Goat Mountain

by David Vann

In David Vann’s searing novel Goat Mountain, an 11-year-old boy at his family’s annual deer hunt is eager to make his first kill. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably.
 
In prose devastating and beautiful in its precision, David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions—what we owe for what we’ve done.
 
David Vann is the award-winning author of Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, American, Contemporary, Book Club, Literature

261 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Published 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.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review has also been cross-posted on my blog. Images tend to disappear on GR. They are all present there. The book was released on Tuesday, September 10, 2013. The trade paperback was released on October 14, 2014.

Drama is a description of what is bad inside of us and the end point of that is hell, a description of a hellish landscape.

This is what David Vann had to say in an interview with GR pal Lou Pendergast. (A link to the full interview is in the LINKS section at the bottom of this review) It will come as no shock then that in his latest novel he presents us with a hellscape, and we see that some of the bad is not content to remain cooped up. In fact David Vann's Goat Mountain is like Deliverance (without the sex) mated with The Golden Bough, as directed by Terence Malick.


David Vann

Northern California. Rural. 1978. On several acres owned by their family for many years. A grandfather, father and eleven-year-old boy, accompanied by the father's friend, Tom (his is the only name we learn), have come for an annual deer hunt. This is to be the boy's first chance to kill a buck. They spot a poacher on a hill. Sight him through their scopes. Encouraged to look through the scope of dad's rifle, the boy takes a careful sighting, then squeezes the trigger, instantly killing the unsuspecting man. What are the rules? Should the boy be turned in to the authorities? Should he himself be killed as an unfeeling abomination? Should the deed be covered up? Do they just walk away? Contending with this issue is the motive force in the story. But it is not the only thing going on here.

An idea is the worst thing that could happen to a writer, and as I’ve written these other books I’ve tried actually to not to know where I’m going. I think my ideas are very small and close the story off, instead I try to just focus on the landscape and the character with the problem and just find out what happens.

And yet some ideas manage to find their way in to this work. It is a good thing he eschewed this advice in favor of a bit of wisdom he received from a very accomplished writer.

I had a class with Grace Paley, and she said that every good story is at least two stories. And to me that’s the one unbreakable rule in writing – the only one. That if you just have an account of something, and it’s just an account – like in most people’s journals or blogs or whatever – it’s just sh*t. Like it will never work. I can’t think of a single good work ever that was just one thing – that was just an account of something. What we read for as readers is that second story – the subtext – and the interest of what story will come out from behind the other one. And so you can’t break that rule, as far as I can tell. I’ve never seen it done.

So what else is in here beyond the dramatic tension of a family trying to figure out what to do with their young murderer?

All of my books are about religion and our need for religion...I started as a religious studies major actually. One thing that links all of my works...is how philosophy can lead to brutality

Religion it is, but not just religion, human nature. Our narrator ponders whether killing is in our DNA.

We think of Cain as the one who killed his brother, but who else was around to kill? They were the first two born. Cain killed what was available. The story has nothing to do with brothers.

And later:

What we wanted was to run like this, to chase our prey. That was the point. What made us run was the joy and promise of killing.

The story is told mostly as an internal monologue by the boy, as both child and man. While we encounter him as an eleven year old boy, his story is related to us by the adult he will become. Positing a guess that the narrator is speaking from 2012, that makes the narrator 45 or so, just about the author's age. And yes, Vann is familiar with hunting. I didn’t feel what I was supposed to feel. I killed my first deer when I was eleven and I started missing them after that.

Religion here considers the pre-historical

The first thing to distinguish man…there’s not much we can do that is older and more human than sitting at a fire. ..It’s only in fire or water that we can find a corollary to felt mystery, a face to who we might be. But fire is the core immediate. In fire we never feel alone. Fire is our first god.

In the atavistic is there relief from civilization? Vann offers a contemplation of human nature, through the eyes of a monster who feels more connection with ancient hunter-gatherers than he does with any living human.

I wish now I could have slept under hides. I wish now I could have gone all the way back, because if we can go far enough back, we cannot be held accountable.

Is the unfeeling boy really a monster, merely immature, or the core of what it is to be human?

This image of Vann and his father was taken from The Guardian

The bible references here lean toward the Old Testament, and they are abundant. For those who, like me, enjoy trawling for literary references it might be wise to heed Chief Brody's advice to Quint, "you're gonna need a bigger boat." Cain comes in for frequent mention. I noted his name nine times, but there may be more. There is a host of further biblical references, including one in which the boy endures his own Calvary-like hike. Edenic references abound. When we read I slithered my way up that steep canyon, my belly in the dirt, and I refused to be left behind, we might be reminded of Genesis 3:14:

Cursed are you above all livestock
and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.

There is a look at Jesus as being guilty of muddying the lines between life and death, the Ten Commandments as being directed against inherent human instinct, and the Eucharist as a way of remaining connected with our bestial nature. Consideration is given to the existence of the devil, and whether we need for there to be some dark agent in charge, anything in charge, because the existential chaos of being is beyond our ability to cope. What are the rules? Who made them and why? And what happens, what should happen, when we break them? There are also parts that reminded me of Dante's Inferno, as the boy consumes some particularly sulphurous water early on and the group has to pass through a daunting metal gate to enter the place in which the story takes place, among other clues.

This is a book that reaches a grasping claw into your stomach and shakes your guts around before yanking them out. Definitely not a book for those who are uncomfortable with the dark, the violent or the sad. But even with all the brimstone challenging your nostrils, you cannot help but detect the aroma of power and substance in Vann's harsh new novel. Once you calm down from the brutality of the story you will long consider the subjects it raises.

==============================INTERVIEW

David Vann very graciously took some time during a whirlwind book tour to answer some questions about Goat Mountain

W - There is a lot in Goat Mountain about the primitive, atavistic drives in human nature. When the boy thinks "Some part in me just wanted to kill, constantly and without end" was he expressing some primitive element within the human character, his personal pathology or something else?

I think it’s both. The book shows a descent that one particular mind takes (as in my novel Dirt, also, and my nonfiction book about a school shooting, Last Day On Earth) but I’m also trying to find shadows of something human and not just peculiar to an individual.

W - How much of what the boy considers, particularly as it relates to a compulsion to kill, reflects your view of human nature (Do you think we are killers by nature?) or was the boy making excuses for his aberrant urges?

I honestly can’t answer any of the big questions about human nature or even individuals. I wrote about my father’s suicide for ten years and yet his final moment still remains mysterious to me. With the school shooter, also, I could put together a narrative that made his final act possible but not inevitable. At the last moment, he and my father could have chosen differently. So I don’t think we’re determined. I think we can kill or not kill, and that many factors push us toward or away. In my fiction, everything is limited to a character’s view always, but I also have basically had or can imagine having all the thoughts and feelings of all my characters, in that they feel possible and believable to me.

W - In an interview you said your books are about "how philosophy can lead to brutality." But the boy in Goat Mountain appears to have the brutality in him inherently. Can it be that brutality leads to philosophy?

That quote was specifically about Dirt, about the dangers of the New Age movement. But it’s an interesting question, whether brutality is so abhorrent it always has to be covered in philosophy in order for the perpetrators to be able to go on telling the story of themselves. You’re right that the narrator thinks he had an inherent brutality as a boy, or perhaps it was the culture he grew up in (he says children will find whatever they’re born into natural). He’s disturbed by the fact that he didn’t feel bad after first killing, but then this changes with the buck and after that he no longer wants to kill, and he becomes fully human when he kills without wanting to. That’s what I find really disturbing about human killing, when it’s divorced from instinct and becomes abstract and we kill for philosophy or religion or politics or calculated risk.

W - There are several references to a time before god. For example "grandfather did not come from god. I’m sure of that. He came from something older" and "The darkness a great muscle tightening, filled with blood, a living thing already before god came to do his work" and "The act of killing might even be the act that creates god." The contemporary view of the Hebrew and Christian god is that there was no existence prior. If the boy believes in god how could he believe that there was a time before god?

There has to have been a time before god, because we made him, and it was quite a while before we came up with the idea of making gods. And antimatter is interesting as a concept, because it makes possible the existence of something before anything, the existence of what pulls existence into being. That’s what the grandfather in the book becomes, the thing that makes matter possible. That’s the closest I can imagine to god. Putting a face on god is as stupid as imagining aliens with a head and two arms and two legs. Our images of god are all simplistic like that, too dumb to be able to believe now. I began as a religious studies major and moved on to fiction, which investigates mystery more honestly.

W - Did you have Dante's Inferno in mind while writing Goat Mountain? If so, were the obstructions the four face getting into their land an echo of the challenges Dante and Virgil face entering the Inferno?

D - I have always wanted to write an inferno, since it’s the natural goal or end of tragedy, as you’ve quoted from me before, and I like Dante’s depiction and also the Venerable Bede’s and Blake’s and McCarthy’s, and there are always obstructions to entering and time it takes to recognize. The inferno is an externalization of a felt landscape within, the shape of our human badness, and the characters have to be put under pressure for a while before they can start to see a mirroring in the landscape. So the book becomes increasingly hellish, as Dirt did. It’s really only in the final section of the novel, when they reach the burn (an area that had had a fire recently), that the architecture of their hell is more fully realized. So they don’t enter gates really but are steadily building.

