lange in mir nachklingen werden.
Thematisch scheinen sich Benedict Wells Buch Vom Ende der Einsamkeit und Kanada zu ähneln, denn in beiden Büchern spielen die Geschwisterbeziehung eine wesentliche Rolle und in beiden Fällen endet die Kindheit der Teenager abrupt durch einen Schicksalsschlag. Doch bei Richard Ford verunglücken die Eltern nicht tödlich, sondern begehen die Dummheit eines dilettantischen Bankraubs, werden gefasst und inhaftiert. Während Berner mit ihrem Freund flieht bevor das Jugendamt kommt, wird Dell von einer Freundin der Mutter über die Grenze nach Kanada gebracht, wo er Unterschlupf bei deren Bruder erhält. Doch auch hier gibt es emotionale Entbehrungen und auch diese Geschichte im Leben Dells endet mit einem Verbrechen. Und wieder verliert er alles und muss weiterziehen.
Mir hat vor allem dieser ruhige Erzählton Dells gefallen, der sich zieht, wie ein langer Highway durch die Kornfelder Montanas. In Dells Stimme hört man nie eine Anklage oder ein Hadern mit dem Schicksal. Seine Mutter hatte ihm beigebracht, dass einem das Leben leer geschenkt wird und dass es an einem selbst liegt, dieses Leben zu befüllen. Das klingt vielleicht wie eine Weisheit aus dem Glückskeks beim Chinesen, aber letztlich ist es einfach bewundernswert wie sehr Dell geerdet und in sich ruhend ist. Im Gegensatz zu seiner wilden Schwester kann der leicht naive und phlegmatische, introvertierte Bruder sein Leben meistern, trotz aller Verluste. Und so endet die Geschichte Dells trotz aller Brutalität und Traurigkeit hoffnungsvoll. Womit auch wieder die Parallele zu dem deutschen Kanada von Benedict Wells gezogen werden kann. Unbedingte Leseempfehlung.
Dies sind die letzten Sätze eines großartigen Romans, der sich meines Erachtens einreihen kann in die Reihe der klassischen, amerikanischen Erzählungen. Dieser Satz über die Bedeutung des Umgangs mit Verlusten zur Erhöhung der eigenen Überlebenschancen ist das zentrale Leitmotiv in dem Buch, in dem wir die Geschichte von Dell Parson erzählt bekommen, der als 15jähriger im Jahr 1960 in einer Kleinstadt in Montana mit seiner Eltern und seiner Zwillingsschwester Berner in ruhigen Verhältnissen aufwächst. Dell erzählt die Geschichte in der ersten Person, aber nicht aus der Sicht eines Teenagers, sondern mit dem Abstand von 50 Jahren als angehender, pensionierter Lehrer. Auch wenn die Reflexionen dadurch nicht altersgerecht wiedergegeben werden, so bekommen die Beschreibungen der Menschen und der Dinge eine große Tiefe und die Schlussfolgerungen enden in solchen oben angeführten Weisheiten, die bestimmt noch lange in mir nachklingen werden.
Thematisch scheinen sich Benedict Wells Buch Vom Ende der Einsamkeit und Kanada zu ähneln, denn in beiden Büchern spielen die Geschwisterbeziehung eine wesentliche Rolle und in beiden Fällen endet die Kindheit der Teenager abrupt durch einen Schicksalsschlag. Doch bei Richard Ford verunglücken die Eltern nicht tödlich, sondern begehen die Dummheit eines dilettantischen Bankraubs, werden gefasst und inhaftiert. Während Berner mit ihrem Freund flieht bevor das Jugendamt kommt, wird Dell von einer Freundin der Mutter über die Grenze nach Kanada gebracht, wo er Unterschlupf bei deren Bruder erhält. Doch auch hier gibt es emotionale Entbehrungen und auch diese Geschichte im Leben Dells endet mit einem Verbrechen. Und wieder verliert er alles und muss weiterziehen.
