- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Arcade Publishing (April 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 161145218X
- ISBN-13: 978-1611452181
- Product Dimensions: 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 522 g
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Set in a small town on a river in New Brunswick, River of the Brokenhearted, David Adams Richards's first novel since his Giller Prize-winning Mercy Among the Children, is told by Wendell King, son of Miles King and grandson of the feisty, willful Janie McLeary King, who made her fortune running the town's first cinema. Set against this trio is the lower-class family of the Drukens, especially Rebecca Druken and her uncle, Joey Elias, bitter because their own early cinema failed. Established early on, the feud plays out across three generations, spanning successes, failures, murder, and dissolution. Yet despite the somewhat bleak subject matter, tremendous humour and vitality persist in this story. The characters leap off the page, and in the person of Miles King, Richards has imagined a fully human soul of stunning believability. Miles is fatally flawed, committing slow suicide by gin as his cinema too begins to fail in the face of the TV's small screen. A sensitive eccentric, a target of small-town narrowness, he is subtly tortured psychically, for years, by Elias and the vicious Rebecca, who have made the downfall of the Kings their life's ambition. Miles King is a character of great loneliness, pathos, humor, and compassion, one of the finest creations not only of Canadian writing but any literature.
River of the Brokenhearted is the story of a river, the Miramichi, but it is mostly about the river of time that passes through Miles King, his mother, his son, and their enemies, carrying all to their ultimate fates: "She had left a river in New Brunswick that would swallow you with its life, shout in its rapids, laugh in its eddies, create industry in its currents, a river of Irish and Scottish myth, wedded to the soil." An outstanding work of fiction. --Mark Frutkin --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Richards, acclaimed in his native Canada, draws on his grandmother's life to provide emotional resonance for his latest novel (after 2001's Mercy Among the Children), a multigenerational family saga in which some generations are considerably more interesting than others. The narrator's grandmother, Hanna Jane (Janie) McLeary, is born toward the end of the 19th century in a small New Brunswick village. At 20 she marries an older Englishman, George King, who is poor in health as well as purse. They open a small cinema, which outdraws the town's other theater, owned by Joey Elias. When King dies, Janie has a son, Miles, and a daughter on the way—surely she can't also run a theater. Elias cunningly uses her bank's manager and her own father in attempts to gain control of her business, but Janie remains steadfast in the face of whispered scandal and threats of violence. But while she manages to keep her theater, tragedy strikes—her father is killed, and her daughter disappears while in the care of her son. Janie's story is fascinating, but while Richards' depiction of character and place remain consistently strong, the narrative slows as it focuses on her son and grandson. The trials of the family as its members progressively succumb to failure and alcoholism (even as they keep the theater running) are well drawn, but as Janie's descendants learn little from their mistakes, the tale becomes less involving. An unexpected deus ex machina in the last pages forces a rather unlikely happy ending onto a story that had been, until that point, entirely believable if not particularly memorable.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.ca
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.5 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unraveling the Laws of Human Morality..., Dec 5 2004
By Chantal Moore - Published on Amazon.com
This is the best book that I have read in a long time. David Adams Richards writes about dichotomous themes--good and evil, love and hate--in a world that seems to have lost its sense of distinction between such binary oppositions. Richards's novel spans four generations and tells the story of two families--the Drukens and the Mclearys--and their conflict-ridden estrangement from themselves and from each other. Janie Mcleary, the protagonist, is an assertive and successful business woman who is left widowed by her husband. She and her children are tormented by the Druken family. Her daughter, Georgina, is murdered and her son, Miles, grows up to be ghosted by his past. Characters in this novel are haunted by memories and stuggle with their faith, morality and integrity. Richard's capacity as an author, stems, in part, from his astute perception into the nature of human greed and faith. River of the Brokenhearted is not a sensuous romance novel; it is a journey into the moral struggles of humanity. Richards conveys the notion that the "good" people and the "bad" people are not always cut in black and white colors; some seemingly "immoral" characters (i.e. Miles the alcoholic) emerge as the unsaid heroes of this text. Past wrongs are translated into bodily ailments that afflict the characters on a physical level, but these wrongs are erasable. Characters are given the chance of redemption. This book resonates with spiritual undertones. It may increase your faith...
4.0 out of 5 stars
Northern sorrows, May 7 2012
By Matthew M. Radz - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
David Adams Richards, the Bard of Miramichi, follows in the tradition of Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro et al in mining the stifling sorrows of small-town Canadian life, in his case remote New Brunswick where this tale of two feuding families unfolds with elegant, relentless grace. Adams's sparse, precise prose creates a spellbinding novel at once genuine and persuasive, thanks in part to its narrative point of view. The story, which takes place mostly in the late 1930s and 1940, is told by the grandson of the book's self-made central character, Janie McLeary King. Now middle-aged, he reconstructs with a sober, cool-eyed neutrality the legacy that has shaped his own life.
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
