- Hardcover: 328 pages
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart; First Edition edition (Sep 9 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0771012535
- ISBN-13: 978-0771012532
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 15.2 x 3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 544 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #217,658 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“Bergen’s characters move and breathe, demonstrating the delicate balance between hope and despair, salvation and damnation.”
— Toronto Star
“David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that’s both erotic and hypnotic. . . .”
— Miriam Toews
“Bergen’s novels are marvels of spare prose and weighty emotion.”
— Saturday Night
“The writing of Winnipeg's David Bergen, who won a host of prizes including the Giller for his last novel, The Time in Between, sometimes gets compared to that of Cormac McCarthy; taut, psychological fiction that floats just above a kind of menacing nihilism. His new novel, The Retreat, keeps to the pattern.”
— Winnipeg Free Press
“Paired with chirping crickets and a porch-side perch, the finely wrought prose and bucolic setting make for a perfect early-fall-evening companion.”
—Toronto Life
“The Giller Prize–winner’s latest book is a gripping tale that leaves the reader heavy-hearted yet driven to turn the page.”
— Canadian Living
“Throughout the story, the spare writing lends an atmosphere of foreboding, even dread, that makes for compelling reading.”
— Edmonton Journal.
“The Retreat is a powerful and engrossing novel, further proof that the late-blooming Bergen is now one of Canada's very best writers.”
— Montreal Gazette
“…the novel speeds along in [Bergen’s] characteristically exquisite prose.”
— The Walrus
“Bergen excels at creating dramatic scenes of survival. . . . A meaningful and significant work.”
— Globe and Mail
“Bergen makes every word count.”
— Ottawa Citizen
— Toronto Star
“David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that’s both erotic and hypnotic. . . .”
— Miriam Toews
“Bergen’s novels are marvels of spare prose and weighty emotion.”
— Saturday Night
“The writing of Winnipeg's David Bergen, who won a host of prizes including the Giller for his last novel, The Time in Between, sometimes gets compared to that of Cormac McCarthy; taut, psychological fiction that floats just above a kind of menacing nihilism. His new novel, The Retreat, keeps to the pattern.”
— Winnipeg Free Press
“Paired with chirping crickets and a porch-side perch, the finely wrought prose and bucolic setting make for a perfect early-fall-evening companion.”
—Toronto Life
“The Giller Prize–winner’s latest book is a gripping tale that leaves the reader heavy-hearted yet driven to turn the page.”
— Canadian Living
“Throughout the story, the spare writing lends an atmosphere of foreboding, even dread, that makes for compelling reading.”
— Edmonton Journal.
“The Retreat is a powerful and engrossing novel, further proof that the late-blooming Bergen is now one of Canada's very best writers.”
— Montreal Gazette
“…the novel speeds along in [Bergen’s] characteristically exquisite prose.”
— The Walrus
“Bergen excels at creating dramatic scenes of survival. . . . A meaningful and significant work.”
— Globe and Mail
“Bergen makes every word count.”
— Ottawa Citizen
Product Description
Bestselling novelist David Bergen follows his Scotiabank Giller Prize—winning The Time in Between with a haunting novel about the clash of generations — and cultures.
In 1973, outside of Kenora, Ontario, Raymond Seymour, an eighteen-year-old Ojibway boy, is taken by a local policeman to a remote island and left for dead.
A year later, the Byrd family arrives in Kenora. They have come to stay at “the Retreat,” a commune run by the self-styled guru Doctor Amos. The Doctor is an enigmatic man who spouts bewildering truisms, and who bathes naked every morning in the pond at the edge of the Retreat while young Everett Byrd watches from the bushes. Lizzy, the eldest of the Byrd children, cares for her younger brothers Fish and William, and longs for what she cannot find at the Retreat. When Lizzy meets Raymond, everything changes, and Lizzy comes to understand the real difference between Raymond’s world and her own. A tragedy and a love story, the novel moves towards a conclusion that is both astonishing and heartbreaking.
Set during the summer of the Ojibway occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora, The Retreat is a finely nuanced, deeply felt novel that tells the story of the complicated love between a white girl and a native boy, and of a family on the verge of splintering forever. It is also a story of the bond between two brothers who were separated in childhood, and whose lives and fates intertwine ten years later.
A brilliant portrait of a time and a place, The Retreat confirms Bergen’s reputation as one of the country’s most gifted and compelling writers.
In 1973, outside of Kenora, Ontario, Raymond Seymour, an eighteen-year-old Ojibway boy, is taken by a local policeman to a remote island and left for dead.
