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Title: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 037575931X Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 09 April, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.63
Rating: 4
Summary: fractured and diffuse and quiet and lovely
Comment: Every man and woman must pause near the end of their days and contemplate what has gone before, how it was good and how it could have been better, the paths chosen and the ones passed by. "Crossing to Safety" is the story of a novelist, reaching old age, doing just that.
The book revolves around a friendship between two couples, enduring but often fragmented, as the vagaries of their careers and the varying fortunes of the twentieth century carry them between locales and from good fortune to bad and back. The book addresses the entire married lives of its characters, a span of some 35 years in which they achieve varying degrees of success and failure and, ultimately, all grow old.
It is this 35-year span, in a book of under 300 pages, that defines the novel. Stegner's prose is poignant and specific, and scenes are described with painstaking lushness, but in a novel of this moderate length there are not many scenes. Most of the story is told in restrospect, and the narrator skims over years and decades the way an old man telling a story might. The tale is not of four lives and fortunes but about the link between them, and the story dwells in the months and years when the couples' friendship is strongest.
One of the novel's peculiarities is the distance it holds the reader at, an analytic perspective that asks the us to think about life along with the narrator, but not to experience the emotional events of the book. This makes the book thought-provoking but less compelling, in a visceral, page-turning sense, than it could have been.
And the thoughts the book provokes are not, as might be expected, about the nature and beauty of lifelong friendship. Ultimately, each character, each person, is an entity unto himself. In the end, everyone is isolated and everyone must decide for himself what, if anything, has made his life worth living.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the great 20th century American novels
Comment: Wallace Stegner is one of the great American novelists of the 20th century and this novel is his final one and the crowning achievement of his career.
This is an elegaic work that spans the lives of two couples from their meeting at college till near the end of their lives. It is a deep, profound meditation of friendship, aging, career, & competitive jealousies.
My favorite scenes are the Italian festival in which the protagonist watches as a predawn procession of peasants with candles draw mysteriously closer and closer to him. The last scene, set near the close of one of the protagonists' lives was heartbreakingly beautiful and I couldn't help but cry.
Rating: 5
Summary: Eminently readable book by a literary giant
Comment: Wallace Stegner's works can be enjoyed on two levels that fortunately overlap: as great literature and as a good story. Crossing to Safety is the story of two couples from very different backgrounds who form a lifelong friendship during the Depression when both men are professors at a university. Stegner tracks their lives at each point of intersection with empathy and beautiful prose. The book reads as a meditation on idealism and the individual and group reactions of these inherently 'good' people to the blows that life and circumstances inevitably inflict upon them.
Read this book, and then read everything else Stegner wrote, especially Angle of Repose.
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Title: Angle of Repose (Contemporary American Fiction) by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 014016930X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: May, 1992 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: All the Little Live Things (Contemporary American Fiction) by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 0140154418 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction) by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 0140139397 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: February, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Remembering Laughter by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 0140252401 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Spectator Bird (Contemporary American Fiction) by Wallace Earle Stegner ISBN: 0140139400 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1990 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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