Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142369 in Books
• Published on: 1990-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

To Have and to Hold
Joe, a retired literary agent, and his wife Ruth in their senior years considering how to integrate life experiences while preserving the precious. Read it to find out!
This book is perfection in writing. The plot is spooled out artfully, and not so sparingly that one just gets frustrated- as many new trendy novels do these days. The Spectator Bird is to be appreciated on many levels- how to write a novel, how to develop a plot, how to create characters one cares about, spot on use of language and expression, how to gift one's reader with having learned something about him/herself, how to live one's life-how to have and to hold the people one loves.
If you are reaching the stage of your sixties, you'll feel not a few uncomfortable twinges of how you feel at that 'age of anxiety'. I did througout. But I promise you, you won't be left feeling bereft or hopeless; and you might just be pricked to change your attitude for the better by this book.
Wallace Stegner was a true American treasure of a writer. I found him after his Pulitzer for The Angle of Repose. I've read three more- Crossing to Safety being another of his greatest, I think. Mr. Stegner will keep book clubs and readers everywhere enthralled for years to come.

Stegner hits all his concerns here
Stegner has three narrative concerns, and the SB hits them all. There is Stegner's nearly vice grip hatred of the counter culture. There is the fascination with the decay of the old, and finally, an interest in eugenics, here expressed in a Danish noble and his son who attempt to inbreed with their servants to create a vibrant strain of humans. Overall, SB, like most of Stegner's work, gives a neat view of what a writer can do when he or she tenaciously latches onto a theme, and exploits it to great effect, adding nuance each time. I think Stegner does that here, and that is what prevents SB from being merely a repetition.

Perfect, Funny, and Wise
In all the entangled limbs, passionate melodrama, wild fantasy, and bloody gore of today's pop and contemporary fiction, there is no match for this fine masterwork. In just a little over two hundred pages, Wallace Stegner manages to present a brilliant portrait of a real marriage, an entertaining story of a husband's pursuit of his mother's memory, and an astonishing portrayal of a bereft Danish countess whose beauty and elegance is haunting and sad. Stegner also gets in his digs about the so-called hip writers of his time, while maintaining a wonderful sense of humor and a poetic and rich style second to none. And, in perfectly chosen prose, Stegner describes what it's like to age and to know that one is aging. In his America of the 1970s, anyone past 65 was just plain forgotten and invisible, except when it came time to vote or be bait for a swindle. Nothing on that score is different today. In fact, this novel is filled with universal truths and with a steady current of wisdom that will make your reading it one of the most rewarding experiences you've had in a long time. I guarantee it.