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A Ilha de Caribou
Nas margens de um lago glacial no coração da península de Kenai, no Alasca, o casamento de Irene e Gary está à deriva. Para cumprirem um velho sonho de Gary, decidem construir uma cabana numa ilha deserta. Irene suspeita que o plano de Gary é o primeiro passo para a abandonar e começa a sofrer de dores de cabeça inexplicáveis, sendo atormentada por recordações de um trágico passado familiar. Quando o inverno chega de forma prematura e violenta, o casal vê-se submetido a uma pressão inesperada, terrível. Rhoda, a filha mais velha, receia que alguma coisa possa acontecer aos pais e tenta ajudá-los, mas também ela está a atravessar uma crise pessoal.
307 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
114 people are currently reading
2926 people want to read
About the author
David Vann
46 books654 followersPublished in 19 languages, David Vann’s internationally-bestselling books have won 15 prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain and, most recently, the $50,000 St. Francis College Literary Prize 2013, and appeared on 70 Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Financial Times, Elle UK, Esquire UK, Esquire Russia, National Geographic Adventure, Writer’s Digest, McSweeney’s, and other magazines and newspapers. A former Guggenheim fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Wallace Stegner fellow, and John L’Heureux fellow, he is currently a Professor at the University of Warwick in England and Honorary Professor at the University of Franche-Comté in France.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 647 reviews
May 16, 2014
Caribou Island is a masterpiece. Set in the remote bleakness of water-soaked, small town Alaska, this is a tale of desperation, failure, of man-versus-nature but also of man so arrogant and self-involved, so removed from reality that he does not bother to properly prepare for the battle. Some hope is gleaned, some battles are won, but the war seen here is a dark, suffocating presence.
The primary actors in Caribou Island are a late-middle-aged couple, Gary and Irene. Gary is impulsive, controlling, a bully and a coward, who cannot ever see himself as being in the wrong. He wants to test his mettle by constructing a cabin on the shore of remote Caribou Island. Another character thinks about sailing a ship around the world, thus conjuring Robert Stone and Outerbridge Reach. Gary’s wife, Irene, desperately trying to save her marriage, reluctantly agrees to help, despite knowing that constructing this cabin is only another in a long history of follies. Their daughter, Rhoda, is a veterinarian’s assistant. She lives with, and expects to marry Jim, a dentist, who is going through a mid-life crisis. A sociopathic man-user rips through the scenery, leaving a trail of destruction, and a few minor characters are given lines. But their actions serve primarily to highlight the larger issues. Looming over all is Irene’s memory from age ten, when she found her mother, hanging.
What effect must that have had on such a young person? Vann ought to know. His own father took his life when Vann was thirteen. Irene carries that memory on her back like Jesus stumbling toward Calvary. Given Vann’s prior work, one must wonder if one or more of his characters will find their way to a similar a dark end.
But there is a route. There are reasons, challenges, revelations, lies, contemplations. Abandonment and isolation are prime here. Vann casts a laser light on how people manage to see past each other, how they miss chances to connect. He looks at how fear, whether of failure, or of being alone, can help cause the very things we most want to avoid. Even the sociopath is running from something. Vann shows how people can make each other invisible, whether consciously or not, and do so at their peril, and how their externalizing of internal issues and images impacts those around them. Are we doomed to repeat the crimes of our parents? Of our parents’ parents? Of forebears beyond counting?
The subject matter may be tough, but the journey is incredibly rich, the main characters well realized, the craft impressive. You will find yourself thinking about scenes from this book long after you have moved on to your next read. Vann is the real deal, and this is top notch literature. Climb into your leaky boat, brave the icy wind and squall-driven waves slapping at the sides of your craft and head over to Caribou Island . It is a memorable sojourn. And if this is not recognized as one of the best books of 2011, I will eat my copy.
Other books by David Vann
Legend of a Suicide
Goat Mountain
Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn't cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge. These tiny towns in a great expanse, enclaves of despair.Whereas most fiction floats atop a watery base of prose, Vann’s characters and story sit amidst a thick stew of imagery. His writing has the density, the economy of a short story. No event occurs that does not contribute to the underlying momentum, or to enhancing our understanding of the characters or their actions. Salmon thrashing about on the deck of a boat echo how his characters struggle to survive the travails of their lives. One even dreams of himself underwater with the hooked fish. The Alaskan environment is as much a character as the characters themselves. While it can be a beautiful landscape, and that is noted more than once, it is mostly harsh here, offering chill wind, rain, snow, cold, the harshness of the venue reflecting the harshness of the characters’ emotional states.
The water was no longer turquoise. A dark, dark blue today, with blackness in it, a clarity, no glacial silt suspended. Irene didn't know it could change so completely in even a day. A different lake now. Another metaphor for itself, each new version refuting all previous.Vann’s language is as unadorned as a block of Hubbard ice, reminding me of Cormac McCarthy, particularly in his frequent verb-free sentence constructions.
The primary actors in Caribou Island are a late-middle-aged couple, Gary and Irene. Gary is impulsive, controlling, a bully and a coward, who cannot ever see himself as being in the wrong. He wants to test his mettle by constructing a cabin on the shore of remote Caribou Island. Another character thinks about sailing a ship around the world, thus conjuring Robert Stone and Outerbridge Reach. Gary’s wife, Irene, desperately trying to save her marriage, reluctantly agrees to help, despite knowing that constructing this cabin is only another in a long history of follies. Their daughter, Rhoda, is a veterinarian’s assistant. She lives with, and expects to marry Jim, a dentist, who is going through a mid-life crisis. A sociopathic man-user rips through the scenery, leaving a trail of destruction, and a few minor characters are given lines. But their actions serve primarily to highlight the larger issues. Looming over all is Irene’s memory from age ten, when she found her mother, hanging.
What effect must that have had on such a young person? Vann ought to know. His own father took his life when Vann was thirteen. Irene carries that memory on her back like Jesus stumbling toward Calvary. Given Vann’s prior work, one must wonder if one or more of his characters will find their way to a similar a dark end.
But there is a route. There are reasons, challenges, revelations, lies, contemplations. Abandonment and isolation are prime here. Vann casts a laser light on how people manage to see past each other, how they miss chances to connect. He looks at how fear, whether of failure, or of being alone, can help cause the very things we most want to avoid. Even the sociopath is running from something. Vann shows how people can make each other invisible, whether consciously or not, and do so at their peril, and how their externalizing of internal issues and images impacts those around them. Are we doomed to repeat the crimes of our parents? Of our parents’ parents? Of forebears beyond counting?
The subject matter may be tough, but the journey is incredibly rich, the main characters well realized, the craft impressive. You will find yourself thinking about scenes from this book long after you have moved on to your next read. Vann is the real deal, and this is top notch literature. Climb into your leaky boat, brave the icy wind and squall-driven waves slapping at the sides of your craft and head over to Caribou Island . It is a memorable sojourn. And if this is not recognized as one of the best books of 2011, I will eat my copy.
Other books by David Vann
Legend of a Suicide
Goat Mountain
June 30, 2022
Cuatro hombres y cuatro mujeres protagonizan la novela. El matrimonio de Irene y Gary forman la columna vertebral de la historia. En el otoño de sus vidas descubren el vacío que ha sido su existencia. Él, un hombre cobarde que, como todo buen cobarde, echa la culpa de todos sus males a los otros, en este caso a su mujer. Ella, una mujer que, por el miedo constante a ser abandonada como lo fue su madre, ha subordinado su vida a las necesidades de un hombre inmaduro que la desprecia. Su hija Rhonda sigue la tradición de la familia y solo tiene un objetivo: casarse por todo lo alto y salir de la vida miserable que ha vivido hasta ahora gracias a la buena posición económica de Jim, que, a su vez, tiene como único objetivo aprovechar los “diez años buenos que le quedan” para follarse a todo lo que se mueva mientras se refugia en la comodidad de una relación nada exigente. El resto de los personajes son comparsas de la trama, la loba de Monique, niña rica que se dedica a utilizar a los hombres; el vivelavida de Mark, hermano de Rhonda, y la tonta de su mujer, que ni recuerdo su nombre; y el pobrecito de Carl, de excursión en Alaska arrastrado por Monique, y al que todavía le falta un hervor.
Y todo esto narrado con un estilo tan rotundo y frío como el clima de Alaska y que pica (duele) tanto como los mosquitos que a miles se encuentran por allí.
Nadie sale bien parado de la pluma de este buen escritor. La recomiendo a pesar de que el desenlace sea excesivamente, y creo que innecesariamente, dramático.
September 20, 2016
Alaska’s beauty has a brutal edge. From a distance it appears calm and pristine, but the reality of living there can be harsh, unyielding. Chaos is part of its nature, a reflection of the chaos in the couple’s marriage, their lives, while at the same time adding to their chaos. A perfect storm gaining momentum.
Gary pictures himself as an ancient Viking; forever bonded to this wilderness, thriving, every attempt at nature to knock him down is countered with his conquering bellows. As part of his dream, he and his wife, Irene are moving to Caribou Island, log by log and side by side they will fulfill his plan to build a cabin there, a small cabin built for just the two of them to live out their days.
“They were going to build their cabin from scratch. No foundation, even. And no plans, no experience, no permits, no advice welcome. Gary wanted to just do it, as if the two of them were the first to come upon this wilderness.”
Irene is recently retired, and suffering from blinding, chronic headaches which her husband dismisses, her daughter seems baffled by both the sudden appearance of these headaches and her father’s obliviousness to her mother’s non-stop pain.
“He thought she was making up the pain, thought it wasn’t real. She was sitting right in front of him in the boat, facing him, but he managed to look ahead their entire trip across that lake without seeing her at all. Part of how he was letting her vanish.”
Beyond the headaches, Irene suffers from increasing dread of Gary’s fantasy life on this island. All she wants to do is crawl into a comfortable bed, find a quiet space and shut away as much of this pain as possible.
“And meanwhile, Irene said quietly to herself, this gets to be my life. Because you can choose who you’ll be with, but you can’t choose who they’ll become.”
Their daughter Rhoda is concerned about her mother, the headaches, the desolate environment her father seems hell-bent to drag her to. She wants them close by. She can’t be worrying about them on an island without any communication.
Nature complies by blanketing everything with a storm seemingly designed to add an atmosphere of desolation like a fog surrounding all. Everyone’s emotions, thoughts and dreams seem to follow suit.
Vann’s writing is effortless, beautiful, haunting. Caribou Island is a captivating, story with tremendously memorable characters. Alaska’s wilderness is just as much a character in this angst filled story as Gary and Irene. Lonely, disconnected and haunting.
September 27, 2016
"You can't have what no longer exists."
Brutally raw.....and that's not just an adequate descriptive for the glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. Rugged terrain both in life and in the treacherous environment that surrounds both the body and the soul.
Gary and Irene seem to gravitate toward the light of a star that may not be their own. Gary continuously fights against the demons within that have tagged alongside him for all of his adult life. He casts his fate like coins thrown randomly in a fountain.....no plans, no preparations, no seeking advice nor taking it. Shaking his fist and constantly looking over his shoulder at the past is his selected brew.