Mir hat vor allem dieser ruhige Erzählton Dells gefallen, der sich zieht, wie ein langer Highway durch die Kornfelder Montanas. In Dells Stimme hört man nie eine Anklage oder ein Hadern mit dem Schicksal. Seine Mutter hatte ihm beigebracht, dass einem das Leben leer geschenkt wird und dass es an einem selbst liegt, dieses Leben zu befüllen. Das klingt vielleicht wie eine Weisheit aus dem Glückskeks beim Chinesen, aber letztlich ist es einfach bewundernswert wie sehr Dell geerdet und in sich ruhend ist. Im Gegensatz zu seiner wilden Schwester kann der leicht naive und phlegmatische, introvertierte Bruder sein Leben meistern, trotz aller Verluste. Und so endet die Geschichte Dells trotz aller Brutalität und Traurigkeit hoffnungsvoll. Womit auch wieder die Parallele zu dem deutschen Kanada von Benedict Wells gezogen werden kann. Unbedingte Leseempfehlung.
June 7, 2018
La historia está contada de forma muy ordenada, clara, metódica y cómoda. Es muy descriptiva y muy minuciosa y por este motivo puede parecer que se vaya a hacer muy denso y pesado pero tal como está escrito hace que la lectura sea fascinante. Los personajes están perfectamente dibujados y descritos al milímetro. Es la típica historia que te va envolviendo poco a poco sin que te des cuenta y llegado a ese momento ya no lo puedes soltar.
Y eso que mayormente lo que narra es solo un pedacito de la vida del protagonista que transcurre en un lapso de tiempo muy corto, pero que tal y como el mismo protagonista reconoce es el acontecimiento de su vida, lo que le ha marcado toda su existencia.
Muy recomendable pero no para todos los públicos. Entiendo que haya gente que le resulte aburrido y sin sustancia. Lo que nadie puede negar es que está impecablemente bien escrito.
Y eso que mayormente lo que narra es solo un pedacito de la vida del protagonista que transcurre en un lapso de tiempo muy corto, pero que tal y como el mismo protagonista reconoce es el acontecimiento de su vida, lo que le ha marcado toda su existencia.
Muy recomendable pero no para todos los públicos. Entiendo que haya gente que le resulte aburrido y sin sustancia. Lo que nadie puede negar es que está impecablemente bien escrito.
September 23, 2023
Canadian Noir.
What would Canadian Noir, if one were writing a 'Saturday Night Show' skit be like? If I ignore all of the warnings that I may sound politically incorrect, well, dare I signal that I agree that many stereotypes have a basis in reality? Dare I say ‘Canada’ seemed to me what a stereotype-Canadian Noir genre book would be like? Should I go further and say I suspect the author Richard Ford of having his little joke in writing a stereotype-Canadian Noir stylized book? Yes. In advance, apologies for saying it aloud after all. Even if I'm wrong, I couldn't help giggling at the thought. The writing appears to purposely diminish dramatic tension. At every point where in an American Noir genre novel the reader would get a cliff-hanger ending before the next chapter, the narrator, Dell, reveals the outcomes and endings before the actions of the next chapter start. Dell tells the story of his childhood after informing the reader that he is near retirement as a teacher in a school, for example, right at the beginning. The reader knows right away that Dell survived and went on with his education to teach. As Dell tells his story in the book, written in a tone as realistic as if he were sitting in a chair verbally speaking to you, with absolutely none of the flourishes that a written story would have, indeed, in the exact voice of a real 15 year old boy who is an inexperienced storyteller, it will take some perseverance to read through the early chapters. There is almost no tension in this book, with the exceptions of occurrences where one might think, ok, this is where the narrator becomes unreliable, or this is where it will step out into a mystery...and then Dell explains the actual outcome, and then he calmly explains how it happened.
Even more deflating, when I was three chapters from the end of ‘Canada’, I was thinking, ok, this is a reflection of Joseph Conrad's book, 'The Heart of Darkness' and even a hint of Conrad's 'Secret Agent', and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby'.......when that's exactly what Dell confirms as he explains what books his childhood reminds him of. Do I hear the author giggling? Yes, I believe I do....
Why read this book, then? Because it's a writer's book to be studied for its construction and its style. Because the writing is voice perfect. Because Dell's story is of interest. Because in observing how the characters behave, react and succeed, or not, is to stir up memories of real people similar to those in the book. Perhaps in the mirror Ford holds for you to see these people, you may discover insight that escaped in the reading of "The Heart of Darkness".
Other things I noticed:
Berner - Burner? She is the American twin who goes off to seize her future in her own hands, burning with purpose and self-assurance, skeptical of authority.
