- Taschenbuch: 276 Seiten
- Verlag: Picador; Auflage: Picador USA. (November 2000)
- Sprache: Englisch
- ISBN-10: 0312267347
- ISBN-13: 978-0312267346
- Größe und/oder Gewicht: 21,5 x 14 x 1,8 cm
- Durchschnittliche Kundenbewertung: 4.5 von 5 Sternen Alle Rezensionen anzeigen (2 Kundenrezensionen)
- Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 2.303.853 in Englische Bücher (Siehe Top 100 in Englische Bücher)
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Produktinformation |
Produktbeschreibungen
Amazon.com
James Galvin opens his first novel with a shocking, seemingly inexplicable murder--horseman Mike Arans closes on a pistol-packing motorist named Merriwether Snipes, throws a rope and snaps his neck--and then proceeds to illuminate why it happened, what it means, and how Mike deals with the consequences. Though billed as a novel, Fencing the Sky is in fact a more deeply fictionalized continuation of The Meadow, Galvin's partly historic, partly imagined evocation of a way of life that took hold on an upland Wyoming ranch for a century and then blew away.
If The Meadow is elegiac, Fencing the Sky is angry and blackly humorous. This is the grim, greedy '90s, when swaggering developers like Merriwether Snipes ride the range in their ATV's, carving up the old homesteads into 40-acre ranchettes and making life hell for the few decent people who remain. Galvin makes three of these holdouts his heroes--Oscar Rose, who supports a cattle habit (and family) by working as a vet; Adkisson Trent, a doctor who inherited from his father a spectacular spread and a penchant for proud solitude; and Arans, the renegade, who fled from New Jersey to become a cowboy. The heat of the book rises from the connections and passions of these men--their women and work troubles, their unspoken bond with each other, their fury at Snipes and everything he represents.
Galvin, a poet, has assembled his narrative out of vivid shards, yet, despite the jump-cuts, this is an old-fashioned novel at heart, with heroes and villains, heartbreak and suspense, and characters so real you want to ride out and shake hands. The same themes, the same imagery, the same equine adoration crop up in Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry, but Galvin has a lighter touch, eschewing myth for the minute particulars of hard work and hard luck in a single community. Galvin can also crack a good joke, even though he knows as well as anyone that there's not a lot to laugh about under the big sky these days. --David Laskin -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .
From Booklist
Once you get past this novel's stereotypes and its morality of "thou shalt get away with murder if thou art righteous enough," the beauty of Galvin's naturalist prose takes hold and the story becomes one of deep friendship and idealism. It's a reinvented western (where, for instance, the rowdies are not drunken cowboys but wasted juvenile delinquents) as befits the modern, demythologized West, placing Galvin in the same line as Larry McMurtry: the old struggles over land and water and mineral rights are countered by a faith in one's community. The story is centered around former antiwar radical Mike Arans, on the run after having accidentally murdered Meriweather Snipes, a land speculator. His pursuer is an Apache Vietnam vet named Jim Thomas who, while not exactly a friend, holds Arans in respect. Oscar Rose and Adkisson Trent, the novel's most interesting characters, are his friends; and as the story hopscotches back and forth through 30 years, the reader comes to understand how their lives shaped their worldviews and how the ties of friendship bound these three men. Frank Caso
-- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe:
Gebundene Ausgabe
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Format:Gebundene Ausgabe
If Wyoming poet James Galvin's "Fencing the Sky" were the last Western novel ever written, the genre would have come full circle: A melodrama in which violence is righteous if committed in the name of protecting the good folks who scratch out a meager existence in an unconquerable landscape.
The plot is a timeworn Western motif: Greed versus idealism. But the book itself, intentionally or not, is a unique artifact of Western consciousness and environment. Its moments of lyric natural beauty -- and there are many -- are occasionally obscured by old-fashioned doctrinaire preachiness, like the ageless mountains behind Denver's brown cloud. Something funny happened on the way to the ranch, and we have forgotten that the now-romanticized ranchers and cowboys who settled this country were, in many ways, no less exploitive and ambitious than the developers who have now replaced railroad barons as the bad guys in regional fiction. It wasn't all that long ago that the bad guys in our stories were the guys who built fences and shot sheepherders. The landscape of Western literature doesn't change, only the good guys and the bad guys.
kay, it's a lot easier to mourn the loss of Western culture than the throttling of the two-dimensional bad guy Merriweather Snipes, but Galvin takes the melodrama to an extreme: The "good" guy -- in this case, a murderer -- ultimately faces no social consequence for his law-breaking. True, it's a book about violence and greed, but it justifies almost anything as long as the land is protected. And there's a paper-thin line between passion and rage. The malignant Snipes never breaks the law, he just has values (admittedly reptilian) that collide with Mike Arans's. The West is wild, to be sure, but do we really want to believe that violence in the service of one man's sense of virtue is permissible?
Galvin's "The Meadow" was one of the most beautiful and enchanting books to be written in or about the West in the past 10 years, and is arguably among the three best books about Wyoming ever. "Fencing the Sky" is just the latest in the burgeoning genre of Western literature exploring the delicate relationship between landscape and how it suffers modern human activity. Ivan Doig's "Mountain Time" and Larry McMurtry's memoir, "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen," are sturdier explorations of the state of the Western landscape, but neither captures the poetic puzzle of the place as well as Galvin.
Format:Gebundene Ausgabe
My parents live on 5 of those 40 acre parcels about which Mr. Galvin has so beautifully written, 200 acres that they have put their own touch upon. He has realistically portrayed the spirit of the people whose history has been undermined by development. Those who have encroached on this desolate place were also truthfully portrayed. It's a sad legacy that we all have to hand our children, my own included. I very much enjoyed this book, not only because I could intimately relate to the area, but because it was wonderfully, believably written. Mr. Galvin has the ability to convince a reader that they are within the story, with all senses experiencing the moment.
