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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 experiencesthe 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: #5837 in Books
- Published on: 2001-10-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 239 pages
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.
From AudioFile
Norman Maclean wrote this work to preserve memories of his late brother, but it's not exactly a memoir or biography. The people are real, but the way the memories bend with the passage of years is evident, Maclean's son notes, since his father penned it after retirement. Ivan Doig reads this tale of male bonding on a Montana river with the personal touch that Maclean himself gave it. This edition includes "On the Big Blackfoot," a disc that includes writing fragments of Maclean, his son's memories of him, and an interview with the author. The bonus disc is well produced, but since it is fragments, it may disappoint those already familiar with the earlier work. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Review
Exquisite . . . this recording joins the ranks of the few near-perfect matches of reader and author. (Philadelphia Inquirer )
Customer Reviews
A great book turned into a good movie
A River Runs Through It is a wonderful story of life in Montana, well, really life in general. In addition to a great story, this book contains some of the best uses of the English language in the 20th century. Highly recommended.
Wonderful
An excellent piece of literary work. From the time I received it, I couldn't set it down.
Not good, not bad
A River Runs Through It deals with tragedy, loss, and other such deep themes, but it's impossible for the reader to distant himself from the realization that much of the tragedy and loss inflicted on the family being explored is, in one way or another, the fault of the family members. While this does not automatically make the situations any less meaningful, it does chip away at the feeling that these tragedies were undeserved or unforseen.
The patriarch of the family is a stubborn, unyielding man who teaches his children by example to ruin another's fishing spot if he has better luck than you that day. His unyielding belief in the Biblical interpretation of a young earth and the scientific evidence of an old one is resolved by a stern splitting of the difference, by averaging the ages and coming up with a "medium aged" earth theory that he lectures to his sons. And when, as little children, they refuse to eat their veggies, the father shouts until he turns red, forces the child to stay at the table until the veggies are eaten, and then gives up in defeat when the child outlasts him.
Is it any wonder, then, when his youngest child grows up to be a free-spirited, gambling, immature man who simply cannot be talked out of his self-destructive tendencies? No one ever reasoned with him growing up - he was taught, by example, from day one that the most stubborn, unyielding person always wins. He was taught to never consider the needs and desires of others as anything but subbordinate to his own. It is difficult for me, therefore, to feel much pity for the bereaved family when the young man finally self-destructs - didn't they see this coming, every moment of every day? Didn't they train the child, every day, for years to reach this eventual moment?
Yes, the story is poignant. Yes, it is beautiful and touching. Yes, it should be read. But it should be read, I think, as a cautionary tale more than as a compassionate one.