W - If Goat Mountain completes a holy trinity for you, will you be continuing with religion as a major focus in your next book? What is your next project?

My next novel, which is finished, is titled Bright Air Black and is the story of Medea, set 3,250 years ago, trying to stay close to the archaeological record. It attempts to be a realistic and sympathetic portrayal of her as a destroyer of kings who wants a world not ruled by men. I’ve been wanting to write something about her for 25 years, and I’m fascinated by the time period because it’s the time the Greeks imagine as the beginning and therefore can be considered the beginning of western culture and literature, but it’s actually the end of an older world, the fall of the bronze age and Hittite empire and decline of the Egyptians. Medea worships Hecate and also Nute, an Egyptian goddess, so there’s a continuity with focus on gods and landscape. But Goat Mountain is the end of my books that have family stories and places in the background.

W - Are there any plans afoot for films to be made of any of your books?

I’ve co-written the screenplay for Caribou Island with two-time academy award-winning director Bill Guttentag, and we’re trying now to raise funding for the film. And the French producers Haut Et Court (producers of Coco Avant Chanel and The Class) and French-Canadian director Daniel Grau will be making a film from Sukkwan Island, the novella in Legend of a Suicide.

W - You said in an interview with the Australian Writers Centre:
...what I teach my students is how to read, how to be better readers, and the importance of studying language and literature. And, I use a linguistics approach for talking about style, very specifically talking about what individual sentences do, writing a grammar for a text.
Have you ever considered putting your teaching ideas into a book?

I have thought about that, because I can’t find a textbook that does what I’d want it to do, but I’m focused for now on writing novels.

W - What books have you read in the last year that you would recommend?

I’ve been reading a lot of books, about a book per week, and my favorite this year was John L’Heureux’s new novel The Medici Boy. A great portrait of an artist, an historical thriller, and a depiction of the persecution of gay men in 15th century Florence, it’s a rich masterpiece that I recommend to everyone.

W - What do you do for fun?

Right now I’m on a six-week residency in Amsterdam with the Dutch Lit Foundation, and my wife and I are going to music and museums and restaurants and walking all around the city. Amsterdam is wonderful. We live half the year in New Zealand, where I do watersports almost every day (waterskiing, wakeboarding, sailing, windsurfing, kayaking) or mountain-biking or hiking. And we sail on the Turkish coast each summer. I also play congas and a bit of guitar and I like tequilas and rums.

Thanks, David, for your time and fascinating insights.

============================EXTRA STUFF

Vann's earlier novel, Caribou Island was my favorite book of 2011. And his 2008 Legend of a Suicide is compelling reading as well.

Lou Pendergrast's interview with DV
(Source for "All my books are about religion" quote)

The author's website - among other things there is a large list of interviews

And his GR page

The Family History Is Grim, but He's Plotted a New Course - NY Times article on Vann from 2011
(Source for "an idea is the worst thing... quote)

University of Gloucestershire Creative Writing Blog interview with DV from October 10, 2011
(Source for Vann's mention of Grace Paley)

The White Review with Melissa Cox (online only)
(Source of the "I didn't feel what I was supposed to feel" quote)

Vann reading from Goat Mountain and a bit from his following novel, Aquarium

[Zoeytron · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first note I jotted down as I was reading this was "edgy and disturbing".  As it turns out, those two words were not even going to scratch the surface.  Pure hell on earth.  There, that's more like it.

The rite of hunting, passed on from generation to generation, primal with an almost religious intensity.  The thrill of the kill.  This particular season is to belong to an 11 year old boy, time for him to kill his first buck.  The rest of the group is made up of the boy's father, his granddad, and a close family friend.  They have been hunting many times. This trip will turn out to be different, veering tragically sideways, forever changing the dynamics of the camp.  No one will emerge unscathed.   

Beautiful words barely mask atrocities that know no quarter.  The infinite patience of the dead is hard to ignore.  There are decisions to be made, with second-guessing and accusations following closely.  What form is the evil taking here?  Because it is here, make no mistake.   

Thank you to my GR friend Robin for your review.  This is indeed why we read.  Rarely do I read a book that punches me in the gut as this one did.  

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was unintentional, so I can't take credit for it, but my reading of this book had perfect timing. Just recently, I read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which is a ruthless western set more in Hell than the American South. Goat Mountain is set in 1978 on a hunting trip in California, but feels more like devil's paradise. Each book an inferno written by brilliant, masterful authors.

David Vann's book has the advantage over McCarthy's for me because of its structure, its having a storyline so compelling that I couldn't stop reading, no matter what atrocity lay before me. An 11 year old boy along with his father, grandfather, and family friend, are on a yearly hunting trip on their land. It's a particularly important trip, because the boy will have his chance at shooting and killing his first buck - a rite of passage into manhood. In a few pages, it all goes wrong. A poacher is sighted, the 11 year old's trigger is pulled. Death.

What will happen now? Who is responsible? Will the police be called? Will the body be buried and forgotten?

Or will these guys take turns scaring the shit out of each other, and continue the hunt, a hunt now so laced with menace and malevolence that the bucks aren't the only ones fearing for their lives.

Meanwhile, during this relentless story which never lets up - and I mean never, you get to read David Vann. David Vann, who makes me think "THIS is why I read." This man's writing is gorgeous, unflinching, brave, vicious. He's never afraid to go there. He'll take you allllll the way, and you probably don't want to go, but he leads you, word by word.

Extremely violent, explicit, nakedly evil, Goat Mountain is also equal parts meaningful. Christian themes permeate the book, particularly the brutal stories found in the Old Testament. Jesus walks these pages, in torment, as he did for 40 days and nights in the desert. Lucifer too, on cloven hooves.

Vann dedicates this book to his Cherokee grandfather, and three other chiefs in his ancestry. Ancient ways are juxtaposed with Christ's morality. How to make sense of it? How to reconcile the two ways? How do you apply meaning or rules to a mountain that has always been there, its face so inscrutable?

The philosophical questioning and exploration is brilliant. My one quibble would be that at times it goes on a little too long, but Vann always brings us back to the story. That story. That inferno which is life. Or is it a nightmare? The answer, if it matters, is both.

Yes, this is why I read.

[Annet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tough one. I need to think...
A disturbing, brooding story of a family, young son coming of age, father, grandfather and friend of the family going on a hunting trip which turns into a dark tale. The writing is poetic, the references to bible stories make the story even more disturbing, the wilderness is beautiful and the relationship between the men is harsh. Still not a full four star for me, as the story did not get 'under my skin' and neither did the persons. It sort of dragged on.... Not bad, but could have been better for me.... I'm a fan of dark wilderness type of stories.

An 11-year -old boy at his family 's annual deer hunt is eager to make his first kill. Accompanied by his father, grandfather and a friend of the family, going deeper into the wilderness. They discover a poacher on their land, a 640-acre ranch in North California, and his father shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering the lives of the men irrevocably.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kept running away from this book. It felt impossible to sit and be alone with the story. I made it through, but towards the end, I'd read five pages and take a break. I really can't remember another book affecting me the same way.

I understood a few themes (besides 'violence breeds violence'). There was just so much going on with religion and human instinct to kill that I couldn't get the big picture. I'm pretty sure it was there, but I kept closing my eyes because the grandfather scared the crap out of me.

The prose was so damn good, I'd read this again with somebody holding my hand.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for the hysteria of the violence, for the Oedipus Tyrannus level of violence; for the way David Vann is willing to go this far.

David Vann mostly reminds me of David Vann--his latest novel, Aquarium, is closer to Goat Mountain than any other novel I've read. There is also something here in the reading experience that reminds me of Pete Dexter, maybe--in particular the final scene of Paris Trout. I feel the same wrenching understanding, as I read, that I'm going to be brought to a level of primal violence that I hadn't been able to imagine being inscribed in language before.

[Rebbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Should Cormac McCarthy be flattered or offended that David Vann "borrowed" his one-of-a-kind writing formula?

The writing is powerful, and for that he deserves 5 stars. But...I can't ignore the moral obligation people have to not blatantly rip off someone else's work, so I knocked off 2 stars.

Also, he pulled a Suzanne Collins and explained things after he showed them to us, as if we haven't got the smarts to rise to his level of genius and comprehend what he's saying. If I cared what he thinks of me, I'd be offended that he thinks we're all significantly dumber than he is.

But since I don't care I'm not offended. However, he's skirting a fine line here so let's hope he's careful and doesn't alienate his readers any further.

So... onto the book. Three generations of male relatives, namely grandfather, father, and son (plus a family friend) go on a deer hunting trip. The son, who's at the tender age of 11, does something that changes not only his life forever, but everyone else's as well. The consequences of this action is something that everyone who was there must endure. There are no second chances, there is no do-over. Everyone must pay a price.

