- Paperback
- Publisher: Harper Perennial (1990)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0060920076
- ISBN-13: 978-0060920074
- Product Dimensions: 13.5 x 20.1 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 295 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #716,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Early, Long, Forever Winter,
By
This review is from: Affliction (Paperback)
This is a tough book. It is the last years of a family that has lived in the miseries of violence and addiction. These are always complicated sooner or later by poverty and loss of soul. The very landscape has been beaten up and bought up and drilled to make it little more than a ghost of nature. Twisted and tortuous is the path of the lives and the land. The buildings are erected similarly, no beauty and not much comfort. The people who have the money are not at all nice to the ones who haven't. Corruption, exploitation and every now and then somebody gets brave enough to take off. Wade, our everyman, has a friend who made it, and he wonders after a certain amount of booze, on certain nights, if he might be able to do the same. But he knows he won't. This is a land of trailer parks perched on concrete slabs, where people fight and love in bars, with half working neon signs casting eery shadows over treacherous, icy roads.Wade Whitehouse is a large man, with strength, sex appeal and a wound racing through him like the Mississippi and all its tributaries. His tale is told through his brother, the questionable survivor, who went to college, got out, has a career, and isn't a blackout drunk. There is the sister turned evangelical Christian, with her own frightening, crazy children. There are the ghosts of the two other brothers, dead together in some offensive in Nam. They too, haunt the bizarre story, a mystery, a murder, and the climax of a legacy. My friends in Maine were simply out of their minds over Banks, and out of respect from these Chicagoan, Wisconsin transplants whose art awakenings I had shared, I entered into these readings seriously. While I recognize the brilliance, it just isn't my geography, just as I suppose I miss so much in Southern writers, but somehow, I can relate more, I feel, to the Welty's and Faulkners and Flannery O'Connors and so many others. The symbolism is intense. A mother who is frozen to death and the nagging, break-through pain of a long-decayed tooth. Throbbing, heart breaking and cold. Check it out, everyone should sample Banks. He is most assuredly, we are told, Wade with a miracle. His talent is indeed miraculous, I just don't worship there.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfection,
By Nifflefoot (Yellowknife, Northwest Territories) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Affliction (Paperback)
One of the finest novels in the last 25 years. The most convincing and natural dialogue I have ever read. Russell Banks is the America's best living novelist, and this is his masterpiece.
5.0 out of 5 stars
wayyyy cool,
By "rp7mf" (New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Affliction (Paperback)
dude, this book was rad. it was so funny when the little girl cries because her dad of her dad beat her dad. i liked the ending because the brother talks about people working at video stores and video stores are cool. read this book anyd you will see what im talking about.
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