Irene shores Gary up like a rainslicker in a windstorm. Sadly, she finds that you can't always fight against the elements on a grand scale. Debilitating headaches leave her in a volatile state. Gary's headstrong insistence of building a log cabin on Caribou Island inflames her inner being. Her feelings of abandonment from childhood are suffocating her. And so she continues to trudge through the motions.
Rhoda and Mark, their children, struggle to find their own sense of fulfillment. Rhoda finds herself running down a corridor shaped and created by someone else......a very questionable pursuit to live in someone else's lane.
David Vann creates characters that are real, wounded, desperate, and left out in the open. He uses no quotation marks in his dialogue. Their words just pour out gushing and frigid like the icy waters of an Alaskan waterfall. No filters here. No filters necessary.
And you will meet a few other individuals added to the mix who thrust the storyline into high gear. I had to screech out loud a few times while experiencing their purposeful actions. Whatever you put out into the universe somehow finds its way back. And who pays that costly price?
Please note: This incredible novel forms a nest of heavy subject matter. It is certainly not for the light hearted. But the writing is top-notch and seeps into the nooks and crannies of its characters like no other. Bold, unrelenting, and served with a very intense chill. Kudos to you, David Vann.
Brutally raw.....and that's not just an adequate descriptive for the glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula. Rugged terrain both in life and in the treacherous environment that surrounds both the body and the soul.
Gary and Irene seem to gravitate toward the light of a star that may not be their own. Gary continuously fights against the demons within that have tagged alongside him for all of his adult life. He casts his fate like coins thrown randomly in a fountain.....no plans, no preparations, no seeking advice nor taking it. Shaking his fist and constantly looking over his shoulder at the past is his selected brew.
Irene shores Gary up like a rainslicker in a windstorm. Sadly, she finds that you can't always fight against the elements on a grand scale. Debilitating headaches leave her in a volatile state. Gary's headstrong insistence of building a log cabin on Caribou Island inflames her inner being. Her feelings of abandonment from childhood are suffocating her. And so she continues to trudge through the motions.
Rhoda and Mark, their children, struggle to find their own sense of fulfillment. Rhoda finds herself running down a corridor shaped and created by someone else......a very questionable pursuit to live in someone else's lane.
David Vann creates characters that are real, wounded, desperate, and left out in the open. He uses no quotation marks in his dialogue. Their words just pour out gushing and frigid like the icy waters of an Alaskan waterfall. No filters here. No filters necessary.
And you will meet a few other individuals added to the mix who thrust the storyline into high gear. I had to screech out loud a few times while experiencing their purposeful actions. Whatever you put out into the universe somehow finds its way back. And who pays that costly price?
Please note: This incredible novel forms a nest of heavy subject matter. It is certainly not for the light hearted. But the writing is top-notch and seeps into the nooks and crannies of its characters like no other. Bold, unrelenting, and served with a very intense chill. Kudos to you, David Vann.
December 4, 2023
On the surface of it Caribou Island by David Vann is a simple story. An older married couple, Irene, and Gary, not entirely happy. They have two adult children, Mark – great name, but a total tosser and Rhonda a lovely woman who is waiting for a marriage proposal from a dentist called Jim who is more interested in other women and himself.
In fact, the blokes in this story don’t fair to well on my newly acquired ‘Dickheadometer©’
Gary: 8.5 Dickheadometers/kg (SI Units DM/kg)
Jim: 9.9 DM/kg
Mark: 8.0 DM/kg
They all live in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, and Gary (the dad) feels the need to build a log cabin on Caribou Island, across the bay from where they live – in a wild and woolly part of the state. Wouldn’t it be great to go there? Anyway, Gary’s two most endearing qualities are his impatience and his dismissiveness of his wife Irene. This log cabin is something Irene feels she needs to support him doing – another undoubtably failed project, but she seems to want to make him happy. So poor Irene (oh…..she’s sick by the way, a chronic headache, some undiagnosable condition) is required to help load logs onto the small boat and cross the water to Caribou and help Gary make this wretched cabin, and stay in it over winter! The project isn’t without problems.
A log cabin on Caribou Island. I think Gary’s cabin makes this one look like The Savoy
Poor Rhonda, who seems to be the family carer – is beside herself with anxiety, worrying about her parents as Gary (her dad) decided to start this project as winter is about to start (great planning), and she knows her mum isn’t well. Rhonda is also waiting for Jim to propose – he also seems to be obsessed with projects (for example, trying to get into shape – so he can have a fruitful sex-life for the next 10 years, until he’s 50). Are us men – obsessed with projects? Anyway – these two are.
Mark, the son – is a dope head, smokes weed lives with a girl called Karen and he has no interest in the health and welfare of his parents, despite living next door. The only person happy in Mark’s life is Mark.
There is one other significant character in this story – a beautiful young woman, and she is beautiful – called Monique. That’s all I’ll say about Monique.
Vann distils human emotion, in particular, the emotions between family members perfectly. He does this so economically – almost like he’s describing them over a beer. He nails it. The characters were real from the first time they were introduced to me, they were so very real. I was hooked, as the book progressed it just got better. The ending will be so memorable for this reader. To be sure.
PLEASE READ THIS!!!! David Vann is a star.
5 Stars
In fact, the blokes in this story don’t fair to well on my newly acquired ‘Dickheadometer©’
Gary: 8.5 Dickheadometers/kg (SI Units DM/kg)
Jim: 9.9 DM/kg
Mark: 8.0 DM/kg
They all live in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, and Gary (the dad) feels the need to build a log cabin on Caribou Island, across the bay from where they live – in a wild and woolly part of the state. Wouldn’t it be great to go there? Anyway, Gary’s two most endearing qualities are his impatience and his dismissiveness of his wife Irene. This log cabin is something Irene feels she needs to support him doing – another undoubtably failed project, but she seems to want to make him happy. So poor Irene (oh…..she’s sick by the way, a chronic headache, some undiagnosable condition) is required to help load logs onto the small boat and cross the water to Caribou and help Gary make this wretched cabin, and stay in it over winter! The project isn’t without problems.
A log cabin on Caribou Island. I think Gary’s cabin makes this one look like The Savoy
Poor Rhonda, who seems to be the family carer – is beside herself with anxiety, worrying about her parents as Gary (her dad) decided to start this project as winter is about to start (great planning), and she knows her mum isn’t well. Rhonda is also waiting for Jim to propose – he also seems to be obsessed with projects (for example, trying to get into shape – so he can have a fruitful sex-life for the next 10 years, until he’s 50). Are us men – obsessed with projects? Anyway – these two are.
Mark, the son – is a dope head, smokes weed lives with a girl called Karen and he has no interest in the health and welfare of his parents, despite living next door. The only person happy in Mark’s life is Mark.
There is one other significant character in this story – a beautiful young woman, and she is beautiful – called Monique. That’s all I’ll say about Monique.
Vann distils human emotion, in particular, the emotions between family members perfectly. He does this so economically – almost like he’s describing them over a beer. He nails it. The characters were real from the first time they were introduced to me, they were so very real. I was hooked, as the book progressed it just got better. The ending will be so memorable for this reader. To be sure.
PLEASE READ THIS!!!! David Vann is a star.
5 Stars
June 26, 2023
Caribou Island is the definition of a compulsive reading experience for me. I picked this up after labouring through a short story collection I kept wishing I was enjoying more... only to be completely hooked by this, after the first couple pages. Finishing it, breathlessly, in less than a day.
It's Alaska, it's a 30 year marriage on the most jagged of rocks, it's dark and brutal and goes allllll the way.
David Vann, oh my lord, he's the stuff. He's so fucking good, Goodreads. Here's a question: Why aren't more of you reading him? Why are you wasting your lives with Colleen Hoover and the like, when there is someone like Vann so mightily wielding his pen?
Next question: Why on EARTH, American Publishing Industry, didn't one house pick up his latest book? French publishers seem to know what's worth printing. It's maddening, and sad, and scary, that it's not the case in North America.
If you're interested in reading something bold and brave, something gorgeous and wild and devastatingly true... this is it.
It's Alaska, it's a 30 year marriage on the most jagged of rocks, it's dark and brutal and goes allllll the way.
David Vann, oh my lord, he's the stuff. He's so fucking good, Goodreads. Here's a question: Why aren't more of you reading him? Why are you wasting your lives with Colleen Hoover and the like, when there is someone like Vann so mightily wielding his pen?
Next question: Why on EARTH, American Publishing Industry, didn't one house pick up his latest book? French publishers seem to know what's worth printing. It's maddening, and sad, and scary, that it's not the case in North America.
If you're interested in reading something bold and brave, something gorgeous and wild and devastatingly true... this is it.
July 29, 2019
4.5★
“What Gary wanted was the imagined village, the return to an idyllic time when he could have a role, a set task, as blacksmith or baker or singer of a people’s stories.”
Gary’s a miserable son-of-a-gun, but he has his up moments, and if I were doing an armchair diagnosis, I’d be inclined toward bi-polar, manic-depressive, or whatever the current terminology is. Irene has stuck with him, this “champion of regret . . . The regret a living thing, a pool inside him.”
They’re in Alaska, building a cabin of odd logs being carted over to Caribou Island in a boat that is in danger of sinking under the weight. Not only that, it’s late summer, far too late to begin such an enterprise, but Irene’s is not to reason why, hers is but to . . you get the idea.
They have lived and raised their now-grown kids on Skilak Lake “the water a pale jade green from glacial runoff”, so you know how numbingly cold it is.
Theirs is one story, another is Rhoda and Jim’s, their daughter and the man she lives with. Rhoda fantasises about marrying him on a beach in Hawaii, while he’s a bored dentist.
Her brother, Mark, works on a fishing boat, and we meet him and partner Karen as they are hosting summer visitors Carl and Monique in their sauna. Naked of course, smoking potent weed, then diving into the icy waters. An Alaskan experience?
Monique is a stunningly gorgeous head-turner from Washington D.C. who leaves a trail of broken hearts everywhere she goes. Carl realises he’s on borrowed time with her, and when she disappears one day, off on her own (ostensibly), Mark invites him out on the fishing boat. It’s a 3:30 am start with no touristy orientation workshop.
“ Get over here! Mark yelled. He was between the reel and the stern, picking the salmon. This didn’t look easy. As the net came up over the edge, he untangled a salmon, until it hung only by its gills, then yanked down hard until it fell out and hit the deck. Salmon all around his feet, silvery and gasping, flopping and sliding in their own froth of slime, blood, and sea water.”
Carl also gets casual work in the cannery, which is another cold, wet, slippery, bloody place to work.
Meanwhile, we watch Gary and Irene’s relationship deteriorate as she develops a splitting headache that gets worse throughout the book. We also follow Rhoda and Jim and see what Monique and the others are up to as they cross paths back and forth. Rhoda is close to Irene, but it’s not what you’d call a close-knit family.