What shocked me the most was the motivation behind the action was not something that's even remotely hinted at in the synopsis. It's not one you would expect, either. I won't say anymore lest I accidentally reveal too much.

Side note: I thought the ending was a cop-out. It is clear that the inevitable questions about the repercussions of the last scenes in the book go unanswered on purpose, and it wasn't to add mystery. It's unfair to drop things in midair imo, but some people don't mind that.

[LA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never gutted and field-dressed a deer, but now I know how. Powerful writing put me there, wincing, but it was core to the narrator's - and therefore the reader's - experience. If you cannot stomach reading about this sort of thing, take my caution and skip my review, skip the book. But do check out Caribou Island by the same excellent author.

This extraordinary coming-of-age story told by Prince of the Dark, David Vann, might indeed have left me feeling gutted myself if it weren't so deeply and incessantly metaphysical. Long and repetitious meanderings that not so much pondered the nature of man, but condemned it curtailed my attachment to the story. Sure, I have my deep moments, but this dude breathes a different and heavier isotope of oxygen than me. The spell-binding story would not let me look away, despite me feeling like a plastic skulled Barbie doll in comparison with the writer. He is brilliant.

Here is what fascinated me - no spoilers...Barbie's Honor. There are four characters who head off onto their annual hunting trip on the season's opening day, something they've loved for many decades, particularly because the 600-some acres of land have been in the family for generations. They not only bond with one another, but they value the animals whose lives they take, love the hills and wallows, revel in the tradition and roles at their crude outdoor camp. Yeah, this is a guy book, but even if you go get high tea with your mom, auntie, and your little girl every Christmas, it is relatable. Just without the guns.

Our narrator is recalling the story of this hunt, back when he was an 11 year old boy. The youngster is particularly excited because this year he will be allowed to fire at a buck for the first time. While he has been allowed target practice with his smallish rifle, by family rules he is now to attempt taking his first buck and therefore become a man. It is the first day of the fall season - opening day, and despite the poison oak that will surely cloak him and the manzanita scrub which will scratch, he is filled with optimism on this, his family's land. It is a happy day.

From the publisher's blurb, you likely know the catalyst that kicks off the tension of the whole tale. If you do not want to know, stop here......... The catalyst is this: upon driving through their padlocked gate, the boy's companions spy in the distance someone who should not be there. The boy's father, his father's best friend from childhood, and the child's grandfather all have high powered scopes on their deer rifles that can be used like binoculars.

The three adults can see a lone man dressed in bright, hunters' orange, resting on a hill with his gun next to him. He is a poacher. Not only is he a poacher on private land, since he has likely been out firing that gun, the deer will have been spooked into deep cover and will not reveal themselves for hours or longer. He has ruined their traditional opening day hunt. The men are understandably incensed. When the father offers his little boy his rifle so that he too can peek at the man through the scope, the 11 year old does not falter. He shoots the poacher dead. Intentionally.

Will they immediately drive out to make a phone call to the sheriff? Will they first retrieve the body? Maybe stage the incident or hide the body? Is there another hunter who came with this dead man?

While those answers are what I first wanted, what I ended up craving was knowing what other horrific thing this boy would do before the book's conclusion. We are told it is coming, and the anticipation is exquisite.

Dulling that anticipation, however, was the lengthy philosophic examination of who we are as human beings. I really wanted to delve into this, considering the crime the boy pulled off with no sense of remorse. But again, my roots don't go deep enough to keep looking into the heavens or into the abyss. The writer decries anything sweet attributed to the New Testament, regularly refers to stories of Cain and Abel, and makes it quite clear that human nature preceded God. I'm down with that, just as I'm good with reading books like Peace Like a River where the good lord sets down some serious miracles. I mention this here because some readers are going to balk and balk badly at reading this. There are myriad but not so many memorable musings on religion - not really dogmatic questions, but those of faith.

David Vann is a hotshot writer, and I will read more by him. But if he had any desire to be more marketable (and thank goodness he is NOT one of those!), he'd trim out the philosophy and get to the gutting.

Very, very good, but not for the average reader. 4 stars.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vann’s latest book is truly an ambitious one. His subject matter and theme—essentially, the savage beast that resides inside the man, reminds me of similar themes covered by Cormac McCarthy. I have read McCarthy’s entire oeuvre, and I suspect that Vann has, too. In this setting, the reader is taken to Northern California and a family of deer hunters who own this land, the eponymous Goat Mountain. The narrator, unnamed (like the Kid in Blood Meridian), tells the story of a shocking and disturbing event that occurred over thirty years ago, in 1978, when he was 11-years-old.

Although the events are utterly rank and harrowing, I was not pulled along by the story and narration as Vann intended. The narrator’s tone/voice wasn’t consistent, and he sabotaged the sense of immediacy with too much presentation. Or, he would show us, and then rush to explain its poignancy, significance, or its allegorical parallels. McCarthy uses exposition at times, sometimes in the form of an oratory or within a character's thoughts, but Vann's use was too pointed and repetitive.

Sometimes the boy was too coy or diffident, and at other times I felt he was trying to “educate” me at the end of a passage with pithy, heavy-handed truisms and maxims. He did this with declarative sentences that were meant to be stated as fact, but it pealed too blatantly. These trusims were often simplistic or vague, or even breaching the contract between the narrator and reader, as the authorial voice of Vann came encroaching to lay down pearls of wisdom that I didn’t buy into. Some of these truisms were just mundane, but Vann inserted a specious profundity into them.

Unlike the writing of LEGENDS OF A SUICIDE, a veritable masterpiece, I didn’t feel that Vann trusted himself enough to come across clearly to the reader. So, instead, he over-explained, which made the narration either stilted or self-conscious. The style was also too indeterminate and contemporary. When you are reaching into the Old and New Testament symbolism, the reader needs a vernacular that is going to hang tough, like in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. When he said things like “I was creeped out,” I half expected “Dude” to come out next. I was jettisoned right out of the story.

Another example is Vann’s overuse of the word “atavistic,” (very McCarthy-ish word). Using it once, even twice, is effective. But Vann used that word so often that the strength of it began to fizzle. I got it the first time, but, again, I think Vann felt he needed to keep that word in our consciousness. I know that the author worked on this novel for years, and I wonder if it suffers from too much over-editing. I wanted to be lost in the story, but, instead, I was hyper-aware of the author penning the story rather than the narrator telling it. What Vann did was first show (which is good), but then he would weaken it in the telling, which wasn’t necessary, because he already showed us. It was as if Vann was dumbing down for a wider audience--certainly a wider audience than most of McCarthy's books.

Why was this told in the first person by the boy? I don't feel I really gained any more insight into his state of mind (than I would have gotten, anyway). The character/narrator was too pale to carry the story, which was why Vann’s voice kept taking over.

McCarthy often starts with a caricature, on purpose, but then an astonishing thing happens, and the characters become real. In the case of GOAT MOUNTAIN, the archetypal characters slipped into caricature, so that by the end, I inadvertently found myself laughing at how ludicrous things had become. There is actually a way to be nuanced and over-the-top simultaneously, as Cormac McCarthy has proven repeatedly. But, in this case, it just came across as silly and ham-handed.

In a story such as this, there needs to be the understanding of what redemption would be, whether or not the author chooses to claim the redemption in the book, or not. If you are going to do a rape of the mind, then allow us to understand more than the theme of "the beast inside the man," since we got that early on. It is understood that our savage natures can rear its ugly head and seize our souls. OK, but where is this taking us? I didn’t feel that I went any deeper than this one aim of the author's. Or, if he just wanted us to be entrenched in the savagery, then don't take time out for station identification, which happened frequently. There was too much instructing and constructing. Maybe the author didn't believe that the reader would tacitly comprehend. And, I wanted that void, that abyss, that space between the words for me to submerge. Vann didn't allow for the abyss; there was too much noise.

It seemed that Vann was having a go at the shock and awe bit, and hoped that that would be sufficient to move the reader. Then, as if he was checking himself, he would seem to take the reader by the hand and whisper too deliberately in our ears. And I do believe that some readers will buy into it just because he dared to go further than most authors. Readers will gasp, gulp, gag, and heave, being thunderstruck by the evil nature of man morphing into his bestial counterpart.

The aspect I did enjoy was the symbolic anthropomorphism of the mountains and the "atavistic" metaphors addressing the area of Goat Mountain (and Pan the goat symbolizing paganism contrasted with the biblical and religious references). Some of the setting really did come "alive." But it wasn't enough to make me like the book.

I predicted the ending about halfway through the book, which doesn’t necessarily upend the effectiveness of the story. But, in this case, I did not feel any more enlightened or gripped; rather, I was shaking my head instead of looking into my soul.