A year later, the Byrd family arrives in Kenora. They have come to stay at “the Retreat,” a commune run by the self-styled guru Doctor Amos. The Doctor is an enigmatic man who spouts bewildering truisms, and who bathes naked every morning in the pond at the edge of the Retreat while young Everett Byrd watches from the bushes. Lizzy, the eldest of the Byrd children, cares for her younger brothers Fish and William, and longs for what she cannot find at the Retreat. When Lizzy meets Raymond, everything changes, and Lizzy comes to understand the real difference between Raymond’s world and her own. A tragedy and a love story, the novel moves towards a conclusion that is both astonishing and heartbreaking.
Set during the summer of the Ojibway occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora, The Retreat is a finely nuanced, deeply felt novel that tells the story of the complicated love between a white girl and a native boy, and of a family on the verge of splintering forever. It is also a story of the bond between two brothers who were separated in childhood, and whose lives and fates intertwine ten years later.
A brilliant portrait of a time and a place, The Retreat confirms Bergen’s reputation as one of the country’s most gifted and compelling writers.
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Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting story....,
By
This review is from: The Retreat (Hardcover)
This new novel from David Bergen has just been released from Random House Canada.The book opens in Kenora, Ontario in 1973. Raymond Seymour, a young native man, has just been dropped off and left to die on a remote island by a local cop. His crime? Dating the white cop's niece. The Byrd family arrives in the summer of 1974 to stay at the Retreat, which is just outside Kenora as well. It's leader is the self styled 'Doctor'. He promotes the Retreat as a spiritual and practical escape for the summer. But to the reader his motives seem to have a darker side. " Take a group of people and plunk them down in a village, a village that is created from scratch, and make those people live together. What happens? That's what interests me." Mrs. Byrd sees this Retreat as her salvation from her unhappy life. Her husband Lewis loves his wife and will go along with whatever she wants. Their four children - Lizzy, the oldest, her brothers William and Everett and the the youngest boy Fish, aren't thrilled to be there. The Retreat is also populated with other guests, all seeking or hiding from something.1974 is also the year of the Ojibway occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora. Lizzy crosses paths with Raymond Seymour, who escaped from the island and now delivers fresh game to the Retreat. They begin a relationship. What follows is a haunting, unsettling story of lives, wants, needs and undercurrents never quite brought to the surface. The clash of cultures and beliefs fuel the fire. Bergen's phrasing and language are beautiful. I often had to stop and savour a phrase. "He was moving his crooked fingers, as if attempting to pick up some slippery idea up off the floor." I felt as if I was watching a train wreck. You don't want to see the destruction but feel compelled to witness it. As the novel hurtles towards it's inevitable end, I could not put it down. I was thinking about The Retreat long after I turned the final page. Bergen is a previous winner of the Giller Prize for his last novel, The Time in Between.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Red Leaf on a White Background,
By
This review is from: The Retreat (Hardcover)
I was on the Lake of the Woods in the summer of 1973 and this story reminds me of that place and that time when the sexual revolution was new, when Ojibwe people were just staring to reach back to their culture for their own solutions to the bad place they found themselves in. The author has expertly created characters that embody the social conflicts of the time: women and girls exploring sexual freedom, the enforcers of colonization, the inter-generational victims on genocide and the majority swept up in self-doubt and changing freedoms but with a limited world-view. It is a bleak story and one that is central to the Canadian story. I am glad that a white Canadian can write so truthfully about the effects of the '60's scoop' of Native children and take some accountability for the damages which are still affecting us all. A good campanion piece to offset the bleakness is Louise Eldrich's book about the lake.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
The epicentre of unresolved tension!,
By Ian Gordon Malcomson (Victoria, BC) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME) (TOP 10 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Retreat (Hardcover)
David Bergen, a recent Giller Prize-winning author, has written a very compelling and dramatic story about ordinary people's lives in the backwoods of Kenora in the early 1970s. What dominates the setting of this well-developed novel are a number of cultural counterforces moving aggressively against each other in the interests of control and subjugation. There is such a widespread sense of distrust at work in this story that when people have an opportunity to become reconciled, some negative force intervenes to wreck it. The points of convergency in the plot are many and varied, but inevitably all end up in irreconciable conflict and tragedy. If it isn't a troubling feud between an OPP officer, Hart, and a young Ojibway native, Raymond, to catch the reader's attention, then there are the many enigmatic conflicts within the Byrd family who have come to Kenora to attend a family-based commune dedicated to achieving peace and reconciliation. And then hovering over the whole setup is a big showdown between the Ojibway and the government over control of a local provincial park. The plot that joins all these different conflicts races to its ultimate conclusion when lives fall apart after dreams of fulfilment are destroyed by acts cruelty, racism, and narcissism. The struggles of two brothers, Everett and Raymond, and two lovers, Raymond and Lizzy, to forge a bond of love and understanding are negated because of general lack of good-will and tolerance in others around them. The reference to a retreat in this story represents the naive hope that there has to be some hiding place out there where one can go to realize peace, love and happiness. Unfortunately, Bergen quickly dashes that thought by bringing the man-made conflict right into the heart of natural world. Great read!
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