Jim, the dentist, sums up his (hidden) sentiments.
“At the moment, though, Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn’t cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge. These tiny towns in a great expanse, enclaves of despair.”
My husband and I have often called ourselves ‘fringe dwellers’, as we usually choose to live on the edges rather than the centre of urban areas. Still comfortable, mind you. Not like Gary, who will have no water or power or even much of a cabin.
We’ve often found ourselves with distant neighbours who may be peculiar or dangerous or interesting or, indeed, all of these. Some are like Gary, looking for the idyllic village milieu, and some are escaping failure in the Big Smoke and looking for somewhere smaller to make an impact. But some are hiding or outcasts who may have been pensioned off by families.
Many of Vann's characters fall into these loose groups. His own background is dark, and his stories are inclined to be dark, but he sure can write.
The dialogue has no quotation marks, which may annoy some readers, but I can’t recall ever finding it confusing. His characters are frustratingly believable. Frustrating, because you want to shake some sense into them all! For me, that's the strength of his writing. He captures all the nuances of how people rely on each other and fail each other. Grim but real.
“What Gary wanted was the imagined village, the return to an idyllic time when he could have a role, a set task, as blacksmith or baker or singer of a people’s stories.”
Gary’s a miserable son-of-a-gun, but he has his up moments, and if I were doing an armchair diagnosis, I’d be inclined toward bi-polar, manic-depressive, or whatever the current terminology is. Irene has stuck with him, this “champion of regret . . . The regret a living thing, a pool inside him.”
They’re in Alaska, building a cabin of odd logs being carted over to Caribou Island in a boat that is in danger of sinking under the weight. Not only that, it’s late summer, far too late to begin such an enterprise, but Irene’s is not to reason why, hers is but to . . you get the idea.
They have lived and raised their now-grown kids on Skilak Lake “the water a pale jade green from glacial runoff”, so you know how numbingly cold it is.
Theirs is one story, another is Rhoda and Jim’s, their daughter and the man she lives with. Rhoda fantasises about marrying him on a beach in Hawaii, while he’s a bored dentist.
Her brother, Mark, works on a fishing boat, and we meet him and partner Karen as they are hosting summer visitors Carl and Monique in their sauna. Naked of course, smoking potent weed, then diving into the icy waters. An Alaskan experience?
Monique is a stunningly gorgeous head-turner from Washington D.C. who leaves a trail of broken hearts everywhere she goes. Carl realises he’s on borrowed time with her, and when she disappears one day, off on her own (ostensibly), Mark invites him out on the fishing boat. It’s a 3:30 am start with no touristy orientation workshop.
“ Get over here! Mark yelled. He was between the reel and the stern, picking the salmon. This didn’t look easy. As the net came up over the edge, he untangled a salmon, until it hung only by its gills, then yanked down hard until it fell out and hit the deck. Salmon all around his feet, silvery and gasping, flopping and sliding in their own froth of slime, blood, and sea water.”
Carl also gets casual work in the cannery, which is another cold, wet, slippery, bloody place to work.
Meanwhile, we watch Gary and Irene’s relationship deteriorate as she develops a splitting headache that gets worse throughout the book. We also follow Rhoda and Jim and see what Monique and the others are up to as they cross paths back and forth. Rhoda is close to Irene, but it’s not what you’d call a close-knit family.
Jim, the dentist, sums up his (hidden) sentiments.
“At the moment, though, Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn’t cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge. These tiny towns in a great expanse, enclaves of despair.”
My husband and I have often called ourselves ‘fringe dwellers’, as we usually choose to live on the edges rather than the centre of urban areas. Still comfortable, mind you. Not like Gary, who will have no water or power or even much of a cabin.
We’ve often found ourselves with distant neighbours who may be peculiar or dangerous or interesting or, indeed, all of these. Some are like Gary, looking for the idyllic village milieu, and some are escaping failure in the Big Smoke and looking for somewhere smaller to make an impact. But some are hiding or outcasts who may have been pensioned off by families.
Many of Vann's characters fall into these loose groups. His own background is dark, and his stories are inclined to be dark, but he sure can write.
The dialogue has no quotation marks, which may annoy some readers, but I can’t recall ever finding it confusing. His characters are frustratingly believable. Frustrating, because you want to shake some sense into them all! For me, that's the strength of his writing. He captures all the nuances of how people rely on each other and fail each other. Grim but real.
March 14, 2021
The Alaskan wilderness, cold and beautiful in its isolation. A long-married couple, the hopes and dreams of their youth in tatters. Silently judging, blaming, picking each other to pieces. As a last ditch effort to salvage their marriage, they are building a log cabin on the remote Caribou Island. Destined for failure, or a balm to soothe their ragged souls? The bitter taste of regret is front and center. The feeling of being unable to fit into one's own life, the itch to escape to a better one. The fear of being left behind. A life that deserves more. Dangerously dark and excellent.
March 11, 2017
Dark-ity, dark-dark, dark! The beautiful Alaskan wilderness was as much a part of this story as its characters - a couple in their mid-50s setting about building (and arguing over) a tiny cabin and about their adult children. These people were drawn with outstanding depth and tone, and that is true for even sideline characters - the four friends and lovers who meander in and out of the tale.
Aside from Rhoda, the gentle hearted daughter, and a sweet side character named Carl, we see shards of the rotten and the kind in practically every person detailed here. This makes the dark story extremely believable, and engages the reader tightly. The black moods that percolate through from time to time are relieved by the 20-something goofiness of the adult son, Mark, and his entourage.
I've read three of Vann's novels so far, and this one is by far the most realistic and with characters that were easy to relate to. Aquarium featured characters that bordered on cartoonish in my opinion. Goat Mountain drug out meandering existentialism over and over. He is an incredibly talented, if sober writer, but for me this particular story was his Goldilocks' choice: just right.
Caribou Island was a difficult book to put down. If you cannot handle the dark or cold, stay away - but if that can entrance you for 300 some pages, read it. 5 stars
Aside from Rhoda, the gentle hearted daughter, and a sweet side character named Carl, we see shards of the rotten and the kind in practically every person detailed here. This makes the dark story extremely believable, and engages the reader tightly. The black moods that percolate through from time to time are relieved by the 20-something goofiness of the adult son, Mark, and his entourage.
I've read three of Vann's novels so far, and this one is by far the most realistic and with characters that were easy to relate to. Aquarium featured characters that bordered on cartoonish in my opinion. Goat Mountain drug out meandering existentialism over and over. He is an incredibly talented, if sober writer, but for me this particular story was his Goldilocks' choice: just right.
Caribou Island was a difficult book to put down. If you cannot handle the dark or cold, stay away - but if that can entrance you for 300 some pages, read it. 5 stars
March 23, 2015
I couldn’t put this book down. Even the moments when I wanted to throw it against the wall, Caribou Island stuck to my hands, the force of its narrative glue stronger than my desire to be rid of its woe and rage.
The backdrop is the great and terrible beauty of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, where Nature’s threat looms in every scene. The opening pages show Irene and Gary, a couple in their mid-fifties, standing apart as their thirty-year marriage unravels between them while they battle a storm from their small boat. They are transporting logs to the remote island of the book’s title to build Gary’s mid-life crisis: a cabin, where they will live out their retirement, with "No foundation, even. And no plans, no experience, no permits, no advice welcome." That journey, the storm, and its consequences, set the tone for the story that follows, which is fraught with frustration, misunderstanding, disappointment, deception, and pain.
Each chapter alternates between characters’ points-of-view. We come to know Rhoda, Gary and Irene’s loving daughter, who like her father, is counting on a fantasy to save her from her own sad existence in this wet, dark town. Rhoda lives with Jim, a dentist—one of the few solvent bachelors in town—in his shelter magazine-ready home. Rhoda pines for the security of marriage and plans their storybook wedding on a Hawaiian beach, while trying to convince herself that Jim loves her. Meanwhile, Jim is living out his sexual fantasies with lithe and blithe Monique, who is drifting through town on a trust fund. Mark, Rhoda’s brother, runs a coffee shop out of a bus and fishes—the only time he really seems to come out of his pot haze to show a passion for work.
Mark is in fact living the authentic Alaskan experience his dad had come in search of thirty years earlier, when he abandoned a PhD in medieval studies to create his own poetic epic. Instead, Gary sank into mediocrity, until he can barely remember the ancient languages that once inspired his dreams.
David Vann’s writing is extraordinary. Like the natural world he presents, it is both gorgeous and haunting, and like Monique walking across the glacier, you are awed by its beauty, but aware that the next step could see you crashing through the ice into a nightmare.
Ultimately, however, the absurdity of the story’s central thread—that goddamned cabin on that godforsaken island—thwarts the impact of the themes. Vann is incredibly compassionate with Irene and I understand the push-pull of her love and hate for Gary and Gary’s crushing disappointment in life, but their behavior was so illogical that I felt forced to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story. Had they just arrived from their native California with dreams of an Alaskan cabin, perhaps, but they had already lived in this remote place, had dealt with the realities of this harsh environment, for thirty years. It just doesn’t make any sense that Gary would be so helplessly inept at basic survival or basic construction skills. And fine, even if he’d taken leave of his senses—which he hadn’t, he was just stubborn—Irene's figurative bashing of her head, when she is already in literal excruciating pain, by attempting to help Gary feels forced and inauthentic. With or without her crippling pain, Irene’s denial of her warm, safe home, her stocked pantry and electricity and toilet and bed has no logic.
But I couldn’t stop reading. I knew where we were all going and that it would all end badly, but the power of the whole that resulted from the parts: the depth of the characters, the brutal and vivid environment, Vann’s rich lyricism, and yes, the story itself, made for an intoxicating, anguishing read.
The backdrop is the great and terrible beauty of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, where Nature’s threat looms in every scene. The opening pages show Irene and Gary, a couple in their mid-fifties, standing apart as their thirty-year marriage unravels between them while they battle a storm from their small boat. They are transporting logs to the remote island of the book’s title to build Gary’s mid-life crisis: a cabin, where they will live out their retirement, with "No foundation, even. And no plans, no experience, no permits, no advice welcome." That journey, the storm, and its consequences, set the tone for the story that follows, which is fraught with frustration, misunderstanding, disappointment, deception, and pain.
Each chapter alternates between characters’ points-of-view. We come to know Rhoda, Gary and Irene’s loving daughter, who like her father, is counting on a fantasy to save her from her own sad existence in this wet, dark town. Rhoda lives with Jim, a dentist—one of the few solvent bachelors in town—in his shelter magazine-ready home. Rhoda pines for the security of marriage and plans their storybook wedding on a Hawaiian beach, while trying to convince herself that Jim loves her. Meanwhile, Jim is living out his sexual fantasies with lithe and blithe Monique, who is drifting through town on a trust fund. Mark, Rhoda’s brother, runs a coffee shop out of a bus and fishes—the only time he really seems to come out of his pot haze to show a passion for work.
