Product Description

Unaware that his life is about to change in ways he can't imagine, seventeen-year-old Jesse Matson ventures into the northern Minnesota woods with his father on a cold November afternoon. Perched on individual hunting stands a quarter-mile apart, they wait with their rifles for white-tailed deer. When the muffled crack of a gunshot rings out, Jesse unaccountably knows something is wrong-and he races through the trees to find his dad dead of a rifle wound, apparently self-inflicted.

But would easygoing Harold Matson really kill himself? If so, why?

Haunted by the ghost of his father, Jesse delves into family secrets, wrestles with questions of justice and retribution, and confronts the nature of his own responsibility. And just when he's decided that he alone must shoulder his family's burden, the beautiful and troubled Christine Montez enters his life, forcing him to reconsider his plans.

In spare, elegant prose, Lin Enger tells the story of a young man trying to hold his family together in a world tipped suddenly upside down. Set among pristine lakes and beneath towering pines, Undiscovered Country is at once a bold reinvention of Shakespeare's Hamlet and a hair-bristling story of betrayal, revenge, and the possibilities of forgiveness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63758 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780316006941
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
With flashes of prose as crisp and haunting as the frozen Minnesota setting, Enger's debut opens 10 years after Jesse Matson's father's alleged suicide, as 17-year-old Jesse sits down to write his own version of events. While hunting with his father in the woods surrounding their hometown of Battlepoint, Minn., the young Jesse hears a shot and finds his father dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Adamant that his father could never take his own life, Jesse determines to uncover the truth. While his mother, Genevieve, retreats to her room and his younger brother, Magnus, looks to him for reassurance, Jesse becomes convinced that his uncle Clay actually killed his father. Despite a lack of evidence or support from law enforcement, Jesse hatches a plan to avenge his father's death, bolstered by his deepening relationship with a girl who has plenty of problems of her own. Allusions to Hamlet and Hemingway's In Our Time (Jesse reads both in school) do a little too much foreshadowing, but the landscape is beautifully rendered, and Jesse's confusion is palpable. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School—In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet speaks of that dread of something after death, "the undiscover'd country, from whose bourn no traveler returns," and this dread is realized beautifully in Enger's debut novel. While hunting deer in the northern Minnesota woods on a cold November afternoon, Harold Matson dies of a single grisly gunshot wound to the head. The local officials deem the death a suicide, but 17-year-old Jesse is convinced that his Uncle Clay is responsible for his father's death. The teen is visited by his father's ghost, has a girlfriend whose personal torment could give Ophelia a run for her money, and a bumbling/developmentally delayed relative (Clay's brother-in-law) who knows the truth about two murders for which Clay was responsible. But the elegantly written novel amounts to much more than just its allusions: Enger has taken a classic tale of betrayal, murder, justice, confusion, and forgiveness and created a story that will appeal to any teen who has experienced love and loss or grappled with dark family secrets. Readers might be left wondering what Hamlet would have been like had he survived. Less tragic perhaps, but he would have had an abundance of material for a career as a writer.—Jennifer Waters, Red Deer Public Library, Alberta, Canada
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"[The] combination of gritty realism and poetic landscape portraiture...create a new story of betrayal, adolescent confusion and loyalty."

(Seattle Times Valerie Ryan )

"With flashes of prose as crisp and haunting as the frozen Minnesota setting." (Publishers Weekly )

"Lin Enger's first novel brings the heft of Shakespearean drama to the north woods of Minnesota. In a cleanly-elegant narrative, Enger weaves a winter's tale of betrayal and ghosts, of one son's debt to his father and the wages of vengeance. For the reader, Undiscovered Country is the best kind of discovery-a riveting first novel that's a genuine page turner, and an author whose work bears watching." (Claire Davis, author of Winter Range )

"Lin Enger starts Undiscovered Country with a literal bang and continues to ratchet up the tension. His characters are vivid and complex, and his descriptions of northern Minnesota in winter are astonishing. This retelling of a Shakespearean tragedy is powerful and engrossing." (Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948 )

"This is a novel of luminous sentences that carry us across a landscape of love and loss to a deeper understanding of our own lives, and of our desire to be forgiven and redeemed. It is a joy to read." (Don J. Snyder author of The Cliff Walk and Of Time & Memory )

"At once both otherworldly and shockingly real, Undiscovered Country reinvents the conundrum of love and loss facing a modern-day Hamlet. This first novel by Lin Enger is sincerely rendered and honestly invoked. Such results promise more to come." (Tom Bailey, author of The Grace That Keeps This World )

Customer Reviews

A Reworking of Hamlet Well Worth Reading on its Own Merits
This striking debut novel opens in California with an adult narrator explaining that he's finally going to write down the truth about what happened back home in Minnesota some ten years ago, in what what seems to be the early 1980s (although it often seems more like the '40s or '50s). Jesse's never told his younger teenage brother Magnus the truth -- and this manuscript is going to lay it all out for him. Ten years ago, when Jesse was 17, he was hunting deer with their father in the woods outside Battlepoint, MN. Sitting in his blind, he heard a shot from where his father was a few hundred yards away. He ran over to find the top half of his father's head blown off, in an apparent act of suicide. Although the local authorities confirm this, Jesse was very close to his father (who was also the local mayor and restaurateur) and can't believe he would kill himself.

