The Road Home |
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Author:
Jim Harrison
By Picador
Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780330376990
ISBN: 0330376993
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: 1999-08-13
Publisher: Picador
Studio: Picador |
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Amazon.co.uk Review
With his 1988 novel, Dalva, Jim Harrison commenced an epic of the American Midwest--or more specifically, the Nebraska sand hills. In The Road Home his eponymous heroine returns in search of the son she abandoned 30 years before, only to find herself more deeply enmeshed than ever in the coils of the family romance. (Quite literally, by the way: the father of Dalva's son was her half-brother.) Now, a decade later, Harrison continues her story in The Road Home. Ranging over an entire century, this second installment encompasses both Dalva's ancestry and her valedictory impulses in the face of death, circa 1987. As he did in the earlier book, the author passes the narrative baton from one character to another. There are five highly individual voices at work, including not only Dalva's own but that of her grandfather, mother, and son. This makes for a dense, Rashomon-like structure, in which events are revisited by one generation after another and truth is a relative thing--in every sense of the word. Harrison leavens this spiralling saga with splendid passages about everything from the Lakota Sioux to bird hunting, from the complexities of art to the simplicities of the wandering life: "There's a sweet, vaguely scary feeling in disappearance," notes Dalva's son, Nelse. And as always, the author can convey both the surprising beauty of a landscape and an almost suffocating sense of its abundance. "It is neither more nor less endurable in May," says Dalva of the lilac-encircled family cemetery, "when it is enshrouded by the heavy-scented purple and white flowers, a smell that on warm evenings is so dense as to be almost visible....The sound of the crickets arrived one by one until they were a chorus, and if you walked down the gravel road toward the Niobrara the frogs from the lower, marshy areas were so loud as to be barely endurable." --Bob Brandeis, Amazon.com
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Read in Nebraska, 2008-04-05
Reading The Road Home flying over Nebraska, turning the last page in South Dakota added to my enjoyment. Perhas as a consequence I felt it one of the finest books I have read. Never having read any other Jim Harrison the sense of place, of family and history elegantly expressed in interwoven perspectives resonated with me and is with me still. So much so that I am now on Amazon looking for another of his books.
Every character is just another version of the author, 1999-06-28
Each character is the same...a dream pondering glutton. i've loved all of harrion's previous novels. but i just could not believe his characterization of dalva. i could not believe this was a woman. harrison is in love with a character that can't exist...a woman who thinks and eats like him. utterly disappointing!
an appropriate sequel to dalva, provides closure., 1999-09-06
a tasteful revisit to characters from dalva. it was good to see the personality of nelse fleshed out, from the skeleton supplied in the former work. for people who return to re-read books as they would revisit old friends, the road home is a welcome closure to dalva, and the northridge clan. harrison continues the saga honestly, without the feel of a 'let's make some money sequel'. i would like to see him revisit tristan ludlow, during the years skipped over in 'legends of the fall'.
Every character is just another version of the author, 1999-06-28
Each character is the same...a dream pondering glutton. i've loved all of harrion's previous novels. but i just could not believe his characterization of dalva. i could not believe this was a woman. harrison is in love with a character that can't exist...a woman who thinks and eats like him. utterly disappointing!
Skip The Road Home and read Dalva, 1999-07-15
I've been a fan of Harrison since I read 'Legends of the Fall' in Esquire back in the 70's, so it was with great anticipation that I picked up this, his first novel in a decade and companion to the excellent 'Dalva'. I began to read slowly, savoring the language and trying to make the pleasure last longer. Instead I found that by the end of the book I had the unmistakeable feeling that I was reading the same character over and over. Each character sings the same refrain "The government ripped off the indian, the government ruined the ecosystem" at the same time they seem to argue for more government regulations. This refrain comes from Dalva, a social worker, her mother Naomi, a teacher, and Dalva's son Nelse, an itinerent naturalist who moves from one federaly funded bird counting project to the next. I truly hope that this was meant to be ironic, at least then I can accept its repetitiveness. Harrison is a terrific writer, though in contradiction to some of the other posts here he is not by any means in the same league as Twain and Hemingway, and I highly recommend Dalva, Legends of the Fall, Just Before Dark, Sundog and his poetry. But don't shoot your money on 'The Road Home'. Harrison should have heeded T. Wolf and remembered that it's a place you can't go again.
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