Mark is in fact living the authentic Alaskan experience his dad had come in search of thirty years earlier, when he abandoned a PhD in medieval studies to create his own poetic epic. Instead, Gary sank into mediocrity, until he can barely remember the ancient languages that once inspired his dreams.
David Vann’s writing is extraordinary. Like the natural world he presents, it is both gorgeous and haunting, and like Monique walking across the glacier, you are awed by its beauty, but aware that the next step could see you crashing through the ice into a nightmare.
Ultimately, however, the absurdity of the story’s central thread—that goddamned cabin on that godforsaken island—thwarts the impact of the themes. Vann is incredibly compassionate with Irene and I understand the push-pull of her love and hate for Gary and Gary’s crushing disappointment in life, but their behavior was so illogical that I felt forced to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story. Had they just arrived from their native California with dreams of an Alaskan cabin, perhaps, but they had already lived in this remote place, had dealt with the realities of this harsh environment, for thirty years. It just doesn’t make any sense that Gary would be so helplessly inept at basic survival or basic construction skills. And fine, even if he’d taken leave of his senses—which he hadn’t, he was just stubborn—Irene's figurative bashing of her head, when she is already in literal excruciating pain, by attempting to help Gary feels forced and inauthentic. With or without her crippling pain, Irene’s denial of her warm, safe home, her stocked pantry and electricity and toilet and bed has no logic.
But I couldn’t stop reading. I knew where we were all going and that it would all end badly, but the power of the whole that resulted from the parts: the depth of the characters, the brutal and vivid environment, Vann’s rich lyricism, and yes, the story itself, made for an intoxicating, anguishing read.
September 21, 2016
"Because you can choose who you'll be with, but you can't choose who they'll become."
This is a story of Gary and Irene, not of an island. The island exists physically and figuratively, but this is a story of them. Their love, envy and hatred of one another. His failings and her failure to realize it too quickly.
They've been together for thirty years, both in their middle 50's and retired; they have 2 children, one that loves and one that ignores. The men in the family have always done what they wanted to do, walking out under pressure. The women, tagging along while they live their life through their men, being the doormat of their existence; the welcome sign shining always on the outside, but furious within.
Pain consumes Irene. Pain of an unknown source. The blocked out pain of her Mom's suicide in childhood and wasting her years with a man that she thinks will eventually leave her irradiates through her head, bursting through, having no place to exit.
Failure consumes Gary. Leaving California and heading to Alaska, he regrets passing on a life of his own, without children, without care.
You can feel the angst and you can feel the pain. It's all over the pages, mostly as it closes. I could feel this book more than most others.
The storm broods and only stops with a false sense of hope.
This is a story of Gary and Irene, not of an island. The island exists physically and figuratively, but this is a story of them. Their love, envy and hatred of one another. His failings and her failure to realize it too quickly.
They've been together for thirty years, both in their middle 50's and retired; they have 2 children, one that loves and one that ignores. The men in the family have always done what they wanted to do, walking out under pressure. The women, tagging along while they live their life through their men, being the doormat of their existence; the welcome sign shining always on the outside, but furious within.
Pain consumes Irene. Pain of an unknown source. The blocked out pain of her Mom's suicide in childhood and wasting her years with a man that she thinks will eventually leave her irradiates through her head, bursting through, having no place to exit.
Failure consumes Gary. Leaving California and heading to Alaska, he regrets passing on a life of his own, without children, without care.
You can feel the angst and you can feel the pain. It's all over the pages, mostly as it closes. I could feel this book more than most others.
The storm broods and only stops with a false sense of hope.
February 17, 2017
david vann'ı, semih gümüş'ün "mutlaka okuyun" dediği yazarlarla dolu bir tvit serisinden not etmiştim. yine haklı çıktı. okurken dağılıyorsunuz, bitince daha da dağılıyorsunuz. o doğa anlatımı, alaska'nın beni bile oturduğum yerde nefret ettiren iklimi, hayatı, atmosferi, balıkçılık detayları... nasıl bir ustalık.
tabii ki bu kadar değil, otuz yıllık evli bir çiftin geldiği yer, geçirdikleri değişim ve hep bir tarafın istediklerinin olmasının katlanılmaz yükü. irene için o kadar o kadar üzüldüm ki roman boyunca.
ve okurken hep şunu düşündüm: türk edebiyatında da var böyle kendini bulma hikâyeleri, erkekler tarafından yazılanlar o kadar "erkek" romanlar oluyor ki, insan hakikaten bıkıyor aynı şeyleri okumaktan, erkekler tarafından erkeklerin tutulduğu, kadınların genelde cinsellik sosu ve küfür için kullanıldığı bir sürü çağdaş edebiyat "ürünü" var.
ama david vann mesela, erkek bir yazar olarak hem kadın hem erkek karakterini öyle bir incelikle işliyor ki. kadınların yapıcılığını, içgüdülerini sezdiriyor hep. fon olmaktan çıkarıp karakter derinliği kazandırıyor.
bu kadar kadın romanı- erkek romanı ayrımı yapmak istemezdim ama işte david vann cinsiyetsiz bir yazar olarak var olabiliyorken, bizde niye olmuyor da bu egolar, bilinç altları bir yerlerden fışkırıyor, merak ediyorum.
tabii ki bu kadar değil, otuz yıllık evli bir çiftin geldiği yer, geçirdikleri değişim ve hep bir tarafın istediklerinin olmasının katlanılmaz yükü. irene için o kadar o kadar üzüldüm ki roman boyunca.
ve okurken hep şunu düşündüm: türk edebiyatında da var böyle kendini bulma hikâyeleri, erkekler tarafından yazılanlar o kadar "erkek" romanlar oluyor ki, insan hakikaten bıkıyor aynı şeyleri okumaktan, erkekler tarafından erkeklerin tutulduğu, kadınların genelde cinsellik sosu ve küfür için kullanıldığı bir sürü çağdaş edebiyat "ürünü" var.
ama david vann mesela, erkek bir yazar olarak hem kadın hem erkek karakterini öyle bir incelikle işliyor ki. kadınların yapıcılığını, içgüdülerini sezdiriyor hep. fon olmaktan çıkarıp karakter derinliği kazandırıyor.
bu kadar kadın romanı- erkek romanı ayrımı yapmak istemezdim ama işte david vann cinsiyetsiz bir yazar olarak var olabiliyorken, bizde niye olmuyor da bu egolar, bilinç altları bir yerlerden fışkırıyor, merak ediyorum.
January 13, 2013
Check out my interview with David Vann in August 2012 >>http://more2read.com/review/interview-with-david-vann/
While reading this story i am thinking of the story Revolutionary Road written by Richard Yates a tale of marriage and the destructive behaviors of the human heart displayed in that story. If you have seen the movie it is probably even more engrained in your mind the images of despair and the path the couple found themselves down. The pursuit of happiness its funny how we try to attain happiness. I recently watched Shadowlands a movie with Anthony Hopkins playing the role of the great writer C. S. Lewis taken from his real life account. He unexpectedly experiences love in the very last stages of the two and fro of a friendship he did not understand love before only until certain situations came about did he understand his path. That movie gave an example of a person caught in the pursuit of goals of splendor in academic and religious constrains away from more palpable feelings and rewards of love and companionship.
In this story, Caribou Island, the characters are faced with many obstacles and challenges of trust, lust or illness. The accommodation of the characters of this story on a beautiful and wonderfully described Alaskan island Caribou island brings about a chance and opportunity to test the waters of these characters' trust and love. They eventually experience a wake up call of sorts.
Illness and despair, when the clock is ticking and that sand in the hour glass runs on its last bead of sand we have a whole different outlook towards those around us.
Calamities can bring about change for the betterment of the parties involved.
In this story there a people who are either in love, want love, think they have love and possibly trust the untrustworthy.
It's seems the fate of one parent and the legacy she left behind has tainted the family and has cast upon them melancholy and a dark over hanging shadow like a black cloud that follows your footprints determined to pour on you cold rains that somehow magically wash away traits of hope.
This Alaskan environment proves to be a form of paralysis to some individuals and brings to fruition love and despair and is all acted out in this story of tragedy.
David Vann has successfully brought to the table a captivating, deep felt, meaningful human tragedy in a prose with wonderful descriptions of landscape coupled with memorable and heartfelt characters.
Review also at http://more2read.com/review/caribou-island-by-david-vann/
While reading this story i am thinking of the story Revolutionary Road written by Richard Yates a tale of marriage and the destructive behaviors of the human heart displayed in that story. If you have seen the movie it is probably even more engrained in your mind the images of despair and the path the couple found themselves down. The pursuit of happiness its funny how we try to attain happiness. I recently watched Shadowlands a movie with Anthony Hopkins playing the role of the great writer C. S. Lewis taken from his real life account. He unexpectedly experiences love in the very last stages of the two and fro of a friendship he did not understand love before only until certain situations came about did he understand his path. That movie gave an example of a person caught in the pursuit of goals of splendor in academic and religious constrains away from more palpable feelings and rewards of love and companionship.
In this story, Caribou Island, the characters are faced with many obstacles and challenges of trust, lust or illness. The accommodation of the characters of this story on a beautiful and wonderfully described Alaskan island Caribou island brings about a chance and opportunity to test the waters of these characters' trust and love. They eventually experience a wake up call of sorts.
Illness and despair, when the clock is ticking and that sand in the hour glass runs on its last bead of sand we have a whole different outlook towards those around us.
Calamities can bring about change for the betterment of the parties involved.
In this story there a people who are either in love, want love, think they have love and possibly trust the untrustworthy.
It's seems the fate of one parent and the legacy she left behind has tainted the family and has cast upon them melancholy and a dark over hanging shadow like a black cloud that follows your footprints determined to pour on you cold rains that somehow magically wash away traits of hope.
This Alaskan environment proves to be a form of paralysis to some individuals and brings to fruition love and despair and is all acted out in this story of tragedy.
David Vann has successfully brought to the table a captivating, deep felt, meaningful human tragedy in a prose with wonderful descriptions of landscape coupled with memorable and heartfelt characters.
“My mother was not real. She was an early dream, a hope. She was a place. Snowy, like here, and cold. A wooden house on a hill above a river. An overcast day, the old white paint of the buildings made brighter somehow by the trapped light, and I was coming home from school. Ten years old, walking by myself, walking through dirty patches of snow in the yard, walking up to the narrow porch. I can’t remember how my thoughts went then, can’t remember who I was or what I felt like. All of that is gone, erased.”
“Above all else, Gary was an impatient man: impatient with the larger shape of his life, with who he was and what he’d done and become, impatient with his wife and children, and then, of course, impatient with all the little things, any action not done correctly, any moment of weather that was uncooperative. A general and abiding impatience she had lived in for over thirty years, an element she had breathed.”
“Gary was a champion at regret. Every day there was something, and this was perhaps what Irene liked least. Their entire lives second-guessed. The regret a living thing, a pool inside him.”
“To Monique, the best part about this place was the scenery: the high, lush mountains close along either side of the river, the short valleys dotted with wildflowers, the swampy areas dense with skunk cabbage, ferns, mosquitoes, and moose.”
