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Title: True North by Jim Harrison, Christopher Lane ISBN: 0-7861-2687-6 Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks Pub. Date: April, 2004 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A SHAGGY OEDIPUS JOKE
Comment: Jim Harrison gives away the punch line to this Shaggy Oedipus story before it even begins. In a one-page prelude, the narrator describes pushing his horribly mutilated father out of a rowboat adrift off the coast of Mexico. One must accompany David Burkett, fourth-generation scion of a family of Upper Peninsula timber barons, for three decades and four hundred pages to reach this incident a second time.
Burkett is a feckless twenty-something when the story opens in the 1960's. Ex-college student, ex-seminarian, he is staying with an alcoholic uncle to escape the rest of his dysfunctional family. The male members of his clan are famous despoilers of nature and of women. David hates his father who is dissapating what is left of the family fortune in ill-considered pursuit of underage girls, including his own daughter.
To expiate the sins of his father, grandfather, and great grandfather, David sets out to write a book exposing their malfeasance. He begins his reasearch by systematically counting stumps on lands his family lumbered, while living a hermit existence in a cabin left him by another relative. And this is one of the happier periods of his life.
Reading this book is like a soggy hike through the woodlands Harrison describes so lovingly and so well. One is depressed and exhilarated at the same time. The scenery is terrific, but the characters, including the narrator, are singularly unattractive. A dog and a Chippewa gardener are the only sympathetic figures in David Burkett's picaresque adventures -- and they are both dead by the time we arrive back at the rowboat.
Harrison is allegedly very popular in France. His writing is called "Mozartean". Do the three sections of TRUE NORTH make it a concerto? Jazz seems the better musical analogy. Riffs on theology, literature, and psychoanalysis are dotted through the narrative in seemingly random manner. The plot meanders like one of the UP trout streams Burkett fishes.
Hemmingway is not on any of the reading lists Burkett is given frequently by other characters, but he looms, unseen, over the story like Banquo's ghost. The Upper Peninsula setting invites comparisons. Burkett has the outdoorsman physicality of a Hemmingway hero, but none of the duende. One can't help noticing an echo, in the rowbat scene, of an old Cuban fisherman disposing of a shark-ravaged marlin.
Rating: 3
Summary: A long short story
Comment: Jim Harrison is a wonderful writer as he demonstrated in "Dalva" and "Legends of the Fall."
In "True North" Harrison again writes well but the story is not worth his effort.
The book is long (more than 400 will-it-ever-end? pages) and the story is shallow. Other reviewers, in a paragraph or two, reveal the plot. It is over before it begins because the ending is at the front of the book.
The main character tries to expiate guilt about ancestral gluttony and perversion by -- you'd never guess -- writing about it.
It's a woodsy bad dad-goofy son yarn tarted up with campfire-tale sex episodes.
Harrison's skillful discriptions and observations remind of his enormous talent, but the story is so trivial and unreal even Harrison can't puff it up into a blaze.
(...)
Rating: 4
Summary: In college we used to "sneak" on to club property.
Comment: I enjoyed this book, more than Mr. Harrison's others. I would say more, but I am just too upset over the way the book was printed. I asked my library to order this book. They did...of course a first edition. I found one typo...what a disapointment...but that is not the half of it....3 chapters...perhaps rewritten after printing....had been type set WRONG!!!! Page line up off, page numbers placement off, font a bit smaller! He is such an important writer, and the carelessness in printing of this book is simply sad. It's Jim Harrison for heaven's sake.
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Title: Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry by Jim Harrison, Ted Kooser ISBN: 155659187X Publisher: Copper Canyon Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Conversations With Jim Harrison (Literary Conversations Series (Paper)) by Robert J. Demott, Robert Demott, Jim Harrison ISBN: 1578064562 Publisher: University Press of Mississippi Pub. Date: 01 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: Eventide by KENT HARUF ISBN: 0375411585 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 04 May, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Winter Morning Walks : 100 Postcards to Jim Harrison (Poetry Series) by Ted Kooser ISBN: 0887483364 Publisher: Carnegie Mellon University Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Off to the Side: A Memoir by Jim Harrison ISBN: 0802140300 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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