Dell - a small valley, surrounded with trees? Dell, the Canadian, uncertain, shy, the 'good' twin who obeys and follows instructions, unassuming, fearful, thinks positive.
Great Falls, Montana, 'The Electric City' - where lightening metaphorically strikes Dells family and a great fall occurs.
Half of the book takes place in America and the other half in Saskatchewan, Canada - but a mere 125 miles away separates Great Falls and Partrean. The author establishes there is not much of an landscape change, although the environment changes through the people Dell meets. Dell's mother Neeva discouraged assimilation with locals wherever the Parsons lived because she had pretensions of superiority. When Dell no longer has the protection and guidance of his parents, he must create inner resources from almost nothing. Crossing the border between Canada and America was akin to crossing the river Styx, where Dell ends up in a kind of purgatory (the Greek meaning), where time appears to stop. Many of the adults that lead him to the next stages in his journey give him advice on how to survive in life and how to guide himself emotionally.
Some of the advice Dell accepts or notices or rejects:
"Which may finally be the only real difference between one place on the earth and another: how you think about the people and the difference it makes to you to think that way."
"' Well, it's not as if there's a race we have to win, is there?'"
"He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to."
"He awkwardly produced a small paper notebook with blue-lined pages, which he seemed to have intended for me, and instructed me to keep my thoughts and observations in it, but never to show what I wrote to anyone." ...."I never wrote in that notebook, and when I left Fort Royal I left it behind."
So, which philosophy of success is more successful, the stereotyped 'American' -Berner- or the stereotyped 'Canadian' -Dell-? Or is it all a roll of the dice, and we are wasting our time filtering our past for clues to planning our future choices?
Since I think Ford, the author, was winking at us readers throughout the book, I have no idea if Dell's final philosophical musings are actually what Ford believes. I prefer to believe he is an agnostic, so we readers can hope for more clever books like this one.
What would Canadian Noir, if one were writing a 'Saturday Night Show' skit be like? If I ignore all of the warnings that I may sound politically incorrect, well, dare I signal that I agree that many stereotypes have a basis in reality? Dare I say ‘Canada’ seemed to me what a stereotype-Canadian Noir genre book would be like? Should I go further and say I suspect the author Richard Ford of having his little joke in writing a stereotype-Canadian Noir stylized book? Yes. In advance, apologies for saying it aloud after all. Even if I'm wrong, I couldn't help giggling at the thought. The writing appears to purposely diminish dramatic tension. At every point where in an American Noir genre novel the reader would get a cliff-hanger ending before the next chapter, the narrator, Dell, reveals the outcomes and endings before the actions of the next chapter start. Dell tells the story of his childhood after informing the reader that he is near retirement as a teacher in a school, for example, right at the beginning. The reader knows right away that Dell survived and went on with his education to teach. As Dell tells his story in the book, written in a tone as realistic as if he were sitting in a chair verbally speaking to you, with absolutely none of the flourishes that a written story would have, indeed, in the exact voice of a real 15 year old boy who is an inexperienced storyteller, it will take some perseverance to read through the early chapters. There is almost no tension in this book, with the exceptions of occurrences where one might think, ok, this is where the narrator becomes unreliable, or this is where it will step out into a mystery...and then Dell explains the actual outcome, and then he calmly explains how it happened.
Even more deflating, when I was three chapters from the end of ‘Canada’, I was thinking, ok, this is a reflection of Joseph Conrad's book, 'The Heart of Darkness' and even a hint of Conrad's 'Secret Agent', and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby'.......when that's exactly what Dell confirms as he explains what books his childhood reminds him of. Do I hear the author giggling? Yes, I believe I do....
Why read this book, then? Because it's a writer's book to be studied for its construction and its style. Because the writing is voice perfect. Because Dell's story is of interest. Because in observing how the characters behave, react and succeed, or not, is to stir up memories of real people similar to those in the book. Perhaps in the mirror Ford holds for you to see these people, you may discover insight that escaped in the reading of "The Heart of Darkness".
Other things I noticed:
Berner - Burner? She is the American twin who goes off to seize her future in her own hands, burning with purpose and self-assurance, skeptical of authority.
Dell - a small valley, surrounded with trees? Dell, the Canadian, uncertain, shy, the 'good' twin who obeys and follows instructions, unassuming, fearful, thinks positive.
