Product Description

Breathtaking in its suspense and beauty, Carry Me Across the Water is the story of a man’s turbulent journey, with his family, through the central years of the twentieth century. Young August Kleinman escapes from Nazi Germany to America, where his mother’s words—“Take the advice of no one”—fate him to a life of boldness and originality, from the poor streets of New York to the marble mansions of industrial Pittsburgh, from old world Hamburg to the jungle islands of the Pacific. Ultimately, near the end of a long and bountiful life, his resolution of a haunting encounter with a Japanese soldier during World War Two finally illuminates, at the deepest levels, the way authentic lives truly unfold. From the writer hailed as “the most mature and accomplished novelist of his generation” (Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio) comes this “exquisitely modulated short novel” (Los Angeles Times), which “eases its silky-smooth way into a reader’s consciousness even as it plumbs the depths” (Newsday).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123318 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-14
• Released on: 2002-05-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Amazon.com Review
A truly gifted short-story writer, Ethan Canin faltered when it came to his second novel, the turgid For Kings and Planets. This time around, though, the author has found an ingenious solution to his problems with the longer form. Carry Me Across the Water is essentially a book of short stories posing as a novel, and here's the surprise--it's pretty effective. The protagonist, August Kleinman, is a wealthy old man looking back on the span of his life. He recalls his early youth in Vienna as the son of a cultured Jewish family; his flight to America in the 1930s with his mother; his war years in the Pacific; his career as the beer king of Pittsburgh; his love for his wife and alienation from his children. This may sound relatively straightforward. Yet Canin shatters this portrait into a series of compelling vignettes, each rearing up unexpectedly and without the crude restraints of chronology.

This format of random flashbacks allows the author to handle a sprawling novel--and a complex life. At the same time, these compartmentalized moments are kept from seeming too small by means of an expansive prose style, which sometimes suggest Mark Helprin in high gear: "Downriver he could see the fierce furnaces throwing blue-black smoke into the air, the crude ore of the land being transformed by human ingenuity into girders and beams that were then floated downstream to ports and train yards and trucking depots, a vast delta of commerce that fanned out from there to all the great hubs of the earth." Throughout, Canin tempers his grandiloquence with a short-story writer's sensitivity to the details of character, and accomplishes exactly what he intended: an involving montage of 20th-century life. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly
August Kleinman, the protagonist of Canin's (For Kings and Planets) latest novel, is 78 years old, rich and wise from a life filled with accomplishments and heartache. Yet as this spare, beautifully realized story opens, he is marveling at the fierce force he discovered in himself one afternoon when he was 18. That day, on his way to watch a friend from his Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Queens practice football at Fordham University, Kleinman slipped into the locker room and impulsively donned a uniform. He can still feel the way he soared through the air and the jolt of the tackle he landed before he was caught. Looking back, Kleinman can clearly see that it has been the sudden flare of this instinctive intelligence and fight, this drive to persist and assert his existence, that has shaped his life, bringing both abundance and loss. Canin deftly laces together the defining stories of Kleinman's life from fleeing Nazi Germany as a child with his mother to fighting the Japanese in World War II, building his fortune, enduring the death of his beloved wife and then his difficult relationship with one grown son. Each story contributes another instance of the fighting spirit and impulse to soar that so characterizes Kleinman. However, what is finally galvanizing and moving about Kleinman's life is not his individuality but his complexity. He is capable of being touched, and he yearns to protect and nurture what he finds good. This work has a resonance and precision that can come only when native storytelling ability and craftsmanship search out the deepest truths. Canin deserves a wide readership because he shows that truth even the truth that comes with age and experience is not boring.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Living alone in a Boston apartment after his wife's death, 78-year-old millionaire beer magnate August Kleinman reviews the defining moments of his life: escape from Nazi Germany as a child, marriage to an Italian Catholic, and the reckless decision to start his own business. But mostly his thoughts turn to World War II and a tragic encounter he had with a young Japanese soldier. For the past 50 years, Kleinman has kept the soldier's letters and drawings and decides to return the keepsakes to the surviving family members in Japan personally. More of a character study than a history lesson, Canin's latest novel (after For Kings and Planets) mentions major postwar events only in passing, instead focusing on family relationships and the simple satisfactions of domesticity. In deference to the values of the World War II generation, the prose style is self-consciously old-fashioned, without a trace of irony or narrative duplicity. This is a well-crafted and frequently affecting novel that only misses the mark in its familiarity. We have heard this story countless times before. Still, Canin's many fans will not be disappointed. Recommended for most fiction collections.
- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