I would love to hear from other readers who have read McCarthy's oeuvre (not just THE ROAD!) and also GOAT MOUNTAIN. I cannot help making comparisons, because both authors cover similar terrain, and it is obvious that Vann was heavily influenced by McCarthy, (for another example, the absence of quotes in dialogue as a stylistic choice) and perhaps tried too much to emulate him while deliberately attempting to come up with his own style. There was no organic presence of the timeless and the archaic (vs just the references to it). Moreover, the graphic descriptions were certainly there, but there was nothing sublime in the telling.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

If David Vann never writes another book – and hopefully, that will not be the case – his reputation will be secured by Goat Mountain. I read it with mounting excitement and horror; although this book may be the darkest book I have ever read, I am convinced it is a masterpiece.

The bare-bones plot is deceptively simple: three men (a father, a son, and a grandfather – a very unholy ghost) and the father’s best friend Tom (the only character who is named) go on their annual deer hunt. The son – who is the narrator – sees a poacher on their land through the scope of his father’s rifle and without any forethought, kills him. This is all set up in the first few pages of the book.

The rest of the book is, at turns, a suspenseful, theological, and philosophical treatise on the very nature of what it means to be human and the consequences of our actions. There is an atavistic quality to the hunt: “This was where we owned and where we belonged and where our history was kept, all who had come before and all that had happened and all would be told again during this hunt, and for the first time, my own story would be added if I could find a buck.”

But is killing wired into us as humans? What if we were never told that killing a man was bad? “Why is it that we hunt? Isn’t it to return to something older? And isn’t it Cain what waits for us in every older time?” The son considers the own members of his hunting party: his father who was made weak by wrestling with right vs. wrong, his grandfather who had become “an obesity pumped full of insulin and pills and unable to walk through a forest for miles. A thousand generations, ended by him.” And Tom, a man who is given the name of everyman, who professes horror for the deed but like millions of others, does nothing to correct it.

Every word is carefully chosen in this book, which is overlaid with biblical themes. After the kill, the boy slinks across the ground like a serpent; he knows he can never go back to the innocence of his one-time Garden of Eden. The story of Cain (“Cain killed what was available. The story had nothing to do with brothers”), the near-re-enactment of Abraham and Isaac, the drinking of blood after the hunt (a clear reference to the blood of Christ), the nature of hell, which is seen as solitary and meaningless…it’s all culled to great effect. Vann writes, ‘The Bible has nothing to do with god. The Bible is an account o our waking up, an atavistically dreamed recovery of how we first learned shame in the garden and first considered ourselves different from animals, and Cain was the first to discover that part of us will never wake up. Part of us will act according to instinct, and that will never change.”

The answer to “why do we kill” appears to be this simple: because we can. Or more correctly, because it is in our primal DNA to do so. We can strive to differentiate a man from an animal, honoring him and doing whatever we need to do to make it right. Or we can determine that a man who is shot is nothing and put the clan first. Ultimately, though, any kill goes back to the first kill – Cain and Abel. This devastating book shines with a rare sort of dark beauty. At one point, a character says, “You’re going to carry that body the rest of your life. It will never leave you.” I doubt this book will ever leave me either.

[kp_readss · Rating 1 out of 5]

najgora stvar koju sam ikada procitala u svom zivotu, a citala sam saptaca od donata karizija

doticni je izgleda otkrio filozofiju u nekim kasnim satima i pomislio da je uhvatio Boga za muda pa da je prvi koji se dosetio da se bavi nekom moralnom temom (a bavi se na jezivo glup nacin)

kroz preglupe metafore i epitete, opise prirode koji izludjuju (s obzirom na koliko reci je covek utrosio na NEUSPELO prikazivanje prirode), pisac (ako ga tako mogu nazvati) pokusava da nam isprica jednu pricu? a usput silno pokusava da povuce analogiju sa biblijskim likovima

prvo: naravno da cu se iznervirati kad neki tamo u najbolju ruku prosecnointeligentni bata pokusava da mi filozofira o religiji, smrti i zivotu I NA TOME POKUSA DA ZARADI PARE a pametno rekao nista nije

drugo: hajde da naucimo da sto to sto nam je profesorica u trecem osnovne jednom rekla da lepo pisemo ne znaci da treba i da postanemo pisci i da normalizujemo da ako imamo prijatelja koji tripuje filozofa i pisca u kasnim vecernjim satima posle tri piva ili buksne DA MU KAZEMO DA ODJEBE I NE JEDE GOVNA

ko je ovom coveku dao, ne samo da napise knjigu, vec i da mu se ista objavi treba da stane pre odgledalo i da se zapita JESAM LI JA NORMALAN i da kaze sebi MOZDA JE BOLJE DA SAM SE ZAPOSLIO NA PUMPI DA TOCIM GORIVO, to bi od mene bilo iskrenije i pametnije

knjiga ima 220 strana a ja sam usput svakom recenicom gubila po mozdanu celiju pokusavajuci da dodjem do kraja da vidim ima li makar cega u ovom delu
odgovor je: nema, ne radite ovo sebi, granici se sa mazohizmom

[Jon Zelazny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never have I been so enthralled by a first chapter, only to be dismayed by pretty much everything that followed. An omniscient narrator would have made a world of difference: I'd accept a quasi-allegorical tale of Man's Inhumanity to Man told in glorious MFA-style sensory detail from a god-like perspective, but once I know "I" is an unnamed man recalling a tragic experience he had as a kid in 1978, I weirdly expect the storytelling to suggest that character's interior thoughts. And while I learned a lot about how to poetically describe nature, I'd also conclude that Mr. Vann has never met any actual eleven-year-olds, and may not have even been one himself. You can make all kinds of literary arguments about what's going on here, but I'm pretty sure that if I shot somebody, at any age, I wouldn't spend the next three days primarily thinking about what color the fucking grass was.

I had the same problem with BILLY LYNN'S HALFTIME WALK, a first-person account of an uneducated 21-year-old combat veteran whose interior monologue sounded remarkably like a middle-aged novelist's. Is it because I was a theater kid or a Hollywood guy that I cannot wrap my head around this particular convention? I dunno, but if you're looking for that nexus of rural American machismo, Mother Nature, and existential philosophy, stick to James Dickey.

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the hardest reviews I have ever had to write. My difficulties lie with both the thematic content of the book and the stylistic qualities. The writing is rich with allegory and metaphor, filled with theology, philosophy, and archetype. However, it is not an easy book to read both because of the writing style and the horrendous violence. Readers should be aware that this is not a book for the faint of heart and that knowledge of some biblical history would be helpful in understanding the novel.

The story is about a boy, his father, grandfather, and close family friend named Tom who go out for a hunt. This is to be the eleven year-old boy's first buck hunt and he is to kill his first buck. Throughout the book, the only name we are privy to is Tom's. The others are just the boy, his father, and his grandfather. The year is 1976 and they own a 640 acre ranch in northern California where the hunt is to take place. The story is told from the vantage point of the adult boy who remembers these events. A poacher is discovered on the land through the viewfinder on the father's rifle. He gives his rifle to the boy to look through and the boy shoots the poacher dead with one shot. As the boy says, "I was trained to raise a shotgun and fire..." and "Some part in me just wanted to kill, constantly and without end." The boy smiles after the kill and doesn't appear to feel remorse but everything in their lives changes after this happens.

The boy feels more remorse in the killing of a buck than he ever feels for the dead man. Talking about the buck he says that "What I knew was that he wanted to live. Something I could never have felt for the dead man, the pull of a trigger too easy, a trigger something that makes us forget what killing means. But in my hands I could feel the pulse of the buck's neck, the panic in him...."

The question becomes what to do with the dead man. Should it be reported to the authorities or should they bury him and pretend it never happens. What they do instead is hang him up like a buck in their camp, covering him with a burlap sack. It is still up in the air as to what will happen with the authorities, if anything, and dissension abounds. The boy is pummeled by his father and his grandfather thinks about killing him, even holding a knife to the boy's neck at one point. The boy says "What we had to fear was inside me, and he was not able to reach that. His fists did nothing. And I think he knew." "There are times I get excited and think I did something beautiful in killing that poacher." Tom wants to report everything to the authorities, the father wants everything to just go away and the grandfather feels murderously towards the boy.

Almost each chapter starts with a reference to something from the bible or mythology. "The bible celebrates many killings." Cain and Abel are mentioned frequently, as are Jesus, the Greek Gods, Noah, Pan, David and Goliath, Medusa and even mermaids. For those who are not familiar with Cain, he was the first-born in the bible who killed his brother Abel, the first fratricide. There are those who believe Cain was not truly Adam's son but the spawn of the devil. There are references to the boy acting as if he were a snake, crawling low down and slithering to the spot where the dead poacher lay. "I slithered my way up that steep canyon slope, my belly in the dirt, and I refused to be left behind. I did not pause or rest, and I kept that rifle clenched in my fist and wouldn't let go. Taste of dirt, of all that has rotted and decayed and lain dormant, all that waits and then is released."

