Reviews

Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks

cac03's review against another edition

5.0

This book is so good I never want it to end so I've been reading it for 9 years now. Its long enough to last a lifetime. I only have about 40 more pages but I just can;t seem to bring myself to finish it.

sfahrney's review against another edition

4.0

Lengthy but interesting insight into John Brown and his influence. I enjoyed it.

jckuhn4's review against another edition

4.0

An amazing, sprawling, epic, uniquely American portrait of a man named Owen Brown: an aging man, a man contemplating suicide with a smile, but also a man finally coming to terms with his denied past and his fractured identity, finally coming to terms with what he was both capable of and incapable of, finally putting to rest the ghosts of his abolitionist father and brothers. And the ghost of Lyman, the black man he never stopped loving. Yes, this is a novel about John Brown, but it is first and foremost about a son of that Old Man, serving as narrator and telling a compelling story of what it might be like to grow up in (and into) the shadow of a warrior, of a priest. But I read his relationship with Lyman to be central to the formation of Owen's character and to the actions he was both willing and unwilling to take; as central to his character as the relationship between this atheistic yet still abolitionist son and his fire-and-brimstone father. It seems sadly and utterly believable that Owen, one of the primary and recurring victims of the Old Man's lordly paternalism, should himself become a major force pushing his father into the self-justifyingly bloody raids on slaveholders, on their supporters, on the federals. Yet, like his own slave-holding country singing anthems to itself as the "land of the free and home of the brave," Owen remains conflicted to the end: yes, he rebels with brutal singlemindedness against the institutionalized slavery into which his country was born. But at the end, he won't lift a finger to stop the raid from going to hell in handbasket, instead watching the Harper's Ferry action unfold from on high, up a tree. Despite Owen's claim of love for his father -- repeated over and over again like an incantation -- his rebellion is in fact complete: he is an unremitting yet silent atheist. And although he won't rebel against what he sees as his and his father's shared duty, it is for his own private and tragic reasons: "...only by cleaving strictly to Father's plan would I be kept from killing men who did not deserve to die." Still, Owen's eyes are far clearer than his father's about race and the abomination of slavery; especially so after Lyman's death. While his father repeatedly swells and preens with self-righteous indignation, in contrast Owen (with his arm crippled through an innocent act of rebellion against the puritanism of the father) clearly recognizes the tragic dilemma of white abolitionism. And especially of the militants, holy or otherwise. In describing Lyman's accident, Owen puts it this way: "...as surely as if I had pulled the trigger myself, I was the man, the white man, who, because of Lyman's color and mine, had killed him. It was as if there had been no other way for me to love him." The personal is so clearly political throughout all of this story, even when it is just hinted at. Although our narrator never quite explicitly admits it to his readers, was there ever a darker closet for a nineteenth-century American gay white man than that proposed in this novel? And self-proclaimed atheist though he is, in the end this Isaac seeks but finds no ram in the bush. In the end he has to sacrifice, won't stop himself from sacrificing, believes it his duty to sacrifice Abraham instead. Not to a nonexistent god, but on the altar of his own heart-broken despair.

edited to add: Don't buy this in ebook format if typos drive you crazy! Speaking from experience here: on the kindle this is a mess.

minsies's review against another edition

4.0

I'm sure that at one point, I must've known something about John Brown other than radical abolitionist mumble mumble Harper's Ferry. If I did, though, I had forgotten all of it except the fuzziest details before I starting reading Cloudsplitter.

I think, to some degree, that may be the best way of reading it; if you know too much about what happened in Kansas, at Harper's Ferry, about the Brown family in general, etc. (essentially, if you know too much of the truth of it), some of the power of Banks's story may be diminished.

It's not a perfect book - there are a few times when Owen Brown uses phrases that I wouldn't have expected of a 19th-century man, for example - but it is thoroughly captivating.

judygjohnson's review against another edition

2.0

I read this book because it was a book club selection. If it hadn't been, I never would have finished it. I kept on to the end, but I cannot recommend it. It fails as historical fiction, because it provides only one perspective, out of context. The author tries to explain this by having the narrator (Owen Brown, John Brown's son) say, many times, with variations, "There is much, of course, that I am leaving out of my account, much that need not be told by me. Most of what happened back then occurred in full public view, anyhow, and is known to the world; it needs not corrective from me..." The depictions of life in Ohio & the Adirondacks in the early 19th century are well-written and moving, although overly long. The portrayal of John Brown is fascinating, and would be worth reading if the book were shorter by about 500 pages.

slyallm's review against another edition

4.0

Too long by a mile, way too padded a backstory. otherwise: a great meditation on racism, political violence, morality, religion. Very contemporary story, much moreso now even than in 1998.

dashausfrau's review against another edition

4.0

Although the book is from 1999, & the story itself is set in the 1850s, the language is prophetic. Since I listened to the book rather than read, I don't have the quotes marked, but John Brown (was this something Brown said or the author?) talks about the masses of poor pro-slavery southerners as "ignorant," supporting slavery only because they're under the illusion that they can become rich & own slaves themselves.

There were the southerners determined to uphold the institution of slavery & establish it in new states, & there were the northern abolitionists who felt very passionately that slavery was wrong, but still had no wish to mix with nonwhites. And there was John Brown.

He was nuts. In a lot of ways. But he sure did put his money where his mouth was.

Was he right in trying to persuade the slaves to take up arms? God knows.

expendablemudge's review against another edition

5.0

Rating: 5* of five

On my birthday in 1999, I got a call from a childhood friend informing me that my mother had had a debilitating stroke. I started planning my trip back to my hometown, calling in favors and loans and generally mobilizing my support system. I was on a plane two weeks later, accompanied by this book.

It was a godsend. A story I knew told by a storyteller I trusted. My next two months were complicated and unpleasant, involving upheavals, betrayals, endings, and beginnings that contained the seeds of their endings. Throughout, I was ministered to by Russell Banks. The time I spent reading this book, so extremely slow by my personal standards, was time well spent and deeply savored. My friend Mark Freeburg recently picked this book up and decided to read it, so I thought I'd revisit some of my favorite moments.

It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution!
Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!

How I wish today's christians thought this way, and acted on the principles they claim to venerate.

Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.

Because this is the simplest statement of a truth I've held dear all my life.

“You must not obey a majority, no matter how large, if it opposes your principles and opinions." He said this to each new volunteer and repeated it over and over to him, until it was engraved on his mind. "The largest majority is often only an organized mob whose noise can no more change the false into the true than it can change black into white or night into day. And a minority, conscious of its rights, if those rights are based on moral principles, will sooner or later become a just majority.”

Yes indeed. As we saw a year ago.

Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.

I'd like to have this printed on the hundred-dollar bill.

So my trip back through the book, even though it falls short of a full re-read, has been deeply and satisfyingly full of moment and meaning.

d0kk's review against another edition

5.0

Outstanding. Easy to be seduced into thinking this is a true story, but aside from the facts of Brown's story as reported by the likes of Villard, it's a work of gifted fiction. This fanciful tale of a son's struggle with a charismatic and willful father hangs nicely against the backdrop of a nation divided against itself.