More great work from a gifted writer
I loved this book. It's a riveting story of an old man's struggle to come to terms with a lifetime of decisions and their consequences. As Kleinman mounts a series of small, surprising initiatives to fight the boredom and loneliness of retirement and widowhood and to build a relationship with a grown son who distrusts and misunderstands him, he reflects with conflicting emotion on the experiences that have shaped his life. Canin covers an astonishing range of material here -- recognizing fear on his infant son's face in rough play, feeling peace as he and his mother fled Germany for America without his father-- these are moments so disparate in substance and scale and chronology that in most writers' hands the full story would take 600 pages to tell. Not in Canin's. He moves through them so seamlessly that despite my plans to get a good night's sleep I stayed up to finish the book in one sitting. And the compassion and emotional insight for which the author has earned a much-deserved reputation graces every scene. The CPR class Kleinman takes with his wife is alone worth the price of the book. This scene is less than a page (less than a page!), and reading it brought two friends who had not yet even read the rest of the book to tears.

For those of you who haven't read Canin's other work, I envy you. Read "The Palace Thief" after this one. I challenge you not to read it more than once.

A charming story
August Kleinman, immigrant and self-made millionaire, has grown old. Nearing what he knows to be the end of his life, he now believes that everything he has worked for and achieved -- the money, the business -- are worthless when compared to what he has lost -- his late wife and the time he could have spent with her and their children.

The thread that makes this more than just another "old-man-looks-back" story involves some papers August had removed from a Japanese soldier he had killed during World War II. Keeping the documents which included a love letter, August had them translated and framed after the war. Almost 50 years later, in what may be one of the final achievements in his life, he traveled to Japan and returned the letter to the Japanese soldier's son. The trip, from the memory of the hunting and the killing of the soldier to the son's reading of the letter containing secrets he had not been told, allowed August to make amends, freeing him from the emotional and psychological baggage he had carried for so long.

This was a quick read for me (just a few hours), but this isn't a light read. Canin succeeded in making August a multi-faceted character, both aggravating and endearing. The decisions made by the characters, including August's mother's decision to flee Nazi Germany and August's struggle with Judaism, help to round out the story. Very enjoyable.

Return to Form
After the major disappointment of For Gods and Planets, Canin again displays a mastery of his craft in Carry Me Across the Water. What a pleasure to find a novel that can be comfortably read in a couple of days yet leaves a deep emotional impression. I disagree with the reviewer who complained about the form, which uses flashbacks and cuts between various scenes in the protagonist's life; there's nothing confusing about it, and it works beautifully. I do agree that Canin has brought to bear his skill as a short story writer in conveying the essence of a good novel without the tedium of endless descriptions and meandering plot lines. For those looking for a complex interweaving of many well-developed characters, look elsewhere; this is the story of one man's life, in which all other characters are supporting, existing only through the lens of his aging eyes in order to help us understand how he feels as he approaches the end of his life, and why. Those reviewers who found the man unsympathetic perhaps are just not as familiar with their own irritable side as they hopefully will be eventually. I found the portrait very true to my experience. Canin seems to do much better with older characters; his young people tend to be two-dimensional, but he has a wonderful grasp of the subtleties of the minds of people much older than he is himself.

After For Gods and Planets I wondered whether Canin was capable of writing a good novel. As I finished the last page of this one, I said out loud to myself, "A good book."