Crossing to Safety (Modern Library) (Modern Library Classics)

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I am trying to reread (something I’m not very good at…I’m such a shallow reader) and I named Angle of Repose as one I plan (hope? When they were younger, sometimes the academic couples camped around a hill like this, enjoying the sunset; sometimes Larry and Sid sat on a bench like this, just above the hill, and they discussed career disappointments). Well, I listened to the audiobook during a long 7h drive today and found it more interesting than Angle and yet not in my upper echelon of American 20th C novels. For me it was too close to reality having witnessed a very similar relationship within my own family, another Charity type who was just an abusive and self-centred bully as far as I’m concerned. Wallace Stegner does not need plot devices at all to draw his readers in close enough to live in the book.

Of course the good old days for us were the new unpredictable days of the mid-twentieth century for most of the country folk roundabout. Like other species, they hang on to their territory much like Charity is grown from her New England soil. Every story is told from someone’s perspective, Larry seems to be saying, don’t trust this to be the only version.Stegner composed a brilliant life contrast: the optimism and enthusiasm of two young, married couples starting out in Madison, Wisconsin, when hope sprung eternal, versus these same marrieds, thirty years on, after life, though gracing them in different ways, has ineluctably dealt each major disappointments and forced them into cathartic concessions.

When we first meet Charity and Sid at the beginning in the small mid-western town, they have two young children with one on the way. Their deviations from the norm are more subtle, and all the more fascinating for how well I can imagine them playing out in my own outwardly conventional world.If you have ever had a friend who lifted you and held you when you would have otherwise fallen, and felt the obligations that accompany such a love, you will recognize that friendship as well. I don’t know how he does it, but he does – with wit, with compassion, with understanding and with care. The odd result is that Sid and Charity become indelible characters, while Larry’s own wife Sally becomes a one-dimensional plot point. I’ve never had the experience of a “couples” friendship like this, setting out on vacations with one another, bonding over shared pregnancies, or struggling with end of life together. Con una exquisita sencillez, ambos autores consiguen conferir a unas vidas sin especial atractivo ese encanto extraordinario que las convierte en el objeto de un relato conmovedor e inolvidable.

And I walked the hundred-mile back roads behind the horse named Wizard wondering if there were two stashes of tea in his pack. I found all the name-dropping in Florence a bit tedious even if I did appreciate some of the analysis particularly of Massacio (one of my favoritea there) as well as the playing of Beethoven's 9th over the chilling conflict over dishwashing. At the time I’d read a very positive and passionate review and that was enough for me to know I had to read it. I remember how quiet it was, how empty the streets at that hour, how our feet were loud on pavement and then hushed in grass and then crackly in leaves. Besides the wonderful characterisations, Stegner created a very atmospheric novel, with beautifully descriptive prose.

Written in the 1980s, this is a novel about a friendship forged in the late 1930s, when Larry Morgan and Sid Lang were colleagues in the English Department of a university in Madison, Wisconsin. I first read Crossing to Safety in the mid-1990s while on vacation in Estes Park, Colorado, where the nature around us echoed the beauty of Stegner’s descriptions of nature in Vermont at the Lang compound. 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.