“A world that shouldn’t exist, far away and untouchable. You could bring a crab up, but you couldn’t go down to them, couldn’t join. And this was the truth about Monique. He could have her for a short time, and his money could make it seem almost that he could fit into her world, but she was untouchable.”
“He didn’t understand marriage. The gradual denial of all one desired, the early death of self and possibility. The closing of a life prematurely. But this wasn’t true, he knew. It was only the way it seemed right now, during a bad time. Once Irene got better and returned to her old self, he’d feel differently.”
“The lives of plants like humans, full of struggle and domination, loss and dreams that never happened or happened only briefly. And that was the worst, to have something and then not have it, that was certainly the worst by far.”
Review also at http://more2read.com/review/caribou-island-by-david-vann/
April 30, 2013
David Vann uses no quotation marks throughout this bleak depressing read. Is his refusal to use quotation marks supposed to be some new "Style" of writing, like texting? Why not just throw out all punctuation? We could all write in one long rambling paragraph. Eventually we could even leave out the spacing between words. I HATE what is being done to literature by those too lazy, or too unlearned, to write properly.
Vann's imagination is just so bleak, so depressing, he should see a doctor. He obviously thinks everyone feels this way. What a revelation it would be for him to get on medication, discover there are things to like and love about life. I certainly can believe he wrote Legend of a Suicide, because this book sounds like he is suicidal. The only reason I finished reading it was because I kept hoping there would be some meaning, or some revelation for these characters.
What a waste of my time reading this was. It's been a very long time since I waded through anything so useless, with no redeeming value. But, I feel better having said so. Read at your own peril.
Vann's imagination is just so bleak, so depressing, he should see a doctor. He obviously thinks everyone feels this way. What a revelation it would be for him to get on medication, discover there are things to like and love about life. I certainly can believe he wrote Legend of a Suicide, because this book sounds like he is suicidal. The only reason I finished reading it was because I kept hoping there would be some meaning, or some revelation for these characters.
What a waste of my time reading this was. It's been a very long time since I waded through anything so useless, with no redeeming value. But, I feel better having said so. Read at your own peril.
February 9, 2021
What a great book! Incredible story, truly interesting characters, and... that... ending.
This was my second David Vann novel and, although I haven't read A LOT of American authors, he's absolutely one of the best I've read. He's so good at creating dysfunctional families, and I don't mean your run-of-the-mill dysfunction. This guy creates dysfunction that'll make your own family seem like The Brady Bunch!
What I admire about Vann is that he doesn't wrap everything up with a nice bow for his readers. He leaves loose ends for you to ponder, and I like that.
This was my second David Vann novel and, although I haven't read A LOT of American authors, he's absolutely one of the best I've read. He's so good at creating dysfunctional families, and I don't mean your run-of-the-mill dysfunction. This guy creates dysfunction that'll make your own family seem like The Brady Bunch!
What I admire about Vann is that he doesn't wrap everything up with a nice bow for his readers. He leaves loose ends for you to ponder, and I like that.
September 19, 2016
5 Estrelas Glaciares
Caribou Island - Alaska
O escritor norte-americano David Vann, nascido em 1996 em Adak Island, no Alasca, publicou em 2011 ”A Ilha de Caribou”, três anos após o “perturbante” ”A Ilha de Sukkwan” - 4 Estrelas.
Irene, é uma educadora de infância, recentemente reformada e Gary, é um docente universitário a trabalhar “eternamente” na sua tese de doutoramento, casados há mais de trinta anos, têm dois filhos; Rhoda, com cerca de trinta anos, assistente num consultório veterinário, vivendo maritalmente com Jim, um dentista de quarenta e um anos, financeiramente independente e Mark, um jovem pescador de salmão, que vive numa casa com condições precárias, numa área florestal, nos limites da marginalidade social com a sua namorada Karen.
Gary decide construir uma pequena cabana de madeira na Ilha de Caribou, uma pequena ilha, situada no Lago Skilak, na península de Kenai, no Alasca, numa área desabitada, delimitada pela floresta de abetos e bétulas, e pelas águas do lago, num pequeno terreno apenas acessível por um pequeno barco a motor, que transporta os toros e os materiais em condições precárias, acentuadas pelas condições climatéricas adversas, num período do ano “tardio” e sem nenhum plano detalhado.
David Vann “localiza” as suas personagens na paisagem agreste e deslumbrante do Alasca, onde o relacionamento conturbado de Gary e Irene, é dominado pela impaciência e pela decadência emocional, acentuando um casamento em crise, dominado pela angústia, pelo arrependimento e pelas dores – física e mental – onde as acusações e a amargura estão sempre presentes. Gary está e sempre esteve eternamente insatisfeito com o seu casamento; Irene procura a salvação desesperada dessa união, pelo seu próprio passado trágico e pelo seu futuro, incerto e doloroso, num cenário angustiante, que acaba por funcionar como um espelho das inquietudes e das fragilidades humanas, onde a proximidade física mais não faz do que acentuar a separação emocional, revelando os ressentimentos, que não se conseguem esquecer…
”A Ilha de Caribou” é um livro perturbador, inesquecível e doloroso, dominado pelo ambiente da Ilha de Caribou e pelas personagens, o seu sofrimento e o seu isolamento emocional, numa escrita sombria e estética, com um suspense verdadeiramente aterrador.
David Vann (n. 1966)
Ilustração de Chi Birmingham (The New York Times)
Caribou Island - Alaska
O escritor norte-americano David Vann, nascido em 1996 em Adak Island, no Alasca, publicou em 2011 ”A Ilha de Caribou”, três anos após o “perturbante” ”A Ilha de Sukkwan” - 4 Estrelas.
Irene, é uma educadora de infância, recentemente reformada e Gary, é um docente universitário a trabalhar “eternamente” na sua tese de doutoramento, casados há mais de trinta anos, têm dois filhos; Rhoda, com cerca de trinta anos, assistente num consultório veterinário, vivendo maritalmente com Jim, um dentista de quarenta e um anos, financeiramente independente e Mark, um jovem pescador de salmão, que vive numa casa com condições precárias, numa área florestal, nos limites da marginalidade social com a sua namorada Karen.
Gary decide construir uma pequena cabana de madeira na Ilha de Caribou, uma pequena ilha, situada no Lago Skilak, na península de Kenai, no Alasca, numa área desabitada, delimitada pela floresta de abetos e bétulas, e pelas águas do lago, num pequeno terreno apenas acessível por um pequeno barco a motor, que transporta os toros e os materiais em condições precárias, acentuadas pelas condições climatéricas adversas, num período do ano “tardio” e sem nenhum plano detalhado.
David Vann “localiza” as suas personagens na paisagem agreste e deslumbrante do Alasca, onde o relacionamento conturbado de Gary e Irene, é dominado pela impaciência e pela decadência emocional, acentuando um casamento em crise, dominado pela angústia, pelo arrependimento e pelas dores – física e mental – onde as acusações e a amargura estão sempre presentes. Gary está e sempre esteve eternamente insatisfeito com o seu casamento; Irene procura a salvação desesperada dessa união, pelo seu próprio passado trágico e pelo seu futuro, incerto e doloroso, num cenário angustiante, que acaba por funcionar como um espelho das inquietudes e das fragilidades humanas, onde a proximidade física mais não faz do que acentuar a separação emocional, revelando os ressentimentos, que não se conseguem esquecer…
”A Ilha de Caribou” é um livro perturbador, inesquecível e doloroso, dominado pelo ambiente da Ilha de Caribou e pelas personagens, o seu sofrimento e o seu isolamento emocional, numa escrita sombria e estética, com um suspense verdadeiramente aterrador.
David Vann (n. 1966)
Ilustração de Chi Birmingham (The New York Times)
December 5, 2010
Not long ago, I was mesmerized by David Vann’s exceptional and perceptive collection, Legend of a Suicide – a mythology of his father’s death. I wondered whether his first full-length novel would capture the magic and raw energy of that astonishing book.
The answer, I’m pleased to say, is yes.
Beware: Caribou Island is NOT for readers who are looking for “likeable characters” and Hollywood-type endings. It ventures into dark emotional territory that’s not always comfortable to reside in – the same type of territory that’s inhabited by, say, Martha and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff. In other words, it packs a wallop.
Gary and Irene are a couple who have lived for years in Alaska, “an open space, an opportunity to forget about something as small as heartache.” There’s a juxtaposition of Alaska as a grand and vast space with the downright claustrophobia of a marriage falling apart. Irene reluctantly “signs on” to Gary’s desire to build a cabin from the ground up in uninhabited and remote Caribou Island.
The cabin becomes a metaphor for their lives. Irene thinks, “Maybe you can nail each layer down into the next…if the could take all their previous selves and nail them together, get who they were five years ago and twenty-five years to fit closer together, maybe they’d have a sense of something solid.”
But that is not to be. Instead, Irene views herself as “chilled and alone…not the expansive vision you’d be tempted to have, spreading your arms on some sunny day on an open slope of purple lupine, looking at mountains all around.” Irene, if truth be known, is falling apart; she is having extreme flashbacks to the time when she found her mother, a suicide. And Gary is totally lost, searching for himself in the infinity of Alaska.
Gary reflects, “You could only find an outward shape…if you followed your calling. If you took the wrong path, all you could shape was monstrosity.” And indeed, it’s evident from the beginning that the cabin is, indeed, that monstrosity.
The legacy of mother to daughter – and daughter to her own children – plays out throughout this book. Rhoda, their daughter, is trying her best to reconcile her dreams of love with a man who is poised to disappoint her. And Mark, their son, has dropped out entirely, living month-to-month and unable to commit to much of anything.
For the sense of place…for the imagery and prose…for the fierceness of Vann’s imagination, this is a book that is stunning to read. Even though his characters will never fulfill their promise, David Vann has certainly fulfilled his.
The answer, I’m pleased to say, is yes.
Beware: Caribou Island is NOT for readers who are looking for “likeable characters” and Hollywood-type endings. It ventures into dark emotional territory that’s not always comfortable to reside in – the same type of territory that’s inhabited by, say, Martha and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff. In other words, it packs a wallop.
Gary and Irene are a couple who have lived for years in Alaska, “an open space, an opportunity to forget about something as small as heartache.” There’s a juxtaposition of Alaska as a grand and vast space with the downright claustrophobia of a marriage falling apart. Irene reluctantly “signs on” to Gary’s desire to build a cabin from the ground up in uninhabited and remote Caribou Island.
The cabin becomes a metaphor for their lives. Irene thinks, “Maybe you can nail each layer down into the next…if the could take all their previous selves and nail them together, get who they were five years ago and twenty-five years to fit closer together, maybe they’d have a sense of something solid.”
But that is not to be. Instead, Irene views herself as “chilled and alone…not the expansive vision you’d be tempted to have, spreading your arms on some sunny day on an open slope of purple lupine, looking at mountains all around.” Irene, if truth be known, is falling apart; she is having extreme flashbacks to the time when she found her mother, a suicide. And Gary is totally lost, searching for himself in the infinity of Alaska.
Gary reflects, “You could only find an outward shape…if you followed your calling. If you took the wrong path, all you could shape was monstrosity.” And indeed, it’s evident from the beginning that the cabin is, indeed, that monstrosity.
The legacy of mother to daughter – and daughter to her own children – plays out throughout this book. Rhoda, their daughter, is trying her best to reconcile her dreams of love with a man who is poised to disappoint her. And Mark, their son, has dropped out entirely, living month-to-month and unable to commit to much of anything.
For the sense of place…for the imagery and prose…for the fierceness of Vann’s imagination, this is a book that is stunning to read. Even though his characters will never fulfill their promise, David Vann has certainly fulfilled his.
August 14, 2016
(Mel Bochner - Amazing, 2014)
November 26, 2013
Approach David Vann's first novel the way you would a fresh grave - with a mixture of fascination and fear. "Caribou Island" follows the author's story collection "Legend of a Suicide," inspired by his father's violent death. Clearly that tragedy still haunts Vann - how could it not? - but now he's written a novel that breaks out of the autobiographical boundaries of his own grief and exposes our friable ties to those we love.
Of course, there's no shortage of dreary tales, but Vann isn't writing in that popular school of static despair. Despite the crushing sorrow of "Caribou Island," it progresses with tremendous momentum. Inspired by the experience of his stepmother's parents, this story of a family in southern Alaska comes to us in a series of vibrant moments as bracing, invigorating and finally as deadly as the icy water that surrounds these characters.
When the novel opens, unhappily married Irene and Gary are setting off on a Henry David Thoreau adventure, but they are light-years from the inspiration found at Walden Pond. Gary has always wanted to build and live in a small cabin on Caribou Island in Skilak Lake south of Anchorage, and now that his wife has finally retired from teaching, she's out of excuses. Except that she doesn't want to live in the howling wilderness in an unheated shack built by a man with "no plans, no experience, no permits."
What Gary thinks of as a search for authenticity, Irene sees as "an expression of despair . . . a sign that Gary hadn't found a way to fit into his real life." With a rising sense of panic, she senses that he plans to discard her - or work her to death. His tiny 16-by-12 cabin is a fitting expression of the cramped dimensions of their life together. And so, through the course of the novel, they haul and saw and hammer, ripping into each other with accusations and resentments stored up over 30 years, both of them baffled by the ruin of their marriage. That they love each other makes their irritation all the more painful as they labor on, often soaking wet, frequently in the dark, in subzero temperatures.
This story of a mismatched couple lost on the tundra of retirement would be almost too much to bear if it weren't warmed a bit by the antics of their adult children. They're doing a poor job of hammering out their own relationships on the mainland. The novel focuses particularly on 30-year-old Rhoda, who senses that something horrible is happening to her parents on Caribou Island. But she's distracted by her plans to marry a schmuck named Jim, who's preparing for their marriage with plans to bed as many people as possible. There are some genuinely funny scenes here involving this pathetic creep as he cheats on Rhoda with a woman half his age - fiancee and mistress showing up together for dinner, a game of Twister that leaves Jim lusting away even as he panics about the threat of exposure. It's another indication of Vann's daring and skill that he can integrate this sex comedy into such a tragic story in a way that stretches the novel's emotional range without shattering its poignancy.
Men don't come off well in these pages, a reflection, I'm tempted to speculate, on the author's experience with his own father, who shot himself while speaking to Vann's mother on the phone. "Caribou Island" presents a world of irritable, depressive, even stupid men who lament their limited options, poisoning everyone around them with bile.
Alaska, too, gets stripped of its romance, despite Vann's ability to portray the water and the wilderness in all their lush beauty. "No one stayed unless they were stuck," Rhoda muses bitterly, and that judgment gets repeated in a variety of convincing ways. We see Irene "slumping down in raingear, hiding, making herself as small as possible, fending off mosquitoes that somehow managed to fly despite the wind. Feeling chilled and alone. Not the expansive vision you'd be tempted to have, spreading your arms on some sunny day on an open slope of purple lupine, looking at mountains all around." The reality, as etched here by these jaundiced citizens of the 49th state, is one of economic stagnation, loneliness and grinding physical labor.
Vann, who was born in Alaska, handles conflicted feelings of love and resentment, and the raw, existential cries of ordinary people, extraordinarily well. And although he's a graceful writer, he never spins the kind of poetic prose that infects too many literary novels with distracting prettiness. But is the ending too much, too Gothic, too masochistic in its determination to make these hapless characters pay for surviving, for imagining that hope isn't a cheat? As the final pages rise into the piercing registry of Cormac McCarthy - or Euripides - some readers may spot Vann's thumb on the scale, making sure every drop of agony is paid. But just wait: For a few moments after this perfectly choreographed horror, it's impossible to say anything at all.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
Of course, there's no shortage of dreary tales, but Vann isn't writing in that popular school of static despair. Despite the crushing sorrow of "Caribou Island," it progresses with tremendous momentum. Inspired by the experience of his stepmother's parents, this story of a family in southern Alaska comes to us in a series of vibrant moments as bracing, invigorating and finally as deadly as the icy water that surrounds these characters.
When the novel opens, unhappily married Irene and Gary are setting off on a Henry David Thoreau adventure, but they are light-years from the inspiration found at Walden Pond. Gary has always wanted to build and live in a small cabin on Caribou Island in Skilak Lake south of Anchorage, and now that his wife has finally retired from teaching, she's out of excuses. Except that she doesn't want to live in the howling wilderness in an unheated shack built by a man with "no plans, no experience, no permits."
What Gary thinks of as a search for authenticity, Irene sees as "an expression of despair . . . a sign that Gary hadn't found a way to fit into his real life." With a rising sense of panic, she senses that he plans to discard her - or work her to death. His tiny 16-by-12 cabin is a fitting expression of the cramped dimensions of their life together. And so, through the course of the novel, they haul and saw and hammer, ripping into each other with accusations and resentments stored up over 30 years, both of them baffled by the ruin of their marriage. That they love each other makes their irritation all the more painful as they labor on, often soaking wet, frequently in the dark, in subzero temperatures.
This story of a mismatched couple lost on the tundra of retirement would be almost too much to bear if it weren't warmed a bit by the antics of their adult children. They're doing a poor job of hammering out their own relationships on the mainland. The novel focuses particularly on 30-year-old Rhoda, who senses that something horrible is happening to her parents on Caribou Island. But she's distracted by her plans to marry a schmuck named Jim, who's preparing for their marriage with plans to bed as many people as possible. There are some genuinely funny scenes here involving this pathetic creep as he cheats on Rhoda with a woman half his age - fiancee and mistress showing up together for dinner, a game of Twister that leaves Jim lusting away even as he panics about the threat of exposure. It's another indication of Vann's daring and skill that he can integrate this sex comedy into such a tragic story in a way that stretches the novel's emotional range without shattering its poignancy.
Men don't come off well in these pages, a reflection, I'm tempted to speculate, on the author's experience with his own father, who shot himself while speaking to Vann's mother on the phone. "Caribou Island" presents a world of irritable, depressive, even stupid men who lament their limited options, poisoning everyone around them with bile.
Alaska, too, gets stripped of its romance, despite Vann's ability to portray the water and the wilderness in all their lush beauty. "No one stayed unless they were stuck," Rhoda muses bitterly, and that judgment gets repeated in a variety of convincing ways. We see Irene "slumping down in raingear, hiding, making herself as small as possible, fending off mosquitoes that somehow managed to fly despite the wind. Feeling chilled and alone. Not the expansive vision you'd be tempted to have, spreading your arms on some sunny day on an open slope of purple lupine, looking at mountains all around." The reality, as etched here by these jaundiced citizens of the 49th state, is one of economic stagnation, loneliness and grinding physical labor.
Vann, who was born in Alaska, handles conflicted feelings of love and resentment, and the raw, existential cries of ordinary people, extraordinarily well. And although he's a graceful writer, he never spins the kind of poetic prose that infects too many literary novels with distracting prettiness. But is the ending too much, too Gothic, too masochistic in its determination to make these hapless characters pay for surviving, for imagining that hope isn't a cheat? As the final pages rise into the piercing registry of Cormac McCarthy - or Euripides - some readers may spot Vann's thumb on the scale, making sure every drop of agony is paid. But just wait: For a few moments after this perfectly choreographed horror, it's impossible to say anything at all.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
February 22, 2011
This is a richly absorbing and dark, domestic drama that combines the natural, icy world of the Alaska frontier with a story of deceptive love and betrayal. If Steinbeck and Hemingway married the best of Anita Shreve, you would get David Vann's Caribou Island. His prose is terse and the characterizations are subtle, but knifing. His characters are saturated with loneliness and disconnection with their lives, with each other, in a pit of misperception, despair and exile, in a conflict of selves that beat each other down. The topography and remoteness of this "exclave" state, a place non-contiguous physically with its legal attachment (of the US) serves as one of many metaphors to the attachments exemplified in this story.
Virginia Woolf, while attempting to write the life story of artist Roger Fry, observed:
"A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand."
Although this is a novel, not a biography, Vann's characters are desperately attempting to grasp, hide and reinvent themselves, trying to fill impossible voids, reconcile the past. The author explores the links between memory and myth, the gray area between real and idea, the notion of identity, and the truth of self-deception. There is stoic Irene, haunted by a childhood of abandonment; her cruel, mulish, and spineless husband, Gary; their (often) oblivious daughter, Rhoda; and Rhoda's puerile and feckless fiancé, Jim. Minor characters (such as their taciturn, alienated son, Mark) move through the novel and accelerate the anxiety and self-destruction of this quartet of refractory souls. They unconsciously use their mates to mirror and shadow what is desired, lost, forgotten, or never was. Vann creates a circle of repetition and insularity in a vast expanse of territory, a terror of the self at its most heinous and human.
"...if they could take all their previous selves and nail them together, get who they were five years ago and twenty-five years ago to fit closer together, maybe they'd have a sense of something solid."
Gary is insisting on building a log cabin in the isolated Caribou Island, pulling Irene into this last-ditch retirement dream, rife with poor planning and ripe with the unspoken threat of finally leaving her. Thirty years ago he brought her to Alaska from Berkeley, another time that he tried to create an idyllic life from an idea, and failed.
"The momentum of who she had become with Gary, the momentum of who she had become in Alaska, the momentum that made it somehow impossible to just stop right now and go back to the house. How had that happened?"
"Gary was a champion at regret...Their entire lives second-guessed. The regret a living thing, a pool inside him."
Thirty-year-old Rhoda is devoted to Jim, (who is a decade older), in an almost frantic state to get married to a man who doesn't really love her, on the precipice of repeating her mother's mistake. Meanwhile, Jim is on a quest to redefine himself, to combine two opposing lifestyles.
