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A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition
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Product Description
Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences—the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.
By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."
"Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. . . . As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway."—Alfred Kazin, Chicago Tribune Book World
"It is an enchanted tale. . . . I have read the story three times now, and each time it seems fuller."— Roger Sale, New York Review of Books
"Maclean's book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren. I love its sound."—James R. Frakes, New York Times Book Review
"The title novella is the prize. . . . Something unique and marvelous: a story that is at once an evocation of nature's miracles and realities and a probing of human mysteries. Wise, witty, wonderful, Maclean spins his tales, casts his flies, fishes the rivers and the woods for what he remembers from his youth in the Rockies."—Publishers Weekly
"Ostensibly a 'fishing story,' 'A River Runs through It' is really an autobiographical elegy that captivates readers who have never held a fly rod in their hand. In it the art of casting a fly becomes a ritual of grace, a metaphor for man's attempt to move into nature."—Andrew Rosenheim, The Independent
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #3230 in Books
- Published on: 2001-10-01
- Format: Deluxe Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 239 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780226500669
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
One of the best-selling audiotapes ever, this title became hard to find recently, as it fell victim to a series of buyouts of various publishers. HighBridge is putting a new cover on this classic reading by Ivan Doig, Montana native and author of This House of Sky.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Exquisite . . . this recording joins the ranks of the few near-perfect matches of reader and author. (Philadelphia Inquirer )
Wise, witty, and wonderful. (Publishers Weekly )
Review
"[Maclean] would go to his grave secure in the knowledge that anyone who''d fished with a fly in the Rockies and read his novella on the how and why of it believed it to be the best such manual on the art ever written--a remarkable feat for a piece of prose that also stands as a masterwork in the art of tragic writing." (Philip Connors Nation )
Customer Reviews
A book you will read more than once.
Norman Maclean began writing late in life, passing away not long after penning this extraordinary piece, depriving us of his gift just as he arrived. The book is actually three short stories but the focus is clearly on the novella "A River Runs Through It". On the surface, the title story is his recollections of his father, a Presbyterian minister, and his troubled but talented brother, with whom he fished. Set in the Montana of Maclean's youth, he paints exquisitely vivid and beautiful word pictures of a land and water and family now gone. At the core is the frustration of the often-futile attempt of trying to help another or trying to save a loved one from their self-destruction. There are passages here which are as wonderfully written as anything in English. Not a page passes without discovering a superbly crafted gem. "So it is...that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed." "It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us." Throughout the tale, his life, his religion, his family, his fly-fishing are metaphors, each for the other. And the words of each are heard in the waters and stone of the rivers. He is haunted, he tells us, by waters. I am haunted by his words which approach poetry.
I am haunted...
When, several years ago, I started reading a lot of fishing books, one title kept cropping up in other books. Every author seemed to defer to A River Runs Through It; it was universally acknowledged to be the greatest fishing story ever written. I dutifully sought it out and read it. I'm sure everyone has seen the movie by now, so I won't be giving anything away when I confess that Paul's death upset me so much that, on that first reading, I hated the book. It was like Old Yeller and the MASH where Henry died and Brian's Song all rolled into one. Returning to it better prepared, I simply enjoyed it for the language and for the bittersweet family story it relates and I learned to love it. Then, in 1992, Robert Redford brought the story to the screen and the beauty of the scenery and some terrific performances, combined with the large chunks of narrative taken directly from the book, resulted in one of the better movies of recent years and cemented the book's place in the pantheon of great American stories.
Amazingly, Norman MacLean, who taught English at the University of Chicago for 43 years, did not publish this book until 1976, after retiring from his teaching job in 1973. I don't know whether he had worked on the story throughout his whole life, as was the case with the posthumous book
Young Men and Fire, but the final product has such beautifully sculpted language, that it would not be hard to believe that it is the end result of four decades of effort. Here is the famous opening:
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.
And, of course, after Paul's death, Norman's father urges him:
Why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
And the story concludes:
Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.
And in between these memorable passages, MacLean unfolds a timeless story of fathers and sons and brothers and their often futile attempts to understand one another and the way in which sport can provide a tie, sometimes the only tie, between them. You will be haunted by the affecting story and by MacLean's crystalline prose in this very nearly perfect book.
GRADE: A+
Warning: This book isn't really about fishing.
A River Runs Through It is quite simply the single greatest book I have ever read. Maclean's language is as terse and economical as any in Hemingway, but Maclean imparts the type of true feeling and emotion into his simple words that Hemingway himself was incapable of producing. A River Runs Through It is not a story about fishing, but rather a tale of family. The family just happens to share a love of fishing, and Maclean's love of waters has more to do with its close association with his family than with the actual fishing that takes place there. It is the family's tragic loss of Paul, the true master fly-fisherman of the clan, that ties Maclean to waters and inspires the closing lines of the novella. A River Runs Through It delves into interpersonal relationships in a manner which grips the reader and makes him/her reflect on his/her own family. Although I am myself an avid fisherman, I am a more avid reader and I can say that for my part, the fishing element of the story is unimportant except for its association with Maclean's family. Maclean's prose is beautiful to point that his description of a common object or occurence could bring the reader to tears. A River Runs Through It is quite simply the most beautiful thing I have ever read. Period.