Evolution and geology are also examined, both exalted and feared, as the author talks about neanderthals, giants, and the turns of the earth through time and circumstance. Still, killing and death remain connected to everything. "Dinosaurs happened in a different world. But killing is still with us. Killing is a past world that overlaps with ours, and if we can reach back into it, our lives are doubled." "Our history was somewhere in all that we had killed, and it was a history, certainly, without words, a history that could be told only in shapes with more direct corollaries."

The boy is ridden with plagues - brambles, poison oak, weights too huge for him to bear, isolation, exhaustion and hunger. The biblical elements are important aspects of this novel. Regarding Cain, "Part of us will act according to instinct, and that will never change. And one of our first instincts is to kill. The Ten Commandments is a list of our instincts that will never leave us." "Born into a world of butchery, a child will embrace butchery and find it normal. Or at least I did."

The writing is visceral and the themes frightening. Sometimes it feels like the story is written in a train of consciousness and at other times it feels like it is wrought out with every sentence ordered and placed in its proper space. The landscape as a living thing plays a huge role in the telling of this tale and the human as landscape also is important. "my grandfather a mountain and without age." The book is very difficult to read. It's style reminded me of Cormac McCarthy, a writer I have difficulty reading. Thematically, the violence and the horrors were like a gut shot. I felt like I bled out while reading this book. If that is a sign of a great book, then that is what this is. If that is a sign of a book that kills the reader, then it can be interpreted that way as well. So how do I rate it. Is it a '1' or a '5'. I have to rate it a '5' because I am reeling from its intensity and significance. It is a book I will not soon forget and David Vann has a dark brilliance in him.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 1 out of 5]

To Write Does Not Make Right

An eleven-year-old boy goes up the mountain in a pickup truck with his father, his grandfather, and a family friend, for the first day of the hunting season. It is his moment to enter manhood, to bag his first buck, and he is possessed by the urge to kill. His father sees a poacher on their land, and shows the boy through the crosshairs of his loaded rifle. The boy pulls the trigger; the poacher dies. All the rest follows from this moment, and in a way leads to it.

As a writer, David Vann has two huge things going for him. He is a master of words, comparable to Faulkner, Hemingway, or the poet James Dickey in Deliverance, another story of a wilderness trip gone horribly wrong. And he clearly writes out of some deep personal trauma that he cannot shake off. The only other book of his I have read, Legend of a Suicide, is an avowed attempt to come to terms with his father's suicide. The same mixture of intense love and hatred is found here, and although the specific trauma is less clear, it is obvious that this is the work of a deeply wounded man. That is both Vann's strength and his liability.

I want to focus on only one aspect: Time. Had this story been written in the present, either in the voice of the boy, or that of an omniscient narrator, it would have had an impact rather like that of William Golding's Lord of the Flies ; the perspective of time would not be an issue. But right from the first paragraph you see a huge contrast between the assured, sophisticated style of the present-day writer and the young boy years before who is the nominal first-person narrator. This contrast makes it impossible to confine the book solely to a weekend in 1978. Something must have happened in the intervening 35 years. Other than a certain facility with words, what has the boy-man learned in this time that makes it possible for him to look himself in the eye? I do not necessarily look for redemption, and total resolution may be impossible, but I do expect some growth in understanding and self-knowledge, some personal transformation that can at least begin to address the moral consequences of murder. Alas, I did not find them.

Consider three possible time-frames: (1) the immediate story of the next 48 hours in the woods; (2) the practical details of the next few weeks when they get back to town and either do or do not explain the deaths (for there will be more than one) and other consequences of the hunt; and (3) whatever personal disintegration or growth takes place over the next three decades.

Vann is superb on the 48-hour scale, painting in horrific detail the quarrels between the men, the difficulty of disposing of the body, and the boy's botched and bloody slaughter of his stag, the greatest possible contrast to his long-distance shooting of the poacher. But he entirely ignores the other two time-frames. Anyone who, like me, read long into the night anxious to find out what happens next will be sorely disappointed; the book just stops. The author (who has written to me directly) does not think this matters, but I do. It is incredible that there would not have been some police investigation into at least some of the deaths and gunshot wounds they left in their wake. And even if nobody in the family was ever indicted, the very fact of having to deal with the law would force them to form some kind of story in their own minds, and be the first step towards whatever changes might take place in the following decades. Without it, and without clear evidence of acquired wisdom on the part of the older narrator, everything needs to be tied up on the mountain itself—and morally at least, I don't think it was.

Instead of moving forward, Vann does the opposite, going back to the very beginning of time: to Cain the first murderer, Abraham and Isaac, the passion of Jesus, and an assortment of pagan myths into the bargain. Killing, he implies, is hard-wired into the human DNA; there is no escaping it. Virtually every chapter begins with a similar meditation, quickly becoming repetitious when it is not simply nihilistic or blasphemous:

The beast is what makes the man. We drink the blood of Christ so we can become animals again, tearing throats open and drinking blood, bathing in blood, devouring flesh, remembering who we are, reaching back and returning.

Worse, he begins to cast the present-day characters in this archetypal mold. The grandfather, for instance, becomes the fierce God of the Old Testament and is made to do things quite at odds with the diabetic decrepitude of his physical condition. I suppose it is a magnificent tightrope act so long as you don't look down, but about halfway through the book, I suddenly saw it for what it was: melodramatic grand-guignol cloaked in spurious philosophy. Before long, I was actually bored, reading on only for a denouement that I wasn't even allowed.

It seems that David Vann is still fueled by his need to deal with childhood trauma; it gives him authenticity and strength. But that in itself is not enough. I find something self-indulgent in using words to wallow in shame, loathing, and degradation; to merely recreate the experience is not to learn from it. The ability to write does not make it right.

[Tamara Agha-Jaffar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Goat Mountain by David Vann is not for the faint of heart. Deceptively simple, the story is dark and unsettling.

The narrative unfolds in the first-person point of view of a man recalling a specific hunting trip he took when he was eleven years old. With his father, his grandfather, and his father’s best friend by his side, he makes the annual trek to the family ranch on Goat Mountain every fall to go deer hunting. Although he has been on the deer hunt many times in the past, this time is different. This time he is actually considered old enough to fire his rifle at a buck. He is eager to taste his first kill.

When they arrive at the family ranch, they see a poacher in the distance. The father hands his son a rifle so he can view the poacher through his scope. It takes only a split second, but in that split second the boy does something that changes their lives forever. He intentionally shoots at and kills the poacher.

In this haunting and unsettling story, David Vann explores what it means to be human. He asks the same questions William Golding asked in his 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. Is bestiality intrinsic to our nature? Is it ever present, hovering under a thin veneer of civilized behavior, ready to surface at the first opportunity? What code of ethics, what rules operate when we are isolated in the wilderness, far from the social, cultural, and moral norms of society?

The wilderness setting and harrowing events are heavily imbued with an atmosphere regressing to a primal time and place. Atavism is stretched to its limits. References to the biblical story of Cain and Abel abound, as do echoes of ancient myths, especially Oedipus. The companionship and bonding that presumably take place among men on hunting trips is missing. Theirs is a contentious relationship with constant quarrels that frequently deteriorate into fists and blows and even threats of murder. The characters seep into the landscape, almost becoming a part of it. The boy imagines monsters and dinosaurs traipsing the earth as he slithers across the terrain like a snake. He admits to feeling greater kinship with hunter-gatherer societies than with his own time and place. He sees the act of killing as wired into our nature since the beginning of time. He lusts to kill. And it is only after he has shot the buck, witnessed its agony and heard its deafening screeches as it struggles to survive, does he begin to question his assumptions about killing.

This is not an easy read. The prose is heavy, intense, and saturated with explicit detail. The language is visceral, at times too heavy, too conscious of itself, too anxious to hammer the point home. The graphic violence borders on being gratuitous. The description of killing the deer, gutting it, and dragging its dismembered corpse back to camp extends for several interminably agonizing pages. It is in stark contrast with the clinical, dispassionate nature of shooting the poacher. The savage nature of the boy is fully brought home as he bites into the raw liver and heart of the buck he has just killed. As they watch blood dribbling down his chin, his father and grandfather bequeath on him the honorific title: “Now you’re a man,” they say.

A haunting and provocative novel that poses questions about human nature, about kinship, and about actions and their consequences. It provides no answers. The adult narrator seems satisfied with merely describing a harrowing experience of his childhood without articulating in what ways—if any—it has transformed or impacted him.

Recommended with reservations as this is not a book for everyone.

[Jelena Milošević · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brutalno, mučno, kod nekih delova izaziva nagon za povraćanjem, iritantno. Opisi prirode fascinantni i zastrašujući. Od mene jaka četvorka, njegova Legenda o samoubistvu je itekako bolja i zanimljivija.

[Jean Ra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es curioso mientras ayer pensaba en esta novela y ensayaba qué ideas me despertaba, me di cuenta que muchas de sus cualidades son los defectos que le atribuí al El Valle del óxido de Philipp Meyer, cosas tales como narración muy parsimoniosa, con avances narrativos y giros muy atenuados, visión pesimista del mundo, lenguaje de gran sobriedad y otras cosas. También en ambas novelas hay una página de agradecimiento y en ambas se menciona al irlandés Colm Tóibín, que por lo visto el hombre está en todas las salsas y saraos.