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22 von 24 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich
Jim has captured the guts of the land of which he writes.
2. November 1999
Format:Gebundene Ausgabe
My parents live on 5 of those 40 acre parcels about which Mr. Galvin has so beautifully written, 200 acres that they have put their own touch upon. He has realistically portrayed the spirit of the people whose history has been undermined by development. Those who have encroached on this desolate place were also truthfully portrayed. It's a sad legacy that we all have to hand our children, my own included. I very much enjoyed this book, not only because I could intimately relate to the area, but because it was wonderfully, believably written. Mr. Galvin has the ability to convince a reader that they are within the story, with all senses experiencing the moment.
6 von 6 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich
Fugitive Cowboy On The Run in Wyoming
17. März 2005
Format:Taschenbuch
This is one of a number of modern Westerns I read in the winter of 2004-05. The others included: J. Robert Lennon's, "On The Night Plain," Annie Proulx' "Close Range"; Mark Spragg's "Fruit Of Stone", Ralph Beer's "The Blind Corral"; Gretel Ehrlich's "Heart Mountain", and David Long's "Blue Spruce", a collection of modern stories. I might also include Wallace Stegner's "Angle Of Repose" which is more of a historical Western though with more contemporary aspects, John Treadwell Nichols' "The New Mexico Trilogy",which seems to me now somewhat dated, or Rick De Marinis' "Year Of The Zinc Penny", set mostly in wartime L.A. in 1943 but about a family with Montana roots. If you only have time to read one--since they are somewhat repetitive, particularly in the areas of cattle or sheep ranching, horsemanship and descriptions of ranch life-- you might choose "Fencing The Sky" since it is one of the best, with Beer's great rather nostalgic novel perhaps second. This is a society in which tradition lasts longer than in some other areas of the country, certainly dating from the late 19th century.
All these novels & stories lament the passing of the Old West, but some--certainly "Fencing The Sky" and "Angle Of Repose" are also strikingly contemporary, dealing with such issues as 60's student radicalism,war service (Lennon, Beer, and Ehrlich) aggressive land development, and considerable ecological problems such as deforestation and strip mining which have laid waste to this part of the country, as Jared Diamond's recent book "Collapse" also attests. Elk and elk hunting, and other naturalistic descriptions, are another subject common to all. At least three of the novels contain quite a lot of romance between siblings growing up on neighboring ranches in what will seem to some, including myself,to be a rather idyllic life, certainly the opposite of urban living.Some of the ranch details are truly inspired, such as a pack rat stealing from a cowboy in the middle of the night, or a square dance. Proulx' amazing award-winning stories are packed with historic details, in a limited space. Cowboys are unfortunately somewhat prone to alcoholism, also. Both Spragg and Galvin use a flashback technique in alternating chapters. Each novel is somewhat unique so that you can enjoy each but all have a great deal in common as well. Spragg's novel is most uniquely notable for its humour--a wayward wife,two old friends, an Indian, a dog, a physicist, and their misadventures.
All these novels & stories lament the passing of the Old West, but some--certainly "Fencing The Sky" and "Angle Of Repose" are also strikingly contemporary, dealing with such issues as 60's student radicalism,war service (Lennon, Beer, and Ehrlich) aggressive land development, and considerable ecological problems such as deforestation and strip mining which have laid waste to this part of the country, as Jared Diamond's recent book "Collapse" also attests. Elk and elk hunting, and other naturalistic descriptions, are another subject common to all. At least three of the novels contain quite a lot of romance between siblings growing up on neighboring ranches in what will seem to some, including myself,to be a rather idyllic life, certainly the opposite of urban living.Some of the ranch details are truly inspired, such as a pack rat stealing from a cowboy in the middle of the night, or a square dance. Proulx' amazing award-winning stories are packed with historic details, in a limited space. Cowboys are unfortunately somewhat prone to alcoholism, also. Both Spragg and Galvin use a flashback technique in alternating chapters. Each novel is somewhat unique so that you can enjoy each but all have a great deal in common as well. Spragg's novel is most uniquely notable for its humour--a wayward wife,two old friends, an Indian, a dog, a physicist, and their misadventures.
5 von 5 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich
Poetic vision of the passing West
13. Dezember 2002
Format:Gebundene Ausgabe
James Galvin is a poet, and his vision of the people who inhabit the land where this story takes place is also poetic. Instead of a straightforward narrative from beginning to middle to end, it intermingles scenes from the lives of several characters told in flashbacks and flashforwards, all sequenced along the spine of a single plot line that involves the pursuit of a fugitive who has killed another man.
The location is northern Colorado and parts of Wyoming extending through the Great Divide Basin and northward into the mountains. The main characters are men with ties to the land -- a rancher, a cowboy, a doctor. Each is witness in his own way to the passing of the rural West and its replacement by land developers and the mining and logging industries.
They are also remnants of a code of honor that respects hard work, the individual, the land and its wildlife, and the values of courage, loyalty, and generosity. In particular, Galvin captures the nuances of friendship between these very individual men and the way matters of concern to them are often lightened with ironic and self-deprecating humor. I enjoyed this book and found myself caring very much for the welfare of its fugitive protagonist.
I recommend this novel to anyone with an interest in the modern West. As a companion book, I'd also recommend Frank Clifford's nonfiction book "Backbone of the World: A Portrait of a Vanishing Way of Life Along the Continental Divide," which finds many of the same kinds of people from real life and explores in greater depth many of the land use issues raised by Galvin's book. As of this writing, "Fencing the Sky" seems to be going out of print. I'm hoping that it reappears shortly in paperback and has a new life for new readers in that format.
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