Vann does a spectacular job of engaging the reader gradually into this blistered turmoil of dissolution. The climax was compelling, creating a circle, a literary architecture of repetition. However, as penetrating and irresistible as this form was, I do wonder if symmetry eclipsed credibility in the outcome. I cannot go further without giving spoilers.
Despite my vexation with the ending's credibility, I was gripped by the power of this atmospheric story, the characters, the exquisite pacing, and the infinite amount of quotable passages. It took me a long time to remove myself from this moody, nuanced tale.
"In the beginning, Irene thought. There is no such thing as a beginning."
Virginia Woolf, while attempting to write the life story of artist Roger Fry, observed:
"A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand."
Although this is a novel, not a biography, Vann's characters are desperately attempting to grasp, hide and reinvent themselves, trying to fill impossible voids, reconcile the past. The author explores the links between memory and myth, the gray area between real and idea, the notion of identity, and the truth of self-deception. There is stoic Irene, haunted by a childhood of abandonment; her cruel, mulish, and spineless husband, Gary; their (often) oblivious daughter, Rhoda; and Rhoda's puerile and feckless fiancé, Jim. Minor characters (such as their taciturn, alienated son, Mark) move through the novel and accelerate the anxiety and self-destruction of this quartet of refractory souls. They unconsciously use their mates to mirror and shadow what is desired, lost, forgotten, or never was. Vann creates a circle of repetition and insularity in a vast expanse of territory, a terror of the self at its most heinous and human.
"...if they could take all their previous selves and nail them together, get who they were five years ago and twenty-five years ago to fit closer together, maybe they'd have a sense of something solid."
Gary is insisting on building a log cabin in the isolated Caribou Island, pulling Irene into this last-ditch retirement dream, rife with poor planning and ripe with the unspoken threat of finally leaving her. Thirty years ago he brought her to Alaska from Berkeley, another time that he tried to create an idyllic life from an idea, and failed.
"The momentum of who she had become with Gary, the momentum of who she had become in Alaska, the momentum that made it somehow impossible to just stop right now and go back to the house. How had that happened?"
"Gary was a champion at regret...Their entire lives second-guessed. The regret a living thing, a pool inside him."
Thirty-year-old Rhoda is devoted to Jim, (who is a decade older), in an almost frantic state to get married to a man who doesn't really love her, on the precipice of repeating her mother's mistake. Meanwhile, Jim is on a quest to redefine himself, to combine two opposing lifestyles.
Vann does a spectacular job of engaging the reader gradually into this blistered turmoil of dissolution. The climax was compelling, creating a circle, a literary architecture of repetition. However, as penetrating and irresistible as this form was, I do wonder if symmetry eclipsed credibility in the outcome. I cannot go further without giving spoilers.
Despite my vexation with the ending's credibility, I was gripped by the power of this atmospheric story, the characters, the exquisite pacing, and the infinite amount of quotable passages. It took me a long time to remove myself from this moody, nuanced tale.
"In the beginning, Irene thought. There is no such thing as a beginning."
January 26, 2012
Cold. Distant. Bleak. Unhappy. Depressing as fuck.
The characters are largely unlikeable, the relationships are thoroughly dysfunctional, and the style keeps the reader (or at least me) at arm's length throughout. Part of this distance is due to David Vann's Cormac McCarthy-esque refusal to use quotation marks to help mark characters' speech. This doesn't make it difficult to tell who is speaking, but it does diminish the sense of the characters as active participants in the story. Because the text doesn't clearly mark the boundaries between speech, thought, and narration, it all begins to feel like one voice instead of individual's voices, even when the perspective shifts, giving the reader little sense of individual humanity to grasp while reading.
Related to this, the book is incredibly fatalistic. The characters not only lack voice but agency. The overall effect, in fact, is that the characters are all doomed to their fates at the beginning of the book and we as readers must just watch them very, very slowly approach those fates. What's upsetting about this is that these are not people trapped by their external circumstances (e.g., poverty, prejudice, geography); these are people who perceive themselves as trapped by their own choices and because they think they're trapped they behave as if they are trapped and then they - surprise, surprise! - wind up stuck in the traps they have built and maintained for themselves. This just made me want to climb into the book and tell them how stupid they were being.
I don't want to make this seem like it's some kind of terrible book, though. Vann is a beautiful writer, and the book includes some wonderful descriptions of the Alaskan landscape and striking and memorable reflections on marriage, love, consciousness, and what makes a life. Looking at other readers' reviews, many of them very positive, there's obviously something here.
But still - it's just so depressing. I certainly do believe that there's a place for truly bleak and unhappy stories in literature, but this book adds too little to my understanding of the human condition or of the world to justify its unhappiness and is far too cynical in outlook for me to be able to enjoy it.
The characters are largely unlikeable, the relationships are thoroughly dysfunctional, and the style keeps the reader (or at least me) at arm's length throughout. Part of this distance is due to David Vann's Cormac McCarthy-esque refusal to use quotation marks to help mark characters' speech. This doesn't make it difficult to tell who is speaking, but it does diminish the sense of the characters as active participants in the story. Because the text doesn't clearly mark the boundaries between speech, thought, and narration, it all begins to feel like one voice instead of individual's voices, even when the perspective shifts, giving the reader little sense of individual humanity to grasp while reading.
Related to this, the book is incredibly fatalistic. The characters not only lack voice but agency. The overall effect, in fact, is that the characters are all doomed to their fates at the beginning of the book and we as readers must just watch them very, very slowly approach those fates. What's upsetting about this is that these are not people trapped by their external circumstances (e.g., poverty, prejudice, geography); these are people who perceive themselves as trapped by their own choices and because they think they're trapped they behave as if they are trapped and then they - surprise, surprise! - wind up stuck in the traps they have built and maintained for themselves. This just made me want to climb into the book and tell them how stupid they were being.
I don't want to make this seem like it's some kind of terrible book, though. Vann is a beautiful writer, and the book includes some wonderful descriptions of the Alaskan landscape and striking and memorable reflections on marriage, love, consciousness, and what makes a life. Looking at other readers' reviews, many of them very positive, there's obviously something here.
But still - it's just so depressing. I certainly do believe that there's a place for truly bleak and unhappy stories in literature, but this book adds too little to my understanding of the human condition or of the world to justify its unhappiness and is far too cynical in outlook for me to be able to enjoy it.
November 20, 2013
My first encounter with David Vann blew me away. I’d heard his work compared to Cormac McCarthy’s in terms of bleakness, along the lines of: “The Road is a picnic in the park compared to Caribou Island.” Although there are ways in which Vann’s work resembles McCarthy’s (no quotation marks to denote speech, epic-scale tragedies taking place in vast open country), Blood Meridian, for one, is much more violent and nihilistic than Caribou Island.
The novel’s gory final tableau may have reminded me of We Need to Talk about Kevin, but the story I thought of most in comparison with Vann’s was actually Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. Perhaps it was something about the way that, in both books, the characters’ grand dreams cruelly mock the mundaneness or perversity of their real lives. Here Gary’s imagined world is an amalgamation of Icelandic and early English sagas; in building a cabin on Caribou Island he pictures himself as a Viking colonizing a new world, but in reality he’s just a bit of a loner and a failure, trying to run away from a life and marriage that have never lived up to his expectations (“Marriage only another form of being alone”).
Similarly, daughter Rhoda’s vision of a fairytale Hawaiian wedding and glamorous life as the wife of dentist Jim is relentlessly contradicted, first by the facts of Jim’s past and planned future adultery with as many women as he can entrap, and later in the horrific irony of the masterful last chapter. As Rhoda and Mark set out to Caribou Island to check on their parents and deliver them a satellite phone, Rhoda’s thoughts turn to her wedding plans. “Mark tossed handfuls of rock salt onto the ramp. Like rice at a wedding...A green, sunny bluff over blue ocean, far away from here...It would be magnificent...A place carefree, a day she had dreamed of all her life, the beginning, finally.” What Rhoda doesn’t know, although she has had premonitions because of her mother’s strange behavior, is that a gruesome scene awaits them, one that repeats family cycles of violence.
The novel’s language is simple, not overblown, but very powerful nonetheless. One of the very best books of 2011.
The novel’s gory final tableau may have reminded me of We Need to Talk about Kevin, but the story I thought of most in comparison with Vann’s was actually Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. Perhaps it was something about the way that, in both books, the characters’ grand dreams cruelly mock the mundaneness or perversity of their real lives. Here Gary’s imagined world is an amalgamation of Icelandic and early English sagas; in building a cabin on Caribou Island he pictures himself as a Viking colonizing a new world, but in reality he’s just a bit of a loner and a failure, trying to run away from a life and marriage that have never lived up to his expectations (“Marriage only another form of being alone”).
Similarly, daughter Rhoda’s vision of a fairytale Hawaiian wedding and glamorous life as the wife of dentist Jim is relentlessly contradicted, first by the facts of Jim’s past and planned future adultery with as many women as he can entrap, and later in the horrific irony of the masterful last chapter. As Rhoda and Mark set out to Caribou Island to check on their parents and deliver them a satellite phone, Rhoda’s thoughts turn to her wedding plans. “Mark tossed handfuls of rock salt onto the ramp. Like rice at a wedding...A green, sunny bluff over blue ocean, far away from here...It would be magnificent...A place carefree, a day she had dreamed of all her life, the beginning, finally.” What Rhoda doesn’t know, although she has had premonitions because of her mother’s strange behavior, is that a gruesome scene awaits them, one that repeats family cycles of violence.
The novel’s language is simple, not overblown, but very powerful nonetheless. One of the very best books of 2011.
August 17, 2019
3.5. To quote my GR friend LeAnne, this book was "darkity, dark-dark, dark"! I loved reading about Alaska, a place I've never been and which seems so intimidating to me. Nice place to visit but I know I'm not cut out to live there. I think the State itself is as much a character in this book as the people. The main focus is on Gary and Irene and their crumbling marriage. More of convenience at this stage than true love and passion. Their daughter Rhoda is also focused on in her relationship with boyfriend Jim. Their son Mark plays a much smaller role in the book. He has a much more distant relationship with the family. The ending is a doozy. If you need to like the characters, this is not for you!
May 8, 2023
This is a dark story about a small group of unhappy people living in Alaska. There are two primary storylines. One is that of Gary and Irene, a married couple in their fifties. Gary wants to build a cabin on the titular Caribou Island, but Irene only agrees to keep Gary from leaving her. Irene is suffering from unexplained headaches and sad memories of her mother’s suicide years ago. The other is that of their thirty-year-old daughter, Rhoda, who is living with the local dentist. She wants to get married, but he does not seem eager to propose. In a subplot, Carl and Monique, a couple in their twenties, have traveled to Alaska for an adventure, but their liaison falters due to Monique’s behavior with the dentist. Another subplot involves Rhoda strained relationship with her brother, Mark.
The characters are almost all unlikeable, but the writing is mesmerizing. Somehow Vann kept my attention to a story where very little happens and most of the action takes place in the characters’ heads. Vann’s descriptions of the stark Alaska wilderness are vivid. It seems like an appropriate setting for the disintegration of Gary and Irene’s marriage. I had the feeling very early on that nothing good could come from these circumstances, but still found it hard to put the book down.