¿Entonces?

Tras darle un par de vueltas me doy cuenta que la escritura de David Vann, que a su manera también persigue la senda de Cormac McCarthy, me ha resultado mucho más convincente. Su talante no es el de recrear un realismo social al estilo Steinbeck, su ánimo es más metafísico, es una búsqueda impulsos esenciales en la psique humana a la vez que toma numerosos símbolos, insufla diversos elementos culturales como el afecto por las armas de fuego y las referencias bíblicas, que tienen un efecto más que evidente en su capa más metafórica que dirige la historia de estos cuatro hombres que se dirigen a Goat Mountain para realizar su cacería anual de ciervos y en la que el narrador, un muchacho de 11 años, comete una atrocidad que tuerce el rumbo de la narración y la sumerge en la oscuridad, en la cual el personaje del abuelo a la vez funciona como símbolo del superyó y gran patriarca furibundo.

Tenía interés por leer Goat Mountain desde su publicación en España, allá por 2014. Recuerdo una reseña que leí en papel en El Periódico dónde se hablaba de ese empleo de la estructura psíquica establecida por Freud, en la que el narrador, que escribe el texto habiendo pasado varias décadas, debe lidiar sus acciones con la conciencia, representada por su padre; el ello, encarnada por Tom, un amigo de la familia, que parece el menos machirulo de todos; y el abuelo es el superyó, una figura terrible e invencible, que en algún punto es perfilado como un ser omnipotente más viejo que la religión. Por ello, ya estaba avisado de la peculiar naturaleza de esta novela y no me ha pasado por alto todas esas resonancias que laten en su fondo. Lo curioso es que ese detalle se me haya quedado grabado por diez años, de forma que me ha servido para comprender mejor los manejos de Vann. Además, el autor también revela -de esa forma oblicua suya- que la cabra que nombra a esa montaña también funciona como metáfora del macho cabrío, es decir, del demonio, omnipresente en los actos de violencia abordados en la novela.

Casi en cada capítulo tiene varios pasajes de referencias bíblicas, en las cuales se reflexiona sobre el mal y también se menciona y trata la parábola de Abel y Caín, es decir, un clima familiar violento, y el pecado fundacional, pues el muchacho a sus once años realiza un aprendizaje terrible durante esa cacería de pesadilla. Por lo cual, si bien la trama puede ser leída sin problemas, te das cuenta que su mínimo desarrollo es porque su principal carga está en el fondo, en como se dibuja a una conciencia que choca contra los ardides del diablo.

No sé si tomaría un par de decenas de ejemplares para luego repartirlos en las puertas de los locales de los evangélicos. Desde luego les daría gusto al principio, verían confirmados algunos de sus preceptos, pero al final les acabaría decepcionando porque no se trata de una obra beata, más bien como esas nociones dogmáticas conducen a sus personajes hacia la brutalidad y el desastre.

Al principio me pesó un poco esa escritura morosa de Vann, hasta que me di cuenta la gran variedad de vocabulario, en como está engarzado con artesanal cuidado, de forma que la frase le queda fluida y te das cuenta que es mejor dejarse llevar por el lenguaje antes que no representar mentalmente una película en tu cabeza mientras lees, por más que muchas frases aludan a acciones. El talento de Vann, y dónde me falló Meyer, es en como aborda una multiplicidad y variedad de detalles de cada momento, de los estímulos sensoriales, para crear un efecto envolvente que se sostiene efectivamente por la lengua. La versión en español la firma Luis Murillo Fort, viejo conocido para los lectores de Cormac McCarthy en castellano, lo cual ofrece una garantía de calidad, que se respeta la esencia y la sutil potencia que Vann inyecta en su estilo. Las variaciones son sutiles, no se siente el peso de la redundancia y quizás porque cada capítulo está hábilmente estructurado para que ocupe de 7 a diez páginas, cerrándose con plena lógica, consigues leer invirtiendo una cantidad razonable de paciencia.

David Vann me ha sorprendido y agradado. Comprendo por qué hace quince años primero Alfabia y luego Penguin Random House ha ido publicando varios de sus títulos, que no cuentan con las cualidades de las obras más comerciables, pero sabe equilibrar su estilo oscuro e introspectivo con una narración inquietante y honesta, no se recrea en su sadismo ni tampoco engaña con píldoras de ingenuidad. Hace años que no publican para el mercado en español de más títulos suyos, pero yo en cambio buscaré esos otros libros que fueron publicados, me gustaría comprobar si su talento también florece en esos otros títulos.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for the hysteria of the violence, for the Oedipus Tyrannus level of violence; for the way David Vann is willing to go this far.

David Vann mostly reminds me of David Vann. There is also something here in the reading experience that reminds me I'm mortal, and I feel a wrenching understanding, as I read forward, that unless I close the book and put it back on the shelf I'm going to be brought to a level of primal violence that I hadn't been able to imagine being inscribed in language before.

[Anna Carina · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 Sterne

Ein Kammerspiel in der Natur. Die Spannung von Weite und engem Innenleben des Icherzählers und der anderen Figuren, wird nicht produktiv genug ausgeschöpft.
Es ist mehr eine Projektionsfläche, ein Symbolträger als interessante psychotische Struktur.
Dafür enthält das Buch in der Erzählung zu viel Brüche, die einer plausiblen Erzählperspektive eines gleichgültigen 11 Jährigen entgegen stehen.
Es ist nicht dicht genug erzählt und bricht durch diffuse und redundante Stellen, die keinen neuen Aspekt hinzufügen etwas auseinander.
Vann setzt hier eindeutig mehr auf Schockmomente als auf ambivalente, differenzierte Strukturen.
Die gewählte Form passt nur bedingt zu der archaisch-mythischen Schwere, die transportiert werden soll.

[Miroslav Maričić · Rating 2 out of 5]

Одлазак у лов на јелене као обичај, разонода и породична традиција, у коме се, у виду иницијације, постаје мушкарац за ову групу од четири члана постаје портал ка упознавању ђавола. Сама Јарчева планина и представља синоним за ђавоље место, место где се људи претварају у звери и где све што представља цивилизовани кодекс понашања напросто не важи. Дечак од једанаест година одлази у лов са дедом, оцем и Томом, кућним пријатељем, а оно што је требало да представља иницијацију претворило се у трагедију и борбу на живот и смрт. Дечак на почетку књиге убија другог ловца, или ловокрадицу, без разлога, мотива или неког логичног разлога, са велике раздаљине и без осећаја кривице. Сви морални кодекси су нарушени на самом почетку, путеви хуманости су избрисани и жиг звери постаје очигледан на лицима четворочлане групе. Пријавити или не пријавити убиство и шта учинити са телом убијеног? Да ли једни другима сада могу да верују и да ли су се све ове године уопште и познавали и живели једни са другима? И да ли уопште има изласка из замке коју је поставио сам ђаво у шумама Јарчеве планине?
„Зарио сам зубе у зид срца и било је тако глатко и гумено да сам морао да га сасвим прислоним уз лице. Моји зуби нису били створени за ово, нису били довољно оштри, па сам морао да трзам главом док сам гризао и кидао мишић. Испустио сам нож и држао срце обема рукама, и опет сам се био претворио у звер, док сам затворених очију жвакао и осећао укус крви и меса у устима.
Сада си човек, рекао је деда.
Сада си човек, рекао је мој отац.“
Оно што недостаје овој књизи је мотив. Кафка је развио свој кафкијански мотив који се одликује одсуством мотива, али одсуство мотива у књизи Јарчева планина је апсолутна немогућност схватити разлоге толиког насиља које је описано у књизи. Дечак убија незнанца, без разлога, сукоби међу члановима породице и страх код оца и унука од деде који је звер и истинска опасност и због кога унук спава са пушком. Јелен је убијен, али описи његовог черечења, као и описи черечења несрећног незнанца су у најмању руку одвратни и непотребни. Углед и покушај поистовећивања са Кормак Макартијем у књизи Божје дете је очигледан, а то је једина књига коју од Кормака Мекартија не бих више читао, управо због тог прекомерног насиља, месарских описа и одсуства мотива приликом злодела. Овакву књигу не могу подвести под уметност и оправдати овакав текст реченицом осврни се око себе сличне се ствари дешавају не држи воду, једноставно не желим да верујем да је ово будућност људског рода и да овакви обичаји постоје било где. Жао ми је, мени се књига није допала и не бих је препоручио мојим пријатељима са којима делим љубав према књижевности, баш као што не бих препоручио ни Божје дете од Кормака Макартија.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first review for BookBrowse (unfortunately, it’s a subscription service, but you can read a snippet here). To my utter amazement, the editor got back to me today with personal feedback from the author: “What a smart, thoughtful review. Please thank Rebecca for me for all her hard work and generosity. Best, David” (!!!!)

