Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)
by Wallace Earle Stegner
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Book Summary Information
Author: Wallace Earle StegnerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-04-09
ISBN: 037575931X
Number of pages: 335
Publisher: Modern Library
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780375759314
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)
Book Review: Awakenings
Summary: 5 Stars
Right away I am seduced by the prose. That first Stegner page about waking up is absolutely superb. "Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake."
These first sentences could be cut into lines and begin a beautiful poem. Here, they serve as a marvelous synopsis of the novel. For it is very much a novel of awakenings. Psychological awakenings. And ironically, some of these awakenings are about dying and what death means to the survivors. For after someone we love passes away we die a little, and we must learn to live again, as opposed to floating "through a confusion of dreams and memory." Our eyes must open again. We must wake up.
And that is how Stegner's Crossing to Safety engages the reader. There is no murder, no explosion, no illicit love affair. Nothing happens. Nothing happens but the magnificent prose. At least on the surface.
Well, guess what? Can't judge a book by its cover. Can't judge a prose by just the surface, either. For apparently nothing happens, but it's all there. First, friendship between two couples with different professional aspirations and different tempers. Then, what the narrator names "the snake" that introduces itself into this paradisiac world of mutual love. Charity, dissatisfied with the lack of ambition of her husband, is a strong, controlling woman, who must have things done her way. But is she the snake? Sally, the narrator's wife, catches polio while the four friends are on a hiking trip, and will never recover the use of her legs. Is that tragedy the snake? Or is it the weakness of Sid, Charity's husband? And what about Larry, the narrator, who can be so judgmental at times?
And so come the awakenings. Realizing that the imperfections of friends are just mirrors; here lies the snake. Not in facing the mirror and really looking, but in refusing to do so. For what appear to be the toughest characters, Larry and Charity, are really masters of denial, while gentle creatures like Sally and Sid are about self-acceptance, and thus stronger than their more flamboyant counterparts. Charity's ultimate cruelty of not allowing her husband to accompany her to the place where she will spend her last living days will eventually play against her. She sees that cruelty as a form of protection; she thinks she will spare her fragile husband. Delusion, delusion. She just doubles, deepens the wound. She's not as tough as she thinks. And if she knows cancer will not spare her, death is something she cannot control. Control, too, is delusional. Charity (what a wonderfully ironic name) ultimately loses it, that control; she loses it in the last moments of her life. And that is her redemption.
Larry's is similar. When Sid disappears, Larry goes on a search to find his friend and is unsuccessful --not something he's used to in his professional life. But the ending, with one simple word of affirmation -- I originally made a typo and wrote "one simple world of affirmation," but it is appropriate also -- says it all. A simple word that brought me to tears. And I don't cry easily.
I was deeply, deeply moved by this masterpiece. I had never read Wallace Stegner before, but I plan to get to know this author better by reading his short stories. To you lovers of literature out there, to you who love words, and worlds in words, I cannot recommend this book enough.
Summary of Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)
?Introduction by Terry Tempest WilliamsAfterword by T. H. Watkins
?Called a ?magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom? by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.
It's deceptively simple: two bright young couples meet during the Depression and form an instant and lifelong friendship. "How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these?" Larry Morgan, a successful novelist and the narrator of the story, poses that question many years after he and his wife, Sally, have befriended the vibrant, wealthy, and often troubled Sid and Charity Lang. "Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish?" It's not here. What is here is just as fascinating, just as compelling, as touching, and as tragic.
Crossing to Safety is about loyalty and survival in its most everyday form--the need to create bonds and the urge to tear them apart. Thirty-four years after their first meeting, when Larry and Sally are called back to the Langs' summer home in Vermont, it's as if for a final showdown. How has this friendship defined them? What is its legacy? Stegner offer answers in those small, perfectly rendered moments that make up lives "as quiet as these"--and as familiar as our own. --Sara Nickerson
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