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beritt 's review for:
Crossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner
Fantastic.
I picked this up in a second-hand bookshop in London, not knowing what to expect. I had heard of Wallace Stegner, and Angle of Repose was already on my reading list, but I didn't really know much about him or his writing. Never having read anything by him before, I wasn't even sure if I would like this book. But the blurb on the back intrigued me, so I took it home.
And God, did I love it. And I mean LOVE it. I don't know how some writers manage to write down the things that seem impossible to write down, how they manage to render the intangible tangible. It is so poetic, so beautiful. I can't even give an example here, because it happens over the course of the novel, not just in any particular passage.
I can, however, give an example of his exquisite, evocative style. Listen to this:
"And suddenly a misty coolness breathed in our faces, we heard the sounds of water, stereophonic, many-toned, reverberant. The earth gaped before us, and we looked down into a fantastic gulch, shadowed and light-shot, where the stream appeared again through grottoes and potholes as slick and twisty as the waterslide at an amusement park. Below us on the right the water burst from the rock and fell ten or fifteen eet into a green pool. Opalescent bubbles streamed along the wall, currents stirred the pool into whorls and upwellings. At its lower end, the water swelled out over a lip and into a second fall, which we could not see but could tell by its rainbow. Down below the second pool, the stream twisted in and out of sight.
"My God," Sid said, "Can there be such a place?" (192-193).
So beautiful. And there's another, fantastic section, in which Sid dreams about what he wants out of life (poetry, a garden) and Charity tells him that that's nice, but it's a withdrawal from life, an evasion, and therefore not sustainable.
It's fascinating, because I can understand both perspectives so well. Both their lines of argument make sense to me. I feel part Sid, part Charity. Maybe that's also what made this book so beautiful to me.
(That scene, by the way, also seems to officially set the stage for the novel as a whole).
I don't know what else to say about this, except that I loved it. I read it at the right time, and it now ranks among my favorites.
Time to go out and find everything Stegner has ever written.
I picked this up in a second-hand bookshop in London, not knowing what to expect. I had heard of Wallace Stegner, and Angle of Repose was already on my reading list, but I didn't really know much about him or his writing. Never having read anything by him before, I wasn't even sure if I would like this book. But the blurb on the back intrigued me, so I took it home.
And God, did I love it. And I mean LOVE it. I don't know how some writers manage to write down the things that seem impossible to write down, how they manage to render the intangible tangible. It is so poetic, so beautiful. I can't even give an example here, because it happens over the course of the novel, not just in any particular passage.
I can, however, give an example of his exquisite, evocative style. Listen to this:
"And suddenly a misty coolness breathed in our faces, we heard the sounds of water, stereophonic, many-toned, reverberant. The earth gaped before us, and we looked down into a fantastic gulch, shadowed and light-shot, where the stream appeared again through grottoes and potholes as slick and twisty as the waterslide at an amusement park. Below us on the right the water burst from the rock and fell ten or fifteen eet into a green pool. Opalescent bubbles streamed along the wall, currents stirred the pool into whorls and upwellings. At its lower end, the water swelled out over a lip and into a second fall, which we could not see but could tell by its rainbow. Down below the second pool, the stream twisted in and out of sight.
"My God," Sid said, "Can there be such a place?" (192-193).
So beautiful. And there's another, fantastic section, in which Sid dreams about what he wants out of life (poetry, a garden) and Charity tells him that that's nice, but it's a withdrawal from life, an evasion, and therefore not sustainable.
It's fascinating, because I can understand both perspectives so well. Both their lines of argument make sense to me. I feel part Sid, part Charity. Maybe that's also what made this book so beautiful to me.
(That scene, by the way, also seems to officially set the stage for the novel as a whole).
I don't know what else to say about this, except that I loved it. I read it at the right time, and it now ranks among my favorites.
Time to go out and find everything Stegner has ever written.