What ensues is a taut psychological mystery, as Jesse's mother retreats into a depressive shell and Jesse starts poking around, trying to figure out who might have wanted to kill his father and why. This leads him pretty much straight to his father's brother Clay, a knockabout rouge who's never been able to make much of himself. Jesse knows that his still-beautiful mother dated Clay before his father came along, and suspects Uncle Clay of harboring deep resentment against his successful brother. Even though there's no evidence of murder, and his mother tries to dissuade him, Jesse is spurred on by repeated visitations from his father's ghost. The question then becomes whether or not Jesse will require any evidence before deciding his uncle is guilty, and what form his revenge will take if he does decide that way.

Yes, this is a reworking of "Hamlet," but the handling of Jesse's desperate internal struggle feels fresh and vivid, as the teenager struggles with very adult issues he's not quite prepared for. Matters are further complicated by his developing relationship with an immigrant classmate who has her own dire family problems to grapple with. For the most part the writing does a great job of capturing the blinding anger and confusion of a teenager, although at times it does slip into allowing Jesse and his girlfriend to be a touch too articulate or wise. Reworkings of classics are usually either fun romps or a total flops -- this is that rarest of outcomes, one well worth reading on its own merit.

O my prophetic soul! My uncle!
Yeats' words "a terrible beauty is born" seem appropriate here--"cold glitter" would also be fitting. This is a powerful and lyrical story, almost entirely told in a small northern Minnesota town in the dead of winter. Harold, the father of 17-year-old Jesse Matson is shot a quarter-mile away from his son while both are hunting deer. Accident, murder, or suicide? Jesse immediately suspects his father's younger brother Clay, but the authorities are convinced it was self-inflicted. Harold was having business problems and was not a happy man.

Jesse's mother was Clay's girlfriend before Harold married her. Things begin to get very strange: Harold's ghost appears to Jesse. In school, Jesse's class had read Hamlet, so here we have, in ways, a version of the King, Claudius, and Hamlet, along with the King's ghost. Jesse becomes convinced that he must lay a trap for Clay to establish his guilt: for Jesse the ghost is real, but he also realizes that maybe his mind is playing tricks on him. You see through the eyes of a troubled 17-year-old, and you understand that Jesse believes (mostly) that he sees the ghost, but at the same time the reader is not being asked to believe it--so this never devolves into some kind of supernatural tale. Jesse does come to believe that he must avenge his father--not an easy task for a boy/young man like Jesse, and of course it was not an easy task for Hamlet either.

So the reader is carried along, through a beautifully-drawn setting, wondering how Jesse will resolve matters. There's even an Ophelia in the form of Christine Montez, Jesse's girlfriend. If this seems a bit too heavy-handed on the Hamlet side, it's not, and it isn't a modern-day retelling of Hamlet. It works well and effectively. This is a fine and compelling first novel--and it certainly is on a par with Peace Like a River and So Brave, Young, and Handsome, two fine novels by Lin Enger's younger brother Leif. Both of Leif Enger's novels have a slightly surrealistic/supernatural feel to them, along with a wonderful feel for time and place. Lin Enger's work shares those same qualities: an excellent novel!

Wow, a tale to be told
Lin, brother of writer Leif Enger, has produced a stunning first novel. Set in rural Minnesota, in the town of Battlepoint, Undiscovered Country opens when, while hunting, a wound from a gunshot kills mayor and restaurant owner Harold Matson. His 17-year-old son, Jesse was in a tree stand nearby, and discovers the body. It appears to be self-inflicted, but Jesse cannot accept that verdict. He suspects that his uncle Clay, his father's brother, has finally snapped and killed him.

Clay had always loved Jesse's mother, and struggled living in the shadow of his successful and responsible brother. This conviction is exacerbated by Jesse's visions of his father's ghost, who has cryptic conversations with Jesse. The bleak and icy winter landscape is every bit as frozen as Jesse's heart. He is angry with his mother, who dissolves into an inactive catatonic grief-closing the family restaurant, and not dealing with their money problems.

Eventually Jesse talks with Clay's autistic brother-in-law Dwayne, who tells a tale of Clay taking a rifle from a closet the day that Harold was shot, and then later throwing something in the lake outside the farmhouse he lives in. Dwayne agrees to go to the sheriff with this story, but then disappears. Jesse tells the sheriff, and then they confront Clay, who has a plausible explanation; and Jesse's resolve to take justice into his own hands hardens. Christine Montez, Jesse's girlfriend, senses the way he is leaning, and tries to influence him. Jesse's struggle with his fears and suspicions, his anger and his frustrations are skillfully rendered.

This modern Hamlet parable will chill you and capture your imagination as you struggle along with Jesse to find the right path.

Armchair Interviews says: Excellent storytelling, very sad, but well written.