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author has constructed a wide beautiful splendid vista tainted by a stream of flowing hot red blood with great sentences with a visceral and fluid prose.
Generations of blood being spilled, he takes you through the cycle with some reflection back to Cain and Abel and digs in to try to find the why and self discovery through killing carried out by a one young man, our main protagonist and voice, makes him wonder on ones falls and worth.

This story ends a cycle of blood and paths of blood that the author has been living through in his characters of his stories and his own family strains.
You feel his voice, his battles with existence, humanity, and the bonds that tie of kin, crossing lines of no return through a road of danger and death.
This tale takes you through the emotions and reflections on the world of the main protagonist and his world gone Dante inferno and Blood Meridien in one, I feel the Cormac McCarthy strain of storytelling and that wonderful choice of writing in a unique and distinctive narrative.
A warning there is deep reflection on the main protagonists religious belief and scenes of hunting involved, so do not be surprised or disappointed when you come to its dealings.

David Vann has a prose and voice that the reader may know of, this novel comes to finalise in his dealings with death, loss, and sacrifice, this story marks a great point in his writings timeline.
One can not help but feel excited and expectantly wait upon his next novel, on what road he shall traverse and what characters he shall craft with great skill.

Looking for buck now. Curved antlers in the dead dry branches on a hillside of scrub, or a brown patch of hide standing under a sugar pine, or lying in the shade. Only so many shapes and colors as deer could be, and all the rest was background. Eyes trained to let background fall away, eyes trained to disappear the world and leave only a target. Eleven years old now, and I'd been shooting this rifle for two years, looking for bucks since before I could remember, but this hunt was the first time I'd be allowed to kill. Illegal still in age, but old enough finally by family law.

Facing uphill, I couldn't see what was happening on the other side. If the tires went off the edge, I wouldn't know until I felt the tilt, and by then it would be too late. I could try to jump, but I'd already be falling through air. Gravity the most terrifying thing in this world, the pull into the void.

I followed, and when I looked back, Tom was following behind me. A figure transformed in a single moment, in that one pull of a trigger. Slack shoulders, head down, rifle held loosely in one hand, a figure refusing to be who he was, where he was, a figure refusing time, also, still holding on to the belief that time could be turned back. Even at seven years old, I despised him, found him weak, but I was a kind of monster, a person not yet become a person, and so it was possible to think that way.

The flies crawling in short jerks, so that there was never duration, only charge. A shifting image, moment to moment and within each moment, but we could never see how or why. I’ve tried to remember what I saw that day, tried to remember many times, but memory insists on causation and meaning, on a story. Each thing that is leads to the next thing, and there’s a reason for that. What I want to recover, though, is that moment in which there was no good or bad but only gravity, and there was no causation but only each moment, separate and whole. Because that was the truth.

Why is it that we hunt? Isn’t it to return to something older? And isn’t Cain what waits for us in every older time?
When we woke late in the day, it was to prepare for the evening hunt. The air freshened, no longer heavy and dead. A promise at the end of everyday, a quickening. The shadows of the trees extending beyond measure, smooth dark strips all angled in unison. Each yellow blade of grass in the meadow aligned also, inscribed, etched into existence, and the tallest of the ferns along the creek casting primeval banded markings a mirror of water.
The breeze in the tops of the pines had increased, and this gave urgency to our movement. My father and grandfather and Tom gathered their rifles and shells, canteens and binoculars, dark jackets and hats. Voiceless shapes in that forest, each grim and content, awakened from the shadows.
We could have been any band of men, from any time. The hunt a way to reach back a thousand generations. Our first reason to band together, to kill.

We pushed our way into his oblivion and just kept going, the land falling down in a slow curve. The sun failing, winking along the farthest ridge and then gone, the sky still bright, the planet turning beneath us. Each of us alone now, separate on that hillside, hearing our own footsteps and blood against the rise of a breeze, the hot air from low in the valley making its way upward.

 

Read the Interview i had with this author in the past @ http://more2read.com/review/interview-with-david-vann/

Read a recent interview about this novel conducted by a Goodreads friend of mine Will @ http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/594438560

Review also @ http://more2read.com/review/goat-mountain-david-vann/

[Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm still not sure, at the end of its page count, that I know entirely what this novel was about. Sure it follows three generations of men from the same Cherokee Indian family; sure it's got heavy themes of violence, murder and all the psychology that goes with it and sure it's about the father-son bond and how strong it can be in the face of adversity or better still how easily broken it can become.
But in amongst all this heavy theming there is overly flowery writing which falls clumsily into tangents unrelated to anything else. Parts like this I found myself reading with only a vague interest and almost no recollection of what I'd just read. It's like David Vann deliberately set out to write a novel of confusing genre, almost as if he tried to create a new religious history meets thriller meets literary exploration of the human condition genre. Which I think could aptly be named pretentious.
I do maintain though, that David Vann is an immensely talented writer whose prose possesses a dark beauty that is unrivalled. This story requires a monumental amount of concentration despite it's relatively average length and is for readers who enjoyed books like Cormac McCarthy's The Road or films like No Country For Old Men.
Dark, violent and twisted Goat Mountain has the makings of a cult classic, but with claims like that comes also the sheer almost unreadable-ness of pseudo-historical literary fiction masquerading as overtly violent gun porn.

[Aleksandra S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Nema mnogo toga što smo u stanju da uradimo a da je starije i čovečanskije od paljenja vatre. Način na koji plamen opkoljava komad drveta i osvetljava, kako taj plamen izgleda meko i kako se čini da se ama baš ništa neće desiti drvetu. Plavkasto, raspoznatljivo u plamenu, da bi se potom pretvorilo u nešto crno i neprimetno, sve dok potpuno ne nestane. Plamen je nesalomiv. Može poprimiti bilo koji oblik, ali svaka promena ide glatko, svaka njegova ivica je obla, svaki novi plameni jezik se rađa iz onog prethodnog, koji nestaje. Jedino vatra i voda kao krajnju posledicu imaju osećaj misterije, suočavanje sa onim što bismo mogli da budemo, ali vatra je neposrednija. Uz vatru se nikada ne osećamo usamljeno. Vatra je naše prvo božanstvo.“

Život koji je pakao. Pakao koji je život. Noćna mora. Oboje. Van je filozof, ja da vam kažem. On konstantno preispituje, istražuje, pokušava da dokuči to nešto metafizičko, a stvarno, da je to briljantno! Ako vam se i učini da ta filozofska nota predugo traje, vrlo brzo ćete promeniti mišljenje jer vas nečujno vrati na „pravi“ tok radnje.

Knjiga govori o dečaku, njegovom ocu, dedi i bliskom porodičnom prijatelju Tomu koji odlaze u lov. Ovom jedanaestogodišnjem dečaku ovo će biti prvi lov na jelene i prvi ulovljeni plen. Čitavu priču pripoveda dečak, sada već odrasla osoba, vraćajući se u prošlost. Na tom svom putu da „postane muškarac“, dečak otkriva lovokradicu u šumi koju će, kako izgleda, bez trunke kajanja i sa osmehom na licu, usmrtiti iz očeve puške. Time će se apsolutno sve u njihovim životima promeniti...

„Buljio sam u te oči. Nisam mogao da odvratim pogled. Mrtve oči imaju drugačiji život, u njima nema straha, suzdržanosti i kalkulacija. Ima nagosti. Prihvatanja.
...
Teško je znati šta je mrtvima potrebno i šta hoće. Nikada nisam čuo mrtvačev glas. Sve u vezi sa njim bila je samo glasina. Da sam bio tu dok je bio živ, znao bih šta sada treba da radim. Kaži mi, rekao sam. Kaži mi, šta da radim.“

Skoro svako poglavlje započinje nekom od referenci na Bibliju jer: „Biblija slavi mnoga ubistva.“ Često se spominju Kain i Avelj, Isus, grčki bogovi, Noje, Pan, David i Golijat, Meduza, pa čak i sirene.

„Isus je prekršio zakon, ukinuo je granicu između živih i mrtvih. Sudar naša dva sveta nije mogao a da ne bude katastrofalan. Isus je pustio mrtve u naše živote, poslao ih da lutaju po zemlji, oslobodio utvare i demone kojih se sada plašimo, napao svet živih svim oblicima zagrobnog života, svim stvorenjima iz pakla, puštenim iz paganskog, demonskog Hada. Nema više reke i čamdžije da nas rastave, pa kada padne noć, svuda osećamo njihovo prisustvo i njihov dah što ne dolazi iz pluća.“

Evolucija i geologija se takođe preispituju kroz delo, a Van govori i o neandertalcima, divovima i kruženju Zemlje kroz vreme i raznorazne okolnosti. Ipak, ono što sve ovo povezuje jesu smrt i ubijanje. Priroda je tu kao ogledalo za mračne duše Vanovih likova.

