- Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Canada (May 22 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0676973590
- ISBN-13: 978-0676973594
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.1 x 2.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #368,621 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Steven Heighton's debut novel, The Shadow Boxer, is a contemporary portrait of the artist as a young man, northern Ontario-style. Hearkening back to the tales of innocents cast into the big, bad world, it traces the edification of one Sevigne Torrins--a young Hemingway type, a boxer from "the Soo," an aspiring writer, and a teetering alcoholic--through sundry misadventures: from the redneck steel town of Sault Ste. Marie to the Egyptian cities of the dead, from the soul-depleting Toronto literary scene to the bleak, wind-swept isles of Lake Superior.
Heighton populates Sev's world with some intriguingly flawed eccentrics: the untamed Una, who breaks Sev's heart; the songstress Mikaela, who rescues his lost soul; the writer friend Ray, who turns legend after vanishing without a trace; Sev's French-Canadian mother, Martine, who yearns for a more glamorous life; and his father, Sam Torrins, a drunk of an ex-seaman, lusty with life, wounded by his family's desertion. The Shadow Boxer shimmers with references to Great Books such as Hardy's Jude the Obscure and The Upanishads, even as its author, flexing his considerable literary muscles, stakes his own claim in the tradition. Heighton, who has published collections of stories (Flight Paths of the Emperor), essays (The Admen Move on Lhasa), and poetry (The Ecstasy of Skeptics), is consummate in his craft. His verbal virtuosity and erudition can at times bog the story down, but the scenes where Sev, otherwise hell-bent on self-destruction, nurses his father through his alcoholism, and those of his merciless winter on Rye Island, off whose shores lie the wreck and skeletons of the Edmund Fitzgerald, are simply riveting storytelling. --Diana Kuprel --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The texture, grit and pure narrative grace of this remarkable first novel by young Canadian short story writer, essayist and poet Heighton (Flight Paths of the Emperor; The Ecstasy of Skeptics, etc.) transform a coming-of-age story into something uncommon yet deeply familiar. Heighton chronicles the arduous artistic journey of the precocious but troubled Sevigne Torrins, who starts off by ditching a promising pugilistic career to follow his literary muse. The early chapters focus on his difficult relationship with his father, a former sailor drinking himself to death on the shores of Lake Superior, followed by a road-travel sequence that takes him to Egypt, where his mother has lived for years with her second husband. Most of the book, however, revolves around two romantic relationships, the first with a sexy, rabidly ambitious fellow writer, Una Sutherland, and the second and more lasting with a woman nearly 10 years older than Sevigne, 34-year-old singer Mikaela Chandler, whose biological clock is ticking with a vengeance. Heighton writes evocatively about the undercurrents of lust, creativity and ennui that shape the two situations. But he saves his most powerful work for the finale, when Sevigne isolates himself at his family's cottage on a remote island near Toronto, where a series of catastrophes reduce his winter writing retreat to a hovel and he contracts an infection that forces him to perform a grisly self-amputation. This is a remarkably accomplished, potent first novel in which Heighton explores the forces that shape the lives of artists, writing in a disarmingly natural voice that shifts effortlessly in range, from near-Lawrentian lyricism to blunt, gripping simplicity. In his progress from enthusiastic innocent, albeit with a complicated history, to someone older, wiser yet still "always working so hard at being alive," Sevigne convinces as few protagonists do. Author tour. (Feb. 25)Forecast: Heighton is already an acclaimed writer in Canada, and this should be his breakout book in the U.S. It's a bit surprising that a work of this magnitude is being issued in paperback, but so long as that doesn't throw book review editors, it shouldn't hurt sales.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
There's Better Canadian Fiction Out There,
By A Customer
I bought this book in the UK on the recommendation of a colleague who is a fan of Canadian literature. I really wanted to like this book, but I'm sorry to say I was very disappointed by it. It rambles on and on and I found its pretentiousness extremely irritating. My girlfriend thinks the female characters are insulting, and I have to agree with her. My co-worker praised Heighton's beautiful descriptions of scenery, and to be fair those parts are well written. This is not enough to carry the book however.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best book I read in years,
By Giovanna Bentivoglio (Rome, Italy) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Shadow Boxer (Hardcover)
Great impression I got since first pages of this surprising and eminent work of Steven Highton an author still unknown for me. The history, the atmosphere, the rithm and superb quality of writing has touched and troubled me. I found in this book the remote and always powerful world of images, sounds and architecture I received when I met the great authors of universal literature of all the times. I even was obliged to stop some times the reading because of the excessive charge of emotion and toughts the book comunicates with the strenght of an immense river. The Shadow Boxer has been a capital experience I wouln't hope to meet again in a young author og these days and I recommend this book to everyone is looking to find in books the supreme and rare deed of beauty and truth. Hoping Steven Highton will come to Italy and meet his italian readers.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great adventure story,
By A Customer
THE SHADOW BOXER is a great coming of age story that becomes a love story, adventure story, and, at the end, a meditation on what really matters in life. I've not read any of Heighton's other books, but his romantic style and deeply feeling narrative make me want to -- I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for something to curl up with on a rainy day.
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