Rating: 
Summary: The Living
Review: I read Annie Dillard's The Living through the library and am now buying a copy to send to my sister in Vancouver, B.C. When visiting there, we traveled the area discussed in the book, which has come alive for me now. The protaganist IS the Great Northwest, and as such, the trials, triumphs and tribulations of Ms. Dillard's 'main character' enthrall, delight and dismay - but never disappoint. Much as I have enjoyed her non-fiction, I look forward to more fiction from her pen.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful and moving
Review: I read Annie Dillard's The Living through the library and am now buying a copy to send to my sister in Vancouver, B.C. When visiting there, we traveled the area discussed in the book, which has come alive for me now. The protaganist IS the Great Northwest, and as such, the trials, triumphs and tribulations of Ms. Dillard's 'main character' enthrall, delight and dismay - but never disappoint. Much as I have enjoyed her non-fiction, I look forward to more fiction from her pen.
Rating:
Summary: The Living
Review: Loved it. Gets to the central problem of life as we know it. Death is all around and we don't want to look, but until you do, you can't choose life, you just avoid the question.... comes down to the line from The Shawshank Redemption..."get busy living, or get busy dying". If you liked Cold Moutain, you'll probably like this.
Rating: 
Summary: All the Pretty Children Die
Review: My book club also read this one. While one cannot dispute that Annie Dillard is a wonderful craftsman of words and prose, I didn't feel that she exacted the necessary character attachments and drama for this to be a successful novel. Perhaps we would have been better served had she stayed with her forte: non-fiction. On the plus side, I have not read a more beautiful or perfectly written final paragraph in recent memory, which endeared the book to me more so than it would have otherwise.
Rating: 
Summary: A dark, claustrophobic book
Review: My book group loved it. I was the sole exception. I did not love it. I found it a dark, claustrophic book. Perhaps that was intentional on the author's part - all those big trees blocking out the sun and all. I will admit that the American pioneers hold little faciniation for me, which undoubtedly skews my opinion. I understand that in them there days people probably "reckoned" all kinds of things. I don't think today's prose describing the past needs to be full of idiomatic accents. I reckoned that was distracting more than anything else. So we have a dark dark book full of reckoning AND it is episodic to boot. Episodic, while occassionally an effective liturary devise, can also strike one as a method to use in stringing together vingettes and never fully realizing the characters' depth. So, now I am left with a dark, claustrophobic, episodic novel full of pretentious accents. I know others love this book. It did not work for me
Rating: 
Summary: Start "living." Read Dillard.
Review: Reading a book rarely gets better than reading Annie Dillard. I often reread her nonfiction books. Her writing is insightful, poetic, and moves from page to page with a sustaining ring of truth. Midway through "The Living," Dillard's main character, Clare, thinks to himself, "set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." "The Living" is Dillard's only novel. It is set in the last fifty years of the 19th century, on the Washington coast, roughly twenty miles south of Canada. As Dillard's novel gradually unfolds, we witness her characters enduring the hardships of living and dying as they struggle out their interrelated lives deep in the unsettled Pacific Northwest. "Accidents happened," Dillard observes, "and human bodies were thin-skinned parcels out of which the force of life leaked at a prick . . .all deaths were accidental, or none was, for disease was just as random an accident as injury, and all die. None died prematurely, for death battened on only the living, and all of those, at any age" (pp. 150-51). Dillard's characteristic attention to detail is evident on every page. Her novel includes salty rocks, sawdust, black snails, drizzling rain, dark, dripping trees, choirs of frogs, "the slushy sky," gulls, and the solitary, white summit of Mt. Baker "above the sky, higher than the clouds." At times the movement of the plot seems to slow to the point of no plot, but never to the point of stopping death, for "death was ready to take people, of any size, always, and so was the broad earth ready to receive them" (p. 156). Dillard's writing here is so real that it is hard to believe this novel is pure fiction. This is a 5-star book. I've given it four stars only when measured by most of Dillard's other books. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Start "living." Read Dillard.
Review: Reading a book rarely gets better than reading Annie Dillard. I often reread her nonfiction books. Her writing is insightful, poetic, and moves from page to page with a sustaining ring of truth. Midway through "The Living," Dillard's main character, Clare, thinks to himself, "set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." "The Living" is Dillard's only novel. It is set in the last fifty years of the 19th century, on the Washington coast, roughly twenty miles south of Canada. As Dillard's novel gradually unfolds, we witness her characters enduring the hardships of living and dying as they struggle out their interrelated lives deep in the unsettled Pacific Northwest. "Accidents happened," Dillard observes, "and human bodies were thin-skinned parcels out of which the force of life leaked at a prick . . .all deaths were accidental, or none was, for disease was just as random an accident as injury, and all die. None died prematurely, for death battened on only the living, and all of those, at any age" (pp. 150-51). Dillard's characteristic attention to detail is evident on every page. Her novel includes salty rocks, sawdust, black snails, drizzling rain, dark, dripping trees, choirs of frogs, "the slushy sky," gulls, and the solitary, white summit of Mt. Baker "above the sky, higher than the clouds." At times the movement of the plot seems to slow to the point of no plot, but never to the point of stopping death, for "death was ready to take people, of any size, always, and so was the broad earth ready to receive them" (p. 156). Dillard's writing here is so real that it is hard to believe this novel is pure fiction. This is a 5-star book. I've given it four stars only when measured by most of Dillard's other books. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Pacific Northwest in all its rough glory.
Review: So this was 19th Century Puget Sound before we messed it up with logging, suburbs, freeways, and all the other entaglements of modern life? I'm sorry I missed it; battling I-5 traffic is not nearly as adventurous as trying to fell 500 year old fir trees by burning out the core (it's in the book). A great story; Dillard is a quirky writer, but that makes the book fun
Rating:
Summary: Should Have Been Called "The Dying"!
Review: This is a dreadful, exhausting book. But I've read it three times! Annie Dillard is an unflinching, straightforward writer who has a firm grasp on the strengths and frailties of human nature. She accurately captures the feel of NW Washington "high woods" and the people who settled the area. By the time you finish this novel you will not just feel like you know the characters, you'll feel like you're related to each one of them and have greived their passing. I highly recommend it to anyone who is from this area of the United States - you will recognize the landscape, the attitudes, and certainly the weather. A character states, after a looong spell of rain and overcast skies, "We live in a lidded pot."
Rating:
Summary: Prose craftsmanship at its finest.
Review: This is prose craftsmanship at its finest. Dillard's imagery shimmers; her sentences are watertight. She tells a vast story with prose that is poetic in its economy of language. When Dillar is at her best -- and she is often in this book -- her words ring like church bells
|