„Naša istorija je bila negde u svemu što smo ubili, i to je bila istorija, svakako, bez reči, istorija koja se mogla ispričati samo u oblicima sa direktnim posledicama.“

Priča je u potpunosti zastrašujuća, brutalna, mračna, nasilna, ali i, na jedan doduše čudan način, uzbudljiva, pa ćete iz nje izaći obogaćeni za neka nova saznanja. I ne samo o sebi već i o svemu oko vas. Možda je jedan od najvećih uspeha ove knjige taj što uspeva da pokaže i onaj treći nivo bivstvovanja izvan nagona i morala. Tokom čitanja, bićete podvrgnuti neverovatno bolnim scenama i nekim jako intenzivnim meditacijama o religiji, paklu i nasilnom iskustvu. Proza je gotovo poetična, sa primesama onog otrovnog bršljana i trnja kojima obiluje priroda. Pa sad, kako ko shvati. (Ne)dovoljno duga priča, teška za proživeti i prihvatiti, ali i moćna i fascinantna u svemu prikazanom.

I na kraju, neće svi ni uživati u knjizi iako sama reč uživanje nikako ne funkcioniše u kontekstu ove knjige. Meni je bila izuzetna i preporučila bih je svakome ko smatra da ovako nešto može da istrpi.

[Mish · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was 1978 when an 11-year-old boy will get his opportunity to hold a rifle and kill his first buck on an annual hunting trip in Californian mountains, with his father, grandfather and a family friend Tom. It was the one event that the boy was eager and revved up to do. When the family enters the gate to their property, they spot a poacher who has trespassed.

The series of events that happens afterwards will cause devastating consequences on both the men and the boy. Their opinions on a solution to the problem will be divided; they will turn against each other, result in physical violence and threats to have their way, or be heard, and the boy will sleep at night with the protection of a rifle by his side.

I read David Vann’s book Dirt earlier this year and loved it. I don’t think I’ve come across a writer who can brings out the best and worse of a dysfunctional family as he has, and to delve into mental state of a twisted and screwed up mind is remarkable. But I do believe he took it one notch further - he created savages.

Even before the disastrous event there is an indication that the adult men were not the nurturing type. It caused doubt in my mind as to whether the boy’s behavior has something to do with the way he was raised or bought up? Or was it in his nature; something evil hidden inside of him, ready to erupt? There is a ritual after a killing of the first buck that you’re expected to preform to prove you’re man. And when the boy eventually killed his buck, he was ecstatic, which bought on a bizzare and psychotic behavior that was terribly unsettling to the reader. It seemed like it was a ritual that was known and taught to the boy by the adult men. But it was hard to tell if the boy was caught up in the excitement of the kill and he went too far because what he did was feral and unnatural.

There was no doubt that the writing was magnificent; lyrical and poetic, especially when it combines the harsh scenic mountainside, the barbaric characters and the nature of their sport, it gave it a haunting, eerie sensation to the tone. I really like how the story was told. The boy –who’s name was never revealed - told the book but in his adult form, in today’s time, but reliving that pivotal moment in his life time. It still had that fresh feeling to it, and if you weren’t reminded every so often, you would think it’s happening right now.

However it wasn’t an easy book to understand and read, and that could be due to the deranged mindset of the characters. There were several situations where the characters behavior was far too peculiar for me to fully understand their motivation; the hanging and moving of the body didn’t make sense to me, and I couldn’t see the point in what the father was trying to achieve by doing so. I think if only they reported the incident immediately all this could’ve been avoided.

From what I understand, David Vann originally wrote this story in his early days, as a novella and I personally think I would’ve preferred to read it in that form. Most of compelling moments happened in the first part of the book, from then on it was scattered throughout. There wasn’t a great deal of dialogue, as they weren’t a talkative family, so a lot of it was the narrators biblical ramblings, trying to justify his thoughts and actions to references in the bible. It felt to heavy at the start but I soon lost interest - I would have preferred less of this rambling.

I like this book, but I can't say that it engaged me fully. No as much as Dirt did.

Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for my review copy

[Marko K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postoji dosta stvari koje bih rekao o Vanovoj ''Jarčevoj planini'', jer je ovo jedan od onih romana koji nam pružaju neverovatno iskustvo u vidu zamišljanja ruralnih predela Amerike, mirisanju zemlje i prirode; roman koji nam postavlja toliko psiholoških pitanja a da nas uz to od prve do poslednje strane vodi sa osećajem nelagode i neizvesnosti.

Roman je smešten u 1978. godinu u Severnoj Kaliforniji, kada jedanaestogodišnji dečak odlazi na godišnji lov na jelene sa svojim ocem, dedom i Tomom, očevim prijateljem (samo je Tom u romanu imenovan). Ovo bi trebalo da bude prvi put kada će dečak da ulovi jelena i tako postane deo porodične istorije, ali će već na samom početku da se desi katastrofa, kada će dečak ugledati lovokradicu kog će usmrtiti. Ovo je i trenutak kada počinje zaplet romana koji se zapravo vrti oko pitanja zašto je to dečak uradio, šta ga očekuje nakon završenog lova, šta to govori o njemu kao o osobi, i kako na to reaguju ćlanovi njegove porodice.

''Jarčeva planina'' je sve samo ne brzo i lako štivo. Zapravo, ovo je jedan donekle spor roman, vrlo deskriptivan, koji nas tera da malo dublje porazmislimo o ljudskoj prirodi, a ujedno i vrlo mučan, posebno ako vam nije lako da čitate o ubistvu životinja. Dejvid Van je iskoristio lik dečaka kako bi čitaocima predstavio pitanje - zašto ubijamo, i da li je to u našoj prirodi? Da li zbog toga lovimo? Da li postoji razlika između ubistva osobe i velike životinje? Sjajno izbrušen i napisan roman, neverovatnim rečenicama Dejvida Vana. Vrlo je deskriptivan, tako da će vam se sigurno dopasti ako vas zanima prava amerikana, a ujedno i jako slojevit. Van, na sve to, koristi Bibliju kao reference- zapravo priče o Kainu i Avelju i Isusu Hristu kako bi nam ispričao priču o tome zašto mislimo da su neke stvari moralne a druge ne.

Čitati Vana je jedno veliko iskustvo, i ja ću sigurno uzeti još nešto njegovo. ''Jarčeva planina'' je jedna kvalitetna knjiga napisana u stilu jednog Kormaka Mekartija, koja će nam predočiti ono najgore u nama i naterati nas da zaista porazmislimo o onome što piše. Ako volite teške i ozbiljne knjige, imajte na umu ovaj biser.

[Eva · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book clarifies once and for all the enormous cultural difference between the USA and the Netherlands. This is a deeply disturbing and violent book about a hunting trip gone wrong. The 11 year old son shoots a poacher while on a hunting trip with his father, grandfather and a family friend. The hunting, the boy of 11 years old walking around with a gun, the brutal way the men interact, the way the men live in the wild and completely turn into savages, all very foreign to most Dutch People. And from what i understand from interviews with David Vann, most of the hunting experiences and part of the relationship between the men and the boy are based on reality, his reality.

Vann's writing is beautiful, very poetic. But there's also a lot of repetition in it, especially If he describes the dead poacher, or the surrouding. And he tends to first show and then tell, which annoys me because somehow it seems Vann sees his readers as people who need explaining. Also, the story develops in something absurd. Vann makes a lot of parallels between the story and the bible, about the main characters and Jezus and God. I find those parts somewhat tedious and repetitive.

The ending is a bit of disappointment. I will tell what it was, but somehow i hoped for more. Like another reader described it: a cop-out.

Almost 3,5 stars.

[Josh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fuel. It takes fuel to make anything go. You can have the hottest rod on the block but without gas it just looks like a dang fine ride. That's kinda where I jump off on this novel.

It had all the elements to be my "end the year on a high note" but in the end the gas just didn't burn. Read the blurb and you'll be hooked but for me it just never got there. It's a haunting story, the descriptive writing was at places bordering on strong, but I never got sucked in. I was stalled in first gear and I think any fuel in the tank had water mixed in.

Some have compared to Cormac. I'd bet the author to be a fanboy, but to me it was not in the same league. Kinda like if I suited up to play infield for the Yankees no one would mistake me for Derek Jeeter. Now to get something in hand I can get knocked out before Jan 1st so that this isn't my end to a great literary year......Rick Bass' "the HERMIT'S story" should fit that mold.

[Addy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally!! I’ve finished this very boring, very disturbing book! The beginning of each chapter was excellent and very philosophical. It made you think about the Bible...about life and death. Then, it would drone on about the mountain, about hunting, about things I didn’t particularly care about. The story was good in itself; a messed up story but there was too much thought in the narration and not enough dialogue. I almost felt like I was reading a book for school, so if you are up for something like that, go for it! I think it will be a very long time before I revisit this author. I listened to this on audible and thought the narrator did a great job.

[Jodie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no author like Vann. Death and violence in all its terror, indeed I had to skip the passages on some of the scenes with the buck, I couldn't do it. But I am yet to read more striking and beautiful prose on the void of death and suffering and relief than Vann delivers. This book is not light, but if you read Vann you already know this, but it is breathtaking and unforgettable.