Online since 1997 Crossing to SafetyClick on a title to get information such as reviews, price comparisons, and availability or to purchase. Search Again-Enter Keyword, Title, or ISBN: |
|
Crossing to Safety
by: Wallace Stegner |
||
 |
|
or |
|
Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52 EAN: 9780140133486 ISBN: 0140133488 Label: Penguin (Non-Classics) Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics) Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 341 Publication Date: March 15, 1990 Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics) |
||
| Customer Reviews | ||
  - A rare jewel of a novelI started to read Stegner's "Angle of Repose" and couldn't get into it. Then I read "The Spectator Bird". Really good, interesting, and even a bit shocking. It gave me an idea of Stegner's breath as well as depth. But "Crossing to Safety" is more than just a story - for me it was a memorable experience. Some of that involved the intersections of my life with those of Stegner's and his characters in the book: University of California, University of Wisconsin, Harvard, New England. But mostly it was the compelling story of how we are all shaped by life, love, friendship, ambition, personal tragedy and transcendence. The writing is just beautiful, done with a wonderful sense of place, of nature, and insight into human relationships. This is a book to savor. Stegner was a prolific writer (and much more), but this book has to be up at the top with his very best. Rating: - Brilliant story-tellingHaunting, sweet, sad, the characters have incredibly well-developed depth and complexity. I'm a huge Stegner fan and this story does not disappoint. I just re-read it for the 3rd time and enjoyed every moment. Rating: - Stegner, in a league of his own...Deeply introspective book with a simple plot which follows the lives of two marriages over a period of years - starting in academia - where both husbands first meet. The friendship among the couples blossoms - as does the story of how friendship is maintained. Stegner demonstrates the complexities, vulnerabilities and love in a marriage and between friends. Characters come alive as does they setting they live in. No drama here. Just a compelling story of life and living in the quiet lives of two couples as they grow and age together. No tidy finishes or endings - no slick wrappings here. Book is generally one of a struggle, determination and a search for meaning and making a difference to others. The book, written by an author who can "turn a word" is a classic - ageless and timeless. A few of my favorite passages: "Talent, I tell him, believing what I say, is at least half luck. It isn't as if our baby lips were touched with a live coal, and thereafter we lisp in numbers or talk in tongues. We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not. Born to the English language and American opportunity (I say this in 1937, after seven years of depression, but I say it seriously) we are among the incredibly lucky ones. What if we had been born Bushmen in the Kalahari? What if our parents had been undernourished villagers in Uttar Pradesh, and we faced the problem of commanding the attention of the world on a diet of five hundred calories a day, and in Urdu? What good is an ace if the other cards in your hand are dogs from every town?..." "Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature. You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine..." "We went through those three weeks in the summer of 1941 like people driving an open road while storms gathered ahead and to both sides. On them, the sun still shines. Who knows, the clouds might part, blow over, clear away; the rain might turn out to be no more than a hard shower. Meantime, the light is lurid and lovely, the mesas reach out of black distance and warm their cliff-ends in the sun, unexpected rainbows arch the valleys..." "In the bed that was still strange to me I lay listening for outside sounds that I was not sure I could interpret, and I had a thrilling sense of the safety of hereness and the close dark. It didn't really matter what noise out there had caught my sleeping ear. Sally breathed quietly beside me. The clock ticked us toward morning..." Rating: - Stegner's Other ClassicWallace Stegner's ANGLE OF REPOSE won a Pulitzer Prize but CROSSING TO SAFETY is also a "winner." Friend Alice A. recommeded it for summer reading and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a book about marriage, friendship, loyalty, academia. Some people complain that nothing happens. However, this is Stegner's genius--that you want to read on about these people and regret summer interruptions until you can get back to them. I didn't love everyone. Larry Morgan can be too tentative and melancholy, but he has sensitivity and dedication. Charity Lang--she's too overbearing and manipulative, perhaps for kind reasons, but she is oblivious to the effect she has on the people around her. I didn't like Olive Kitteridge, by the way. This year's popular OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout [I liked her ABIDE WITH ME better] features a well-drawn busybody. Both Olive and Charity reminded me of Anne Hammersmith in Chandler Burr's YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU, another book well-worth reading despite some quibbles. While I'm on quibbling: my copy of CROSSING TO SAFETY had a photograph of a stone fence winding through the woods. Since the book opens with Robert Frost's "I could give all to Time ...," one can't help reciting "good fences make good neighbors," but, surely, that is not the message of this book. Redeeming features--Stegner's language: "the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters"; teaching "if carried on too long could turn a good writer into a twenty-five watt Henry James"; the sun, coming in flat, knocks a prismatic oval out of the tumbler [of water] and lays it on the ceiling"; "tweed jackets [of some academics] that looked as if apples had been carried in the lining." The Richmond Times Record News had called CROSSING TO SAFETY the "crowning achievement of Wallace Stegner's long and illustrious career as a writer and teacher." Alice, I agree! Rating: - Crossing to SafetyA truly great novel. Stegner is an astute observer of the private lives of people...families, friends, husbands and wives. I bought a used copy and the qualiaty was excellent. |
||