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Lädt ... History of Wolves : A Novel (Original 2017; 2017. Auflage)von Emily Fridlund (Autor)
Werk-InformationenHistory of Wolves von Emily Fridlund (2017)
  
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 Circlestonesbooks | Jul 11, 2021 | 
With her overflowing cauldron of contradictions — sexually curious and naïve, an outsider taunted by her classmates who longs to become something other than herself — Linda seems as much prey as predator, akin to the wolves she studies.... Regardless of one’s judgment about the characters’ mistakes and shortcomings, the chilly power of “History of Wolves” packs a wallop that’s hard to shake off. In the process, Fridlund — who received a Ph.D. in creative writing from USC — has constructed an elegant, troubling debut, both immersed in the natural world but equally concerned with issues of power, family, faith and the gap between understanding something and being able to act on the knowledge. Fridlund’s novel is compelling and deliberate. Tension is seeded throughout the narrative at just the right intervals, even though the incident at the core of the novel—the death of young Paul Gardner—is known from page two. The mystery surrounding Paul’s death does its work to pull the reader along, but Linda and her longing is our focal point. The fallout of Paul’s death is quickly concluded, though it’s apparent that the events of that summer still weigh on her in adulthood. What’s not so clear is exactly what continues to follow Linda. Is it the loss of her friend? Is it the intimacy she failed to find in Mr. Grierson, Lily, or Patra? Or is it the way that Leo Gardner, Paul’s father, led her to question how she views the world? ... History of Wolves is artfully told, leaving the reader as scattered and wanting as the adult Linda who shares her childhood stories. She invites us to intensely long for the same things she does: intimacy, understanding, and a clear place in life. This is a difficult poetry to achieve in literature. I was relieved at the slow-motion tragedy that does unfold is testimony to Fridlund’s daring. An artful story of sexual awakening and identity formation turns more stomach-churning; child sacrifice takes many forms, and sometimes the act doesn’t require bloodshed but simply adults too wedded to their ideals.... Fridlund has a tendency to double up on her descriptors, to use two adjectives where one would do. But she is masterly when she lets more scraped-down prose push a series of elemental questions to the fore: Do intentions matter? What price will you pay to feel wanted? How does it feel to be both guilty and exonerated? The result is a novel of ideas that reads like smart pulp, a page-turner of craft and calibration. History of Wolves follows a 14-year-old girl named Madeline, though nobody calls her that: "At school, I was called Linda, or Commie, or Freak." ... Perhaps the greatest accomplishment in the novel is Fridlund's portrayal of Linda, who the reader encounters not just as a teenager, but, in brief flash-forward scenes, as an adult still psychically wounded from the events of the summer. Sometimes people overcome the traumas they were subjected to as children; sometimes they don't. For most people, and for Linda, it's somewhere in between.... Looking in hindsight isn't any more accurate than trying to predict the future, of course; and neither really works out for Linda. But she's such an incredible character — both typical and special, sometimes capable of great love and sometimes spectacularly not — that it's hard to turn away from her sometimes horrifying story. AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: "So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth this provides!"-Aimee Bender Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outlander at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is charged with possessing child pornography, the implications of his arrest deeply affect Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong. And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. It seems that her life finally has purpose but with this new sense of belonging she is also drawn into secrets she doesn't understand. Over the course of a few days, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do-and fail to do-for the people they love. Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, Emily Fridlund's propulsive and gorgeously written History of Wolves introduces a new writer of enormous range and talent. .Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.56)
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2017 Booker Prize longlist: History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
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Content
Madelaine Furston, called Linda, grows up in a small cabin at a lake somewhere in the rural woods of northern Minnesota. Her parents, old hippies, treat her like an adult person, letting her make her own decisions and ideas about live. In school, they call her “freak”.
When she is fourteen, almost fifteen years old, everything changes. Across the lake, which is very narrow at this point, one late winter day a family from the city with a small child arrives at their new summerhouse. The father soon leaves but the mother and the little boy stay. Linda begins to visit and soon she is Paul’s babysitter and feels like a girl friend to his twentysix years old mother Patra. She seems to have found a happy family who cares. Linda feels that something changes when Patra’s husband Leo, a Christian Scientist, returns, but she could not explain what was wrong because Patra and Leo are still exceptionally friendly, making it easy to assume that they are happy and everything is fine.
Theme and genre
This novel, shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize, is about the difference between a truth that you create for yourself and desperately want to believe, and a reality where you should act. Important topics are outsiders, family, growing up in the lonely nature, and the strong influence of religion.
Characters
The characters of this story are not always likeable and understandable in their behavior and thinking. Linda, who is trying to find out if she is still just a kid, longing for a real family, or a teenage girl with all her worries, trying too hard to be an adult. As an outsider, she is interested in the lives of other outsiders, pretending to understand what happiness in their lives or just making things up.
Plot and writing
Madelaine “Linda”, now thirtyseven years old, tells the story of her childhood and youth as the first person narrator. Not always chronological, her memories switch between years and ages, persons, incidents, and some events that happened, and this leaves us readers with some loose ends and implausibilities. Delightful to read are the poetical descriptions of the nature, the lakes and woods, but tough, sad and sometimes depressing, when it comes to the dreams, invented stories and real living conditions of the female main characters.
Conclusion
An interesting, but not always plausible coming-of-age-story, a demanding read with only partly coherent figures, leaving the reader with some open questions. (