East Of The Mountains

Rating:
Summary: Great Prose ¿.way too much sage!
Review: Like Snow Falling on Cider, this is such a beautifully written book, long lyrical descriptions of scenes and emotions. Much of the weakness of this story is in the slow meandering "plot" in comparison to the faster paced drama of Snow Falling.

With so many excellent reviews of this book, I would just say, I enjoyed the prose a great deal, found it a bit slow at times, but overall a good read

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Summary: The Strength of the Human Spirit
Review: East of the Mountains by David Guterson is a moving account of the strength of the human spirit. Ben Givens, a retired heart surgeon who has been diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer, takes the reader on a hunting trip designed to cover up his planned suicide. Though actually spanning one week of time, Givens adventure in the high desert of Eastern Washington State guides us through a lifetime of memories and leads us to a deeper understanding of Ben's desire to end his life. Guterson's style of slow and patient writing adds to the feeling that his main character is winding down, putting things in perspective and trying to make sense of a life that he can no longer control. Guterson writes with the wisdom of someone who has experienced the slow process of forced acceptance.

Through vivid flashbacks and visual descriptions, Guterson paints a picture of Given's childhood in the apple orchards along the east bank of the Columbia, the area itself, and how he met and fell in love with Rachel. When Ben is called to serve his country in World War II, he witnesses death first hand on the battlefields in Italy's Apennines, and is awed by the power of healing that emanates from the hands of the Army doctor. This experience leads Givens to choose a fulfilling career as a thoracic surgeon. After marrying Rachel and fathering a daughter, Ben is sustained by the love and devotion of his family, the power of healing others, and the richness of personal accomplishments. When Rachel dies, Ben realizes how deeply his own sense of self was rooted in his relationship with his wife; now, only nineteen months after his wife's death, Ben is faced with the onset of colon cancer. The fight or flight syndrome is even more intense for a surgeon who is personally acquainted with the process of a slow death. "Ben was aware of regions of pain so terrible, they obliterated all arguments"(p 15). Ben envisions the burden and pain that such a painful fatal illness will inflict on both him and his loved ones; he turns to the alternative-suicide. "Like all physicians, he knew the truth of such a verdict; he knew full well the force of cancer and how inexorably it operated. Better to end it now, he'd decided; better to avoid pain than to engage it" (p 4).

However, the human spirit clings to life, and as Ben Givens spends a week in the east side of the mountains, he encounters several people who influence and help him to discover his inner strength. After Ben wrecks his 1969 International Scout at Snoqualmie Pass, he nearly loses his eye and alters his immediate plans. Ben meets a couple of incense-carrying "forevers" who remind him of youthful desires and a drifter who provides him with marijuana to ease his pain. Givens encounters a coyote hunter and survives a wild nighttime standoff with a ravenous pack of Irish wolfhounds, leaving one of his dogs dead and the other critically injured. Ben tests his physical endurance as he carries his wounded pet from the desert to a veterinarian where her touch reminds him of the power in a surgeon's hands. As his journey continues, he meets a migrant worker who tries his ability to understand and comes face to face with a situation that questions his identity as a physician. However, Ben's skill saves the life of a mother and infant in a very harrowing delivery, and life begins to take on new meaning for Ben. "Things looked different" (p 264). Guterson makes us understand that even when the body gets old and betrays us, the human spirit is ageless and can endure.

Ben Given's decision to end his life is not so shocking considering the road ahead of him; however, his inner strength to find a new path toward his final passing is inspiring. In the unhurried quiet of Ben's soul, truth was affirmed. Ben's encounters with people on the east side of the mountains taught him that life is a gift filled with purpose and beauty, and that even in the darkest hours, the human spirit can reach out and touch someone's heart. Guterson reminds us that we are all human, that we do not want to suffer, and that it takes an extremely strong person to live life fully when faced with the finality of death.

Rating:
Summary: Good
Review: I bought it because the Audio Version has gotten a Award, the story was excellent, and the recording was good too.

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Summary: Deep Reflections of Suicide and Redemption
Review: True to its poetic title, Snow Falling on Cedars fell softly and deeply onto the literary landscape after it was published in 1994. David Guterson's first novel, set on an island in Puget Sound, Wash., in the 1950s, got good reviews and eventually won several awards, including the 1995 PEN/Faulkner. But it was also a classic word-of-mouth sleeper, talked into paperback-best-seller heaven by hundreds of thousands of ardent readers.

Guterson's new novel, East of the Mountains, is set in the orchard country of central Washington, but in essential matters it has a lot in common with its snowy predecessor. It has Guterson's subtle, elegiac style, infused with atmospheric landscapes and high seriousness.

It's a story of precarious redemption, a man backing through defeat into grace. And it's haunted by memory, both sweet and rueful. The period doing the haunting is the same one--World War II and the years just before it. Taken together, Guterson's two Pacific Northwest novels, like Cormac McCarthy's "Border" trilogy about the Southwest during the 1930s and '40s, reflect a deep nostalgia for the Depression and the war as the last austere and heroic time in American life, before the culture became plastic and ironic, consumerized and televised.

In fact, East of the Mountains, set in 1997 amid standard roadside clutter and blight, gives a better sense of our diminished present. But avid Guterson readers may feel that the enchantment gauge is down somewhat from Snow Falling on Cedars, which evoked a distinct world through its story of a Japanese-American man brought to trial on a murder charge, interspersed with memories of a clandestine interracial love affair and stark images of snow and sea.

East of the Mountains is an episodic and brooding road (and off-the-road) novel, in which the episodes are usually compelling but have a cooked-up feel. Most road novels have young heroes. This one has a 73-year-old retired Seattle heart surgeon named Ben Givens, who grew up on an apple farm near the Columbia River. He acutely misses his wife, Rachel, dead for 19 months, and now he's been diagnosed with terminal colon cancer.

Already in pain, he decides to commit suicide, planning to make it look like a hunting accident to spare the feelings of his daughter and grandchildren. With his two dogs and shotgun he drives east over the mountains in search of a canyon to disappear into. And everything goes wrong. If Guterson were a comic writer--which he definitely isn't, particularly when he momentarily tries to be--this would be a comedy of errors about a man who wants to kick the bucket but keeps putting his foot into it.

Crossing a mountain pass, Ben skids off the wet road, wrecking his car and leaving himself with a breathtakingly ugly black eye. He gets a ride to a nearby town from a young couple, neo-hippie vagabonds who supply him with pumpkin seeds and Tibetan incense.

Carless, he decides to hike to the desert to hunt birds and himself, but after a memorably nightmarish scene involving a coyote, a pack of hounds, and a mystery man on a dirt bike, he's left gunless and nearly dogless as well. During his misadventures he meets a hitchhiker offering marijuana, itinerant Mexicans in need of a doctor, and a girl who imparts the cloudy wisdom of the German spiritualist Rudolf Steiner (who once figured in a novel by Saul Bellow). Eventually Ben discovers that "all guns are cursed," and that by saving the lives of others he saves his own for an honorable end.

There's a lot in the book that's unflinching, especially Ben's ordeals on the Italian front during the war. But the prevailing note here, as in Snow Falling on Cedars, is tenderness; Guterson is a master, for instance, at depicting first love. The tenderness in this book occasionally crosses the border into sentimentality. Too many characters are too good to be true--the Mexicans are all humble and saintly, for instance, and Rachel seems remote in Ben's devout memories of her. But Ben is deeply drawn and complexly sympathetic, and if his story, compared with Guterson's first novel, occasionally seems forced and thin aroun the edges, it's sustained by the same consistent intelligence and moral vision.

Rating:
Summary: A step down from Snow Falling on Cedars
Review: East of the Mountains by David Guterson Harcourt and Brace 1999

The beautiful and haunting "Snow Falling on Cedars" by the same author spurred me to read this book. The story line is simple. An elderly physician, Ben Givens, discovers he has colon cancer and decides that he does not want to wait for a painful slow ending but would rather commit suicide. His wife died several years previously and he does not want to subject his daughter and grandchildren to the sight of his slow death.

He plans meticulously so that it will appear to be a hunting accident. The story unfolds as he travels with his hunting dogs to where he is going to hunt. Several things happen on his journey that lead him to reconsider his decision.

The characterization of Ben is very believable and most of the characters appearing along the way are very sympathetic and likeable. (I think Guterson has difficulty drawing a truly despicable character). The descriptions of this part of Washington State are incredibly beautiful and evocative of a youth full of passion for this part of the country. Another echo from Snow Falling on Cedars is the depiction of the brutality and senselessness of war and its life changing effects.

I did not find this book as fulfilling as "Snow Falling on Cedars" and the plot seems a bit contrived. However the visual word pictures painted by Guterson are remarkable and worth the read alone.

Rating:
Summary: A Superb Novel
Review: This subtle and thoughtful novel, Guterson's second, is among the best I have ever read. It relates the story of how one man deals with an impossibly difficult problem that he cannot avoid: his own impending death.

In a basic sense, "East of the Mountains" expands on ideas explored years ago by John Barth in "The Floating Opera" and by Edward Abbey in "The Fool's Progress." But Guterson's profound novel goes far beyond those fine earlier efforts.

The multiple themes of "East of the Mountains" include the importance of casual, everyday decisions; the strength of family love; and the power of fate and happenstance. But most vividly, the book illustrates the overwhelming importance of engaging life face-to-face on a daily basis. Guterson sees life as a process, not as a goal.

Written in Guterson's graceful and unsentimental style, this novel is a true literary masterpiece. Thoughtful persons will find it enormously gratifying; it reaches for the stars. I lost sleep because of this book -- I know of no higher praise.

Rating:
Summary: A novel of self-discovery
Review: A sometimes disturbing story of a man's attempt at suicide--a suicide that will appear accidental AND hide the fact that he will die before cancer kills him.

On the way to his suicide mission, Ben Givens is involved in an accident that forces him to make a soul-searching journey. The foot-journey "east of the mountains" allows him to reflect on his past--his family history, his one true love Rachel, his medical career.

And the turning point comes with a birth. Called upon to assist with a difficult delivery, he witnesses the struggle for life. His efforts save both the mother and infant. "Things looked different now."

A great story of self-discovery. And the reminder that self-discovery is a life-long quest.

Rating:
Summary: East Side of the Mountains is profoundly marvelous
Review: I loved this quiet, pensive read about retired thoracic surgeon Ben, recently widowed & diagnosed with cancer who heads off over the Cascade Mountains into the orchard lands of his childhood. Accompanied by his two Brittanies, his father's hunting rifle & his memories, this gentle, sad grandfather skids off a rainy highway & lands himself into a world of misery & kindness, philosophy & acceptance. Lovely, lovely read! For my full review do check out[my website].

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Summary: Journey Towards Life
Review: East of the Mountains offers a visual picture of the Washington landscape that works almost like a character. The descriptions of mountains, desert, and fruit orchards blend with the story of a man's journey toward death as he reviews his life and eventually turns back toward living. Heart surgeon, Ben Givins, sets out on a rainy Washington morning with his two dogs to go bird hunting and finally to end his life. When a series of unexpected events occurs, his course is changed and challenged as he struggles with age and infirmity, only to discover that he is still useful and that life is still full of richness and beauty. What initially was to be a depressing story turned into a life-affirming saga of one man's journey of self discovery. In reliving his youth, war years, and savoring the memories of his wife, Ben rediscovers the importance and fullness of a life accustomed to loving and helping others. Only through that revelation is he able to return to his own life and face the challenges that inevitably must come.

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Summary: John Dolan
Review: There are a lot of novels like this around these days: healthy, harmless, well-meaning novels by old people who don't really have the gift, didn't burn hot enough to become writers while they were young but manage to squeeze out one novel in their old age. You know the novels I mean: Cold Mountain. Shipping News. Snow Falling on Cedars. Often they're set in the Pacific Northwest, where all the nice white people fled when the rest of the US got too piebald and bloody. These novels often do very well, because they appeal to a big demographic bulge: boomers past their prime, eager to find their bland, diminishing lives gilded with meaning and solemnity they don't really possess.

East of the Mountains is that kind of novel. It's a follow-up effort by David Guterson, who wrote Snow Falling on Cedars. It has the same humorless solemnity of Cedars--or at least it attempts to continue that tone. In fact, East of the Mountains is very funny, albeit unintentionally so. The plot is a classic: an old man, a tall proud successful Seattle heart surgeon who's got terminal colon cancer, decides to kill himself in a fake hunting accident. But on his way from Seattle to that final Happy Hunting Ground in eastern Washington, he crashes his car, meets a series of people--oh yes, people both good and bad, young and old, rich and poor, stupid and stupid--and then he helps deliver a baby, and it's a big moment for him because it like shows how life goes on, you know? And naturally he realizes that life is too precious to be surrendered so easily. We leave him, at the end of the novel, no longer thinking of suicide, instead committed to enduring nine months of agonizing pain that will end in certain death.

Now that's funny. But Guterson, who possesses that perfect earnestness one often finds in provincial literary folk, doesn't seem to have any sense of the sheer Ed Wood comedy of the trite and silly plot he's employing. Like most American workshop writers, he's read far too much Hemingway and learned to confuse flat, pompous monotony with toughmindedness. He writes in Hemingway's terse, hard style; but Hemingway could do that because he was, at least in his early career, a very strange mind whose telegraphic syntax seemed to be holding terror and chaos barely in check. When middle-of-the-road disciples like Guterson try to attain this tone, they always end up reproducing the comic earnestness of the late Hemingway--the tone of works like The Old Man and the Sea, bombastic self-praise that would've made Whitman himself blush. In fact, East of the Mountains is very like Old Man and the Sea in its plot, as well as its style. In both novels, an aged hero confronts his waning powers and finds triumph in overcoming them, etc.

Guterson's failed attempt at Hemingway-like hardness shows up in the first paragraph of East of the Mountains:

"On the night he had appointed his last among the living, Dr. Ben Givens did not dream, for his sleep was restless and visited by phantoms who guarded the portals to the world of dreams by speaking relentlessly of this world. They spoke of his wife--now dead--and of his daughter, of silent canyons where he had hunted birds, of august peaks he had once ascended, of apples newly plucked from trees, and of vineyards in the foothills of the Appenines. They spoke of rows of campanino apples near Monte della Torraccia; they spoke of cherry trees on river slopes and of pear blossoms in May sunlight. Now on the roof tiles and against his windows a vast Seattle rain fell ceaselessly, as if to remind him that memories are illusions; the din of its beating against the world was in perfect harmony with his insomnia. Dr. Givens shrugged off his past to devote himself to the rain's steady cadence, but no dreams, no deliverance, came to him. Instead he only adjusted his legs--his bladder felt distressingly full--and lay tormented by the fact that he was dying--dying of colon cancer."

They spoke of Spokane... huh? Oh, sorry--musta dozed off there for a moment. Where were we? Right, right: we were looking at the first paragraph of this potboiler. Whoo-boy, now there's a first paragraph for you! Remember those novels that Snoopy used to try to write? "It was a dark and stormy night... "

Somebody must've told poor Guterson that you have to grab the reader by the colon in your very first sentence. In that first clause, we learn that our hero is about to die. By the end of the first paragraph we learn that our hero is a doctor, a widower, with one daughter, and that he has hunted birds (all middlebrow heroes must participate in some form of blood sport, if only that they can renounce it at the moment of epiphany), that he climbs mountains and lives in Seattle, that he's been to Italy... in short, he's just the hippest dying elderly doctor who ever topped off for a pound of Kenyan Blend at the Starbuck's across from U Dub.

If only Guterson had any deftness, he might have passed all this expository background on to the reader a bit more slowly and smoothly. Instead he writes like a first-year English major, signposting like crazy, providing every single detail of the entire plot in the very beginning, no matter how this warps his sentences. Look at the last sentence of his paragraph; Guterson stops in the middle of the final sentence to update us on the state of his doctor-hero's bladder, then goes on to tell us the good doctor's dying... and then, just to be specific, adds, "--dying of colon cancer." It reminds me of one of Thurber's anecdotes about his college writing course, in which one farmboy-student, acting on his instructor's advice to grab the reader at the very start, began his next story with the sentence, "'Hell!' said the Duchess."

It's bad, but somehow it doesn't upset me the way other bad writing does. There's something almost endearing about this dreadfully earnest novel--it has the off-kilter tenderness of a truly bad primitive painting. You just know, after that first paragraph, that the good doctor is going to have a series of Scrooge-like epiphanic encounters which will teach him that he oughtn't to blow his head off with his heirloom shotgun. The characters he meets are pretty standard: a lovey-dovey young couple; a Hispanic farmworker who needs medical attention; a mean rancher; a lonely trucker... did I leave anybody out? Oh yeah: the Ghost of Christmas Past. No, wait--that's another epiphany entirely. My mistake. But to tell you the truth, I wouldn't've been at all surprised if Dr. Givens had run into Bob Cratchit or Ebenezer Scrooge out there on the sagebrush desert. The good doctor couldn't hardly stir without some cardboard character popping up to teach some moral lesson. In the Naked Gun version of this novel--and the novel is damn close to being a parody of itself already--in the Leslie Nielsen version, the doctor would flee back to Seattle and prepare to endure his long agony out of sheer frustration at not being able to find a quiet spot out there in the sagebrush to swallow that shotgun. He'd head back to the big city just for the sheer peace and quiet.

In the end, it was Cobain--the only real literary talent in all of King County--who put the barrel in his mouth and punctuated himself. Only the good die young. The bad--and Guterson is a comically bad writer--go on and on, squeezing foolish moral tales out of their obstructed bowels long after the cancer should have silenced them.