Great Falls, Montana, 'The Electric City' - where lightening metaphorically strikes Dells family and a great fall occurs.
Half of the book takes place in America and the other half in Saskatchewan, Canada - but a mere 125 miles away separates Great Falls and Partrean. The author establishes there is not much of an landscape change, although the environment changes through the people Dell meets. Dell's mother Neeva discouraged assimilation with locals wherever the Parsons lived because she had pretensions of superiority. When Dell no longer has the protection and guidance of his parents, he must create inner resources from almost nothing. Crossing the border between Canada and America was akin to crossing the river Styx, where Dell ends up in a kind of purgatory (the Greek meaning), where time appears to stop. Many of the adults that lead him to the next stages in his journey give him advice on how to survive in life and how to guide himself emotionally.
Some of the advice Dell accepts or notices or rejects:
"Which may finally be the only real difference between one place on the earth and another: how you think about the people and the difference it makes to you to think that way."
"' Well, it's not as if there's a race we have to win, is there?'"
"He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they're substantial, that they're not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to."
"He awkwardly produced a small paper notebook with blue-lined pages, which he seemed to have intended for me, and instructed me to keep my thoughts and observations in it, but never to show what I wrote to anyone." ...."I never wrote in that notebook, and when I left Fort Royal I left it behind."
So, which philosophy of success is more successful, the stereotyped 'American' -Berner- or the stereotyped 'Canadian' -Dell-? Or is it all a roll of the dice, and we are wasting our time filtering our past for clues to planning our future choices?
Since I think Ford, the author, was winking at us readers throughout the book, I have no idea if Dell's final philosophical musings are actually what Ford believes. I prefer to believe he is an agnostic, so we readers can hope for more clever books like this one.
November 28, 2015
I'll admit I started this book with prejudice. I love Canada. I mostly love his writing which I find to be consistently gorgeous, in a quiet, beautifully-cadenced way. His stories are not the sort that usually attract me-men in America, searching for their identities. But (possibly as a result of the beauty of the prose), I am always drawn in and touched by Ford's men. He renders their malaise precisely and gently.
In Canada, Ford's most recent work, the "man" is a 15 year old boy, Dell Parsons. All the adults in Dell's life, as well as his twin sister Berner (yes, no mispelling here and no clue as to why the name was chosen), are let down by all the adults in their life. After 15 relatively "normal" if somewhat dysfunctional years of parenting, Dell's mother and father rob a bank. Neither has any background that would indicate success in this career-nor do they have any. Mother is described as "ethnic"-a small Jewish woman almost stereotypical in her appearance living in a small Waspish town in the midwest and dad is a former military man, tall and blonde from Alabama. Dad is generally ineffective and given to small-time thefts and failed jobs. Mom is an intellectual who made a bad marital choice and can't seem to undo it. She tries to protect the children from the effects of her crime but fails just about as profoundly at doing so as she does at the crime itself.
Dell ends up across the border in a very small town in, of course, Canada, where he is taken in (although hardly taken care of) by an expatriate American, himself fleeing from the consequences of a crime gone wrong. In a very brief period of time, Dell's life comes undone. And yet, as we know from the narrator (Dell, 50 years after the action which takes place in 1960), Dell turns out extraordinarily well. A bit shut down, perhaps, a little distanced from emotion but he might as easily have turned out the same way had his life not been shattered.
And yet Dell makes it clear that his life was shattered. That the people who shattered it gave him just enough support and helpful guidance to enable him to survive the cataclysm but that his own general character-bookish, quiet, decent-probably was what enabled him to take the scraps he was given and turn them into a satisfactory life.
The magic of Ford's writing is that while I never escaped feeling the tragedy, I believed in Dell's survival and almost magical resilience (of the most quiet kind). The kind of quiet wonder I felt I heard in the voice of Dell.
In Canada, Ford's most recent work, the "man" is a 15 year old boy, Dell Parsons. All the adults in Dell's life, as well as his twin sister Berner (yes, no mispelling here and no clue as to why the name was chosen), are let down by all the adults in their life. After 15 relatively "normal" if somewhat dysfunctional years of parenting, Dell's mother and father rob a bank. Neither has any background that would indicate success in this career-nor do they have any. Mother is described as "ethnic"-a small Jewish woman almost stereotypical in her appearance living in a small Waspish town in the midwest and dad is a former military man, tall and blonde from Alabama. Dad is generally ineffective and given to small-time thefts and failed jobs. Mom is an intellectual who made a bad marital choice and can't seem to undo it. She tries to protect the children from the effects of her crime but fails just about as profoundly at doing so as she does at the crime itself.
