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Rattlesnake Farming
Rattlesnake Farming takes place at Christmastime in contemporary Santa Fe at the home of the rattlesnake farmer who hypothesizes that rattlesnake venom contains an antidote to Christianity. A novel about original sin and redemption, a family saga, realistic and magical, this is a remarkable novel, at once hilarious and serious, (The New Mexican) an absorbing and unusual work by a writer of extensive abilities and elaborate imagination. (Joseph Heller)
564 pages, Paperback
First published September 22, 1992
25 people want to read
About the author
Kathryn Kramer
4 booksLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Kathryn Kramer is the author of several novels, most recently Sweet Water, short fiction, and non-fiction articles. She’s currently completing a memoir entitled Missing History: The Covert Education of a Child of the Great Books, about the experience of being brought up in the Socratic tradition. On a volunteer basis she teaches English as a second language to migrant workers in Vermont and has an Undergraduate Collaborative Research Fund grant from the college to work with a student to develop an ESL textbook for this population.
Above from Middlebury faculty page: http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/e...
Kathryn Kramer is the author of several novels, most recently Sweet Water, short fiction, and non-fiction articles. She’s currently completing a memoir entitled Missing History: The Covert Education of a Child of the Great Books, about the experience of being brought up in the Socratic tradition. On a volunteer basis she teaches English as a second language to migrant workers in Vermont and has an Undergraduate Collaborative Research Fund grant from the college to work with a student to develop an ESL textbook for this population.
Above from Middlebury faculty page: http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/e...
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 27, 2016
Rattlesnake Farming is so enormous in so many ways. From the sprawling span of time to the vast cast of characters to the depth of colliding ideologies, at just under 500 pages, this novel may have been, if anything, too short. I confess, I wanted a different ending, but it's as if Kathryn Kramer, the book's author, had told her reader, "You'll want it another way, but it has to be this way," and still I hoped she was lying.
What startles and upsets me is that I've never heard Kramer discussed. She wrote this behemoth novel, executed it so well, and even the meager 11 ratings on Goodreads proves the work is largely ignored, today.
Rattlesnake Farming deserves to be discussed alongside classics. Readers should flock to this book. Yes, the author's ambition fails to translate at times: there are some transitions that seem a bit abrupt, and a few moments throughout that feel a bit limp, but for the relatively few technical mistakes, there are five dozen splendors.
Who's writing today that juggles religion and philosophy, family and friendship and romance and revenge and hope and despair, life, death, afterlife, environment and love all in one novel? And that Kramer does all this so horrifically well, it boggles the mind.
I'll almost certainly need to edit this review as I continue to process the narrative, but I needed to express my thrill at having encountered this book, one I purchased from a library sale because it was in good condition and sounded interesting based on the dust jacket synopsis.
What startles and upsets me is that I've never heard Kramer discussed. She wrote this behemoth novel, executed it so well, and even the meager 11 ratings on Goodreads proves the work is largely ignored, today.
Rattlesnake Farming deserves to be discussed alongside classics. Readers should flock to this book. Yes, the author's ambition fails to translate at times: there are some transitions that seem a bit abrupt, and a few moments throughout that feel a bit limp, but for the relatively few technical mistakes, there are five dozen splendors.
Who's writing today that juggles religion and philosophy, family and friendship and romance and revenge and hope and despair, life, death, afterlife, environment and love all in one novel? And that Kramer does all this so horrifically well, it boggles the mind.
I'll almost certainly need to edit this review as I continue to process the narrative, but I needed to express my thrill at having encountered this book, one I purchased from a library sale because it was in good condition and sounded interesting based on the dust jacket synopsis.
September 10, 2010
I read this book when it was first released because I took a class from the author.
Don't let the professional review put you off. The situations in which the characters find themselves are bizarre but the characters and completely human and understandable.
The thesis of the book seems to be that normal lives are full of such bizarre tragedy and degradation that it is not possible to predict how people will react or to claim that one way of responding makes more sense than the other.
Kramer deals with secrets and the effect of keeping them in her other works. This book address the secrets that we keep, or deny, or ignore as a society. She dramatizes this by creating teenage characters who look honestly at the world in which they live and are so dismayed that they have no appropriate way to respond.
15 years later I still remember vividly the scene in which the teenage daughter discovers her deep sense of betrayal that her father has kept from her the realities of poverty and inequality that surround them.
Read this book. It will surprise you.
Don't let the professional review put you off. The situations in which the characters find themselves are bizarre but the characters and completely human and understandable.
The thesis of the book seems to be that normal lives are full of such bizarre tragedy and degradation that it is not possible to predict how people will react or to claim that one way of responding makes more sense than the other.
Kramer deals with secrets and the effect of keeping them in her other works. This book address the secrets that we keep, or deny, or ignore as a society. She dramatizes this by creating teenage characters who look honestly at the world in which they live and are so dismayed that they have no appropriate way to respond.
15 years later I still remember vividly the scene in which the teenage daughter discovers her deep sense of betrayal that her father has kept from her the realities of poverty and inequality that surround them.
Read this book. It will surprise you.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews