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The Shadow Catcher: A Novel (Paperback)

by Marianne Wiggins (Author)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product Details

Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (Jun 3 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743265211
ISBN-13: 978-0743265218
Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14 x 2.5 cm
Shipping Weight: 250 g

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #252,123 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
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#1 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( W ) > Wiggins, Marianne

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen, etc.) takes a magnificently Sebald-like approach to fictionalizing the life of photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952)—along with that of a woman named "Marianne Wiggins." The book opens as Wiggins presents her newly completed Curtis novel to a Hollywood agent. Curtis photographed American Indians in the early 20th century, and Marianne attacks the common image of Curtis as a swashbuckler who risked his life to photograph his favorite subjects. Even as she shows that Curtis staged the shots, and was an absentee husband and father at best, the agent is enthralled. Marianne, ambivalent, arrives home to a phone call that her father is in a Las Vegas hospital—the father who has been dead for 30 years. From that quick setup, the novel moves seamlessly back and forth between Marianne's painstaking research into Curtis's life and the journey she undertakes seeking closure with her father's past. Photographs taken by Curtis and from the Wiggins's family album, which she approaches from multiple angles, give the story several layers of immediacy. Curtis emerges as a fascinating, complex figure, one who inhabited any number of American contradictions. Suffused with Marianne's crackling social commentary and deceptively breezy self-discovery, Wiggins's eighth novel is a heartfelt tour de force. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Wiggins is a writer who paints elegant pictures with words. So who better to tell the story of Edward Sheriff Curtis, the enigmatic photographer of the American West, protege of J. P. Morgan, and friend of Theodore Roosevelt? She chooses to tell the story from her own point of view, through a fictionalized version of herself, called by her own name. Summoned to Hollywood to discuss turning her book about Curtis into a movie, Wiggins makes it plain to the director, who wants to make him a romantic hero, that he was anything but. He paid the Bureau of Indian Affairs a fee to photograph inside the reservations that he drove to in his car, abandoning his wife and four children and spending all their money to follow his obsession. At the same time she is pitching the movie, her personal life gets a bit hectic, and the links between Curtis' past and her present intertwine, if a little too coincidentally, at least very interestingly. The book slips from Wiggins' point of view to that of Curtis' long-suffering wife, Clara. The pages are liberally sprinkled with photographs, insights, realistic pathos, and human situations. This creative novel will not disappoint. Elizabeth Dickie
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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4.0 out of 5 stars The Vanishing Point, May 18 2009

By	photolover "Click" (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews

Marianne Wiggins has artfully intertwined her own memoir of her father with the story of Edward S. Curtis,and of the man who stole Curtis' identity, all of whom were absentee fathers. All the children of these men, including Wiggins, attempt to capture the ghosts or shadows of their fathers.

Who was the real Edward S. Curtis? The hero who risked his life to document the disappearing plains Indians, or an emotional cripple? Why did he leave his family? Curtis is the archetypal lone cowboy who deserts his family to pursue his first love, photography, an entrepreneur who rises from rags to riches and then loses it all. The haunting sound of the train's whistle, and the traffic jams in L.A. are all part of a constant journey towards the vanishing point in the distance which is the future, the American West, the lure of the unknown, the prospect of a better life. Much of the novel describes in detail the routes which people follow as they migrate from one part of the States to another, finding adventure as they struggle to survive.

Wiggins' use of photographs is intriguing. She includes not only Curtis' Indian photos, but those of family members and of paintings whose relevance only becomes apparent when the are read concurrently with the text. At one point, for example, photos of Kachina dolls appear while Wiggins describes the impassive, inscrutable Indians peddling their wares at a train station where Curtis' future wife, Clara, stops on her way to the West. Clara feels a kinship with them, since she too has been displaced from the Eastern way of life which had nurtured her, but also finds them alien. Even Wiggins, almost a century after, surprises herself when she realizes she has not asked He Who Owns his Shadow, the Indian who knew the Shadow Catcher, what he does for a living. Such is the power of the myth that Curtis helped create of the American Indian.
As a photographer, I found wiggins' comments about the parallels between writing and photography fascinating. She says that every photograph is an adventure. Reading her novel was an adventure for me. I like it even more on a second reading.

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