Dell ends up across the border in a very small town in, of course, Canada, where he is taken in (although hardly taken care of) by an expatriate American, himself fleeing from the consequences of a crime gone wrong. In a very brief period of time, Dell's life comes undone. And yet, as we know from the narrator (Dell, 50 years after the action which takes place in 1960), Dell turns out extraordinarily well. A bit shut down, perhaps, a little distanced from emotion but he might as easily have turned out the same way had his life not been shattered.
And yet Dell makes it clear that his life was shattered. That the people who shattered it gave him just enough support and helpful guidance to enable him to survive the cataclysm but that his own general character-bookish, quiet, decent-probably was what enabled him to take the scraps he was given and turn them into a satisfactory life.
The magic of Ford's writing is that while I never escaped feeling the tragedy, I believed in Dell's survival and almost magical resilience (of the most quiet kind). The kind of quiet wonder I felt I heard in the voice of Dell.
January 23, 2018
Meeeeeeh... μερικα πολυ ομορφα σημεια χαμενα μεσα σε απεεεεεεραντες περιγραφες και πολυλογια.δυστυχως το ενδιαφερον μου για αυτο το βιβλιο χαθηκε σε αρκετα αρχικο σταδιο..ισως ξανασυναντηθω με τον Φορντ σε καποιο αλλο (πιο ενδιαφερον) εργο του..
Ας γνωρισουμε αλλον εναν πολυδιαφημισμενο τυπο...😉👍
Ας γνωρισουμε αλλον εναν πολυδιαφημισμενο τυπο...😉👍
December 24, 2023
1.5 ☆
Don't get me wrong, I understand that the narrative delves deeply into the theme of "crossing borders," exploring the irreversible nature of leaving one's past behind and the significance of self-reflection on life's minutiae. That's why I will give this book +0.5 ☆.
Nevertheless, I just perceived Richard Ford's writing style as monotonous, uninteresting and tedios. His sentences are excessively long, repetitive, and scenes unfold in an overly detailed and ultimately inconsequential manner. The fact that I'm criticising the overly detailed description aspect of this book is actually hilarious, since I am used to reading classics (and a thorough enjoyer of them), and classics are known for deep-dives. I guess this says a lot about the reading experience for me when it came to this book where I got extremely annoyed by it... Namely, it's a sign to not pick it up *sigh*
Dell's narrative voice appears inconsistent and redundant. The characters, in my opinion, lack redeeming qualities, coming across as sluggish, overly introspective individuals who achieve nothing and serve no purpose. The thoughts, actions and inner monologues etc. of characters felt one-dimensional.
Generally speaking, I'm frustrated that I invested time in reading this novel, however, it was obligatory for my final exams in high school, so I had to keep pushing myself to finish.
If I knew how much this would drag despite "only" being 400 pages, I would have tried to pick a different book for my finals.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that the narrative delves deeply into the theme of "crossing borders," exploring the irreversible nature of leaving one's past behind and the significance of self-reflection on life's minutiae. That's why I will give this book +0.5 ☆.
Nevertheless, I just perceived Richard Ford's writing style as monotonous, uninteresting and tedios. His sentences are excessively long, repetitive, and scenes unfold in an overly detailed and ultimately inconsequential manner. The fact that I'm criticising the overly detailed description aspect of this book is actually hilarious, since I am used to reading classics (and a thorough enjoyer of them), and classics are known for deep-dives. I guess this says a lot about the reading experience for me when it came to this book where I got extremely annoyed by it... Namely, it's a sign to not pick it up *sigh*
Dell's narrative voice appears inconsistent and redundant. The characters, in my opinion, lack redeeming qualities, coming across as sluggish, overly introspective individuals who achieve nothing and serve no purpose. The thoughts, actions and inner monologues etc. of characters felt one-dimensional.
Generally speaking, I'm frustrated that I invested time in reading this novel, however, it was obligatory for my final exams in high school, so I had to keep pushing myself to finish.
If I knew how much this would drag despite "only" being 400 pages, I would have tried to pick a different book for my finals.
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