Gifted
A Novel
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- CHF 11.00
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- CHF 11.00
Description de l’éditeur
"[A] remarkable story." —The New York Times Book Review
Henry Fielder, solitary and unmoored in his thirties, runs into an old lover and finds himself ready to tell the story he has harbored for two decades. He is fifteen, in rural western Oregon, enduring a year of sorrows. His mother has died, his father is physically abusive, and his extraordinary spiritual affinity for the wild lives of his native country seems to desert him. An older couple, retiring to the area from California, offer solace and expanded cultural horizons but set him further at odds with his millworker father. The abuse escalates, and ultimately a natural disaster catalyzes a crisis in which father and son betray each other and Henry sets out on a trek through the backcountry of the Oregon Coast Range, seeking to understand what has happened and to forge a new sense of self.
A Huck Finn of the modern age, Henry is portrayed with a directness and clarity that pulls readers through the environmental dynamics of the Pacific Northwest. In stark yet beautiful prose that highlights his long tenure as a nature writer, Daniel creates an odyssey that explores the spiritual dimensions and deeply entangled pains and pleasures of belonging to the human domain and the natural world of which it is part.
Set in the mid–1990s, when environmentalists and timber communities warred over the future of the last Northwestern old–growth forests, Gifted is the story of a young man with a metaphysical imagination—naïve yet wise, gifted yet ordinary—who comes of age under harsh circumstances, negotiating the wildness of his home country, of his human relationships, and of the emerging complexities of his own being.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Henry Fielder is having trouble telling his story, until, after years repressing many of his childhood memories, a chance encounter with a former lover inspires him. From rural Oregon logging country, Henry grew up with a strong bond to the natural world. After his mother fell ill and passed away in a nursing home, Henry's father became increasingly isolationist and erratic, occasionally physically abusing Henry. In order to deal with his difficult life at home, Henry turned toward the natural beauty of Oregon and eventually met Carter Stephens and his wife, urban transplants who introduced him to conservation and environmental activism. To cope with his abusive father, Henry started drinking and smoking pot at age 15; one night, after catching his son inebriated, Henry's father took the abuse to a new horrific level. Daniel captures Henry's feeling of isolation and loneliness with eloquent prose that draws readers into the mossy old-growth forests of the Northwest. His clean descriptions and comforting digressions about the landscape mirror Henry's own attempts to find solace in an unjust, confusing world. Daniel's impressive novel quietly builds, ending in a place where Henry can see the way past his experiences into a much more beautiful, logical future.