Crossing to Safety: Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Crossing to Safety: Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics)

Crossing to Safety: Wallace Stegner (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Price: £4.995
£4.995 FREE Shipping

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A poignant and thoughtful reflection on the complex nature of the emotional web of human relationships. This is the third time I've read it, and I was so glad to be prompted to read it again, because I got a whole lot of new things out of it in the third read. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work. But I see, or remember, or both, the uncurtained windows, the bare rafters, the board walls with nothing on them except a calendar that I think was here the last time we were, eight years ago. Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

But, even if I am, there is no question, it seems to me, that Stegner is using Larry’s difficulties with the idea of writing a book about Charity and Sid to get the reader of Crossing to Safety thinking. 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). The story is told mostly in flashback; the narrator, Larry Morgan, and his wife, Sally, settle into their new home in Madison, Wisconsin, as Larry begins a term teaching creative writing at the university's English department. Larry is a former academic who has taken care of his disabled wife for many years, but now he’s taking a walk around the house to get some fresh air.

In the meantime, the Langs also introduce the Morgans to other local academics, through which Larry begins to build a network and the accompanying fiscal and job security. She is probably the least defined of the four, supportive to all, but ultimately the one most in need of the support of her friends. some parts of this story were so heartbreaking for me that they had me crying long after the story was done!

The friendship, though, is not organic, at least not in the way of your first best friend, or your high school pals, or the guys you ran with in college. Yet the Morgans observe the stresses in their friends' marriage as headstrong, insufferably well-organized Charity tries to bully the passive Sid into a more aggressive mold. The Langs introduce the Morgans to other academics, which helps Larry build a network and gain more job security. While I shared their reverence for literature and art they lost me with their DISINTEREST in anything outside their cozy little world. In a virtuoso scene – one of many – the Morgans find themselves basking in the Langs' golden light while another, less fortunate couple can only glare in envy from the sidelines.Edward Herrmann is perhaps best known to younger audiences as kindly, patrician Richard Gilmore on the television series Gilmore Girls. Wallace achieved greater literary fame when his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain - a semi-autobiographical novel set in the heart of the West - was published in 1943. They are lovely people and you like them and all that – but they’re also a compromise to the circumstances of life.

In fact, if you could forget mortality, and that used to be easier here than in most places, you could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Each year the two couples get together at a summer family compound in Vermont owned by the wealthier couple.MARIEKE HARDY: When you said 'at times monstrous', but monstrous in a way that someone in our family would be. The Morgans slowly learn that the Langs have dysfunctions of their own lingering behind a highly conscious veneer.



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