I felt involved in the story and wanted to warn some of the characters that they are going to regret certain decisions. If you appreciate a well-written but distressing story that explores the many ways relationships go wrong, this is one to pick up. I liked the writing style but it is a little too depressing for my taste.
The characters are almost all unlikeable, but the writing is mesmerizing. Somehow Vann kept my attention to a story where very little happens and most of the action takes place in the characters’ heads. Vann’s descriptions of the stark Alaska wilderness are vivid. It seems like an appropriate setting for the disintegration of Gary and Irene’s marriage. I had the feeling very early on that nothing good could come from these circumstances, but still found it hard to put the book down.
I felt involved in the story and wanted to warn some of the characters that they are going to regret certain decisions. If you appreciate a well-written but distressing story that explores the many ways relationships go wrong, this is one to pick up. I liked the writing style but it is a little too depressing for my taste.
March 8, 2020
3.5
I remember loving another book a while back narrated by Bronson Pinchot (yes, that Bronson Pinchot), so when I came across this one I borrowed it immediately. A rather depressing book set in Alaska, it asks the question Can this marriage be saved? and then smacks you in the face with the answer.
Slow moving and very sad, but I liked the setting.
As usual, Pinchot delivered in his unique style, full of emotion and credibility.
I remember loving another book a while back narrated by Bronson Pinchot (yes, that Bronson Pinchot), so when I came across this one I borrowed it immediately. A rather depressing book set in Alaska, it asks the question Can this marriage be saved? and then smacks you in the face with the answer.
Slow moving and very sad, but I liked the setting.
As usual, Pinchot delivered in his unique style, full of emotion and credibility.
August 10, 2022
Nie že by som sa na Aljašku niekedy chystala, po tejto knihe však po nej už absolútne vôbec netúžim. Akoby v jej chlade a pustatine nemal šancu prežiť nielen akýkoľvek vzťah, ale pokiaľ odtiaľ ľudia nezutekajú, tak vôbec nemajú šancu zistiť, čo chcú robiť, čo ich napĺňa. Aljaška je v tejto knihe nielen javiskom, ale podstatne dôležitou aktérkou deja, keď jej geografia či počasie sú absolútne zlomové pre vývoj udalostí.
May 12, 2022
Stavba zrubu na Aljaške manželským párom, ktorý prežil spoločne tridsať rokov, bolestne odhaľuje všetky zamlčané pravdy, polopravdy a frustrácie vo vzťahu, ktorý už nič neprináša a nikam sa nerozvíja.
V doslove Lukáša Mertza sa píše:
" Čítanie Zrubu rozkladá sladké predstavy o nehynúcej partnerskej láske a spoločnej ceste životom. David Vann hovorí totiž príliš veľa o ženách, ktorým ide viac o svadbu ako o manželstvo aj o zúfalých mužoch, ktorí panikária a opúšťajú manželky keď zistia, že im život pretiekol pomedzi prsty. Konfrontuje nás s vlastnými nenaplnenými snami a pripomína tragický konflikt medzi tým, kým sme a kým by sme chceli byť. "
Nenapíšem k tejto výbornej a silnej knihy nič lepšie ani múdrejšie. Jedna z najlepších kníh, aké som mala v poslednom období v rukách.
V doslove Lukáša Mertza sa píše:
" Čítanie Zrubu rozkladá sladké predstavy o nehynúcej partnerskej láske a spoločnej ceste životom. David Vann hovorí totiž príliš veľa o ženách, ktorým ide viac o svadbu ako o manželstvo aj o zúfalých mužoch, ktorí panikária a opúšťajú manželky keď zistia, že im život pretiekol pomedzi prsty. Konfrontuje nás s vlastnými nenaplnenými snami a pripomína tragický konflikt medzi tým, kým sme a kým by sme chceli byť. "
Nenapíšem k tejto výbornej a silnej knihy nič lepšie ani múdrejšie. Jedna z najlepších kníh, aké som mala v poslednom období v rukách.
October 13, 2022
Niektoré knihy sú svojím obsahom natoľko tragické, že by sme si priali, aby boli iba fikciou. K napísaniu Srubu autora žiaľ inšpirovali skutočné udalosti a cez svoje knihy sa bude celý život snažiť spracovať neutíchajúce spomienky.
October 23, 2023
Sanırım uzun süreli ilişkilerde, insan aslında yapmak istemediği, yapmaya üşendiği ya da kendisinden kaynaklı bir sebepten sürekli ertelediği şeyleri yapmak için geç kaldığı hissine kapılınca bunun faturasını karşısındakine kesme eğiliminde oluyor. Bir tür savunma mekanizması belki, çünkü kendini suçlamak daha ağır geliyor. Bir de bir süre sonra ilişki için ya da birlikte olduğu insan için, özellikle hiç istemeden yaptığı fedakarlıklar daha ağır gelmeye başlıyor, hele de bunların tek taraflı olduğu hissine kapılırsa. Bu nokta da tam bir kördüğüm aslında çünkü insanı ‘ben senin için bunu yaptım’, ‘hayır sen bunu aslında şu sebepten kendin için yaptın’ açmazına götürüyor, ki bence buradan çıkmak çok zor. Çünkü buradan da şuraya geliyoruz: Yaptıklarımız, söylediklerimiz hep iki yanlı; tamamen aynı olayın, sözün, durumun veya ânın farklı insanlardaki yansımaları bambaşka. Beraber geçirilen zaman dilimlerini, yapılan şeyleri, söylenen sözleri iki kişi hep apayrı hatırlıyor ve anlatıyor. İşte roman bu meselelerle ilgili. Otuz yıllık evli bir çiftin, adamın hayalini gerçekleştirmek üzere Alaska’da bir kulübe inşa etme sürecinde evliliklerinin de çözülmesini anlatıyor.
Romanla ilgili fikirlerime gelecek olursam: Ele aldığı konular ilgi çekici. Oldukça da akıcı, okuru içine çeken ve merak duygusunu da diri tutarak nasıl olduğunu bile anlamadan kendini okutan bir kurgusu var. Ancak yazar meseleleri irdelerken bana göre biraz dağıtmış. Söz konusu çiftin oğullarının madde bağımlılığı ya da kızlarının erkek arkadaşının sadakatsizliği gibi detaylarla da oyalanmak yerine çiftin ilişkisinin ve sorunlarının daha derinlerine inmesini okumak isterdim ben. Yan karakterlerin derinleştirilmesi, onların hikayelerine de yer verilmesi çoğu zaman metni zenginleştirse de, bu kitapta ana karakterlerin meselelerinin yüzeysel işlenmesine sebep olmuş hissi verdi bana. Ama ilişkiler üzerine okumaktan hoşlanıyorsanız ve akıcı, yormayacak bir roman okumak isterseniz öneririm, hakikaten okurken vaktin nasıl geçtiğini anlamadım.
Romanla ilgili fikirlerime gelecek olursam: Ele aldığı konular ilgi çekici. Oldukça da akıcı, okuru içine çeken ve merak duygusunu da diri tutarak nasıl olduğunu bile anlamadan kendini okutan bir kurgusu var. Ancak yazar meseleleri irdelerken bana göre biraz dağıtmış. Söz konusu çiftin oğullarının madde bağımlılığı ya da kızlarının erkek arkadaşının sadakatsizliği gibi detaylarla da oyalanmak yerine çiftin ilişkisinin ve sorunlarının daha derinlerine inmesini okumak isterdim ben. Yan karakterlerin derinleştirilmesi, onların hikayelerine de yer verilmesi çoğu zaman metni zenginleştirse de, bu kitapta ana karakterlerin meselelerinin yüzeysel işlenmesine sebep olmuş hissi verdi bana. Ama ilişkiler üzerine okumaktan hoşlanıyorsanız ve akıcı, yormayacak bir roman okumak isterseniz öneririm, hakikaten okurken vaktin nasıl geçtiğini anlamadım.
April 14, 2021
I love books like this. The characters so internal, the setting so riveting and used as so much more than a reflection of its characters. This book is not a happy read, indeed it is bleak and desolate, yet I found myself smirking at Irenes dialogue, she knows her lot in life and she is resigned to it, well at least she was, existing with a husband that is so fraught with illusions of grandeur that he constantly fails to see the essence that is his life, and this is just one of his many failings. In Australia Gary would be called a gonna, I was going to do this, I was going to do that, always going to, but never actually doing any of it and always blaming everyone and everything else for it. And yet Irene is to blame too, but I can't help but feel so much more sympathetic towards her.
The writing by Mr Vann for Irene is truly wonderful (as it is throughout); sharp, sarcastic (when required) and touching too. It is important to note that there is no punctuation through this book to delineate the dialogue. You would think this may make it difficult to distinguish between the characters, but it isn't, and only because the writing is that good. I particularly loved Irenes internal dialogue when the cabin was being constructed.
Not a single word or event or picture painted in my mind was wasted or frivolous. I feel a little exhausted from it, but exhilarated too. There is so much I loved and appreciated about this book. The way he wrote about the pain in Irenes head was remarkable. I occasionally suffer from migraines, the agonising, red hot knifing pain is not anything that can be described accurately, but Mr Vann has come as close to anyone in getting it right, including the pain killers that come along with it.
I knew throughout the book that there was going to be this inevitable conclusion, but yet I was still shocked to read it, and sad too, but only for Irene and Rhoda.
This is a book that will sit with me for a long time I expect.
I hold pictures in my mind of Alaska, cold, desolate, dangerous, and of Rhoda.
What is it that makes people stay there letting the isolation that they craved become their undoing? Why do people stay in relationships that are so tightly bound in wrong when life is so frail?
A compelling read, don't be put off by its coldness, it is very much a story on living.
The writing by Mr Vann for Irene is truly wonderful (as it is throughout); sharp, sarcastic (when required) and touching too. It is important to note that there is no punctuation through this book to delineate the dialogue. You would think this may make it difficult to distinguish between the characters, but it isn't, and only because the writing is that good. I particularly loved Irenes internal dialogue when the cabin was being constructed.
Not a single word or event or picture painted in my mind was wasted or frivolous. I feel a little exhausted from it, but exhilarated too. There is so much I loved and appreciated about this book. The way he wrote about the pain in Irenes head was remarkable. I occasionally suffer from migraines, the agonising, red hot knifing pain is not anything that can be described accurately, but Mr Vann has come as close to anyone in getting it right, including the pain killers that come along with it.
I knew throughout the book that there was going to be this inevitable conclusion, but yet I was still shocked to read it, and sad too, but only for Irene and Rhoda.
This is a book that will sit with me for a long time I expect.
I hold pictures in my mind of Alaska, cold, desolate, dangerous, and of Rhoda.
What is it that makes people stay there letting the isolation that they craved become their undoing? Why do people stay in relationships that are so tightly bound in wrong when life is so frail?
A compelling read, don't be put off by its coldness, it is very much a story on living.
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