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 |
About Grace : A Novel |
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Rating:  Summary: Amazing Grace Review: After Anthony Doerr's stunning short story debut with "The Shell Collector" (Scribner), the gifted young author has made a beautifully seamless transition to novelist with his exquisite new book, "About Grace" (Scribner). Mr. Doerr again intriguingly integrates the natural world and the human spirit with his signature beautifully poetic prose. Fiction and scientific fact are elegantly combined to raise our awareness of the wonder in much of our everyday lives that is too often unobserved. His use of story is especially compelling, pulling the reader along, completely captive.
We will surely hear a lot more from this talented young writer in future years. Meanwhile, his most recent gift, "About Grace," is exceptional.
Hal Eastman, Director, Easlas Trust
Rating:  Summary: A Beautiful and Engaging Story... Review: Anthony Doerr's "About Grace" is a wonderful piece of fiction. The story of David Winkler's journey completely engaged me. My heart ached for Winkler. Doerr created a character that one could emphathize with as well as root for in his search for his daughter and inner peace. Like the "Shell Collector", Doerr's writing is simply beautful. I cannot wait for his next book!
Rating:  Summary: A beautifully written novel about a father's love Review: David Winkler is a 32-year-old hydrologist leading a fairly boring life in Anchorage, Alaska. Since childhood, he has experienced dreams that occasionally turn out to be actual premonitions. The most vivid one involves a man cut in half by a bus. Despite his mother's best attempts to avoid any incidents (she keeps him home for several days after he confides the dream), it comes to pass that, after shopping for groceries on a Saturday, he witnesses a man --- carrying the same hatbox as in his dream --- keeping his inevitable date with the bus of destiny.
In the dream that most affects his adult life, he watches a woman drop a magazine in a store and he picks it up for her. Eventually, he picks up the magazine for one Sandy Sheeler --- a woman he knows he will fall in love with, a woman he semi-stalks for several months, whose magazine he keeps and reads until the pages are tattered, a woman who is married.
Their affair begins with afternoon movie matinees and stretches into Wednesday evenings spent in his apartment as her husband has hockey on those nights. Before long, she becomes pregnant and, since her husband has been deemed infertile, it is obviously David's. They run away together and end up in Cleveland where David has found a job with a TV station as the staff meteorologist and Sandy fulfills an artist's dream by constructing large, elaborate metal sculptures in the basement of their little tract house by a feeder creek of the Chagrin River.
David's baby daughter, Grace, is born, and as babies tend to do, she changes his life in completely unexpected ways. His happiness and contentedness are palpable as he counts the minutes at work until he can go home to watch his little girl sleep and watch his wife (because, despite not being divorced from her husband, they have married) toiling over her art. All is well.
Then he has a dream. He dreams of a long, rainy spell in Ohio, one that swells rivers to flood stage and even causes creeks to rise. He dreams of his house, deserted and filling with water, seemingly empty as he runs room to room, yet he knows this cannot be because he can hear a baby crying. He finds Grace and stumbles outside with her only to be met by a wall of water that sweeps them both away. He awakes. He cannot shake the dream and it stirs his old sleepwalking habit. It gets so bad that his wife will shake him awake in the driveway, sitting in the car with the baby on the seat, having just returned from driving to where or from neither of them have any idea. In addition to panicking about whether his dream will come true, he now panics about what he himself might do to his daughter in his sleep.
Ultimately, the dream comes true. It rains and rains. It floods. He spirits his family off to a motel. But after leaving them there and being sent away by Sandy out of fear of his sleepwalking, he returns to the house after attempting to call the motel and getting no answer. His street, neighborhood and home look exactly like the scene of his dream, and unable to go any further, he runs to his car and literally runs away.
David ends up in St. Vincent for 25 years. He becomes a laborer, then handyman, at a local resort he helps build. He is adopted as a strange, white uncle by an island family, whose daughter forms an unusual bond of the soul with him. He writes letters upon letters to Sharon, trying to find out if Grace is alive or if the entire dream became a reality. His simple life on the island is appealing and satisfying, yet his hunger for information on his daughter finally drives him back to the United States where he tracks down Sharon Sheelers and Grace Winklers from state to state until he ends up back where he started in Alaska. Ironically, his island "niece," Naaliyah, ended up in Alaska (partly due to the college recommendations he wrote for her) and he manages to find her out in the bush where she is preparing to spend the winter studying the hibernation tendencies of insects. They eventually return to the city where he finds answers to the big questions that have been haunting him for most of his life.
It would be easy to scorn David Winkler. It would be easy to call him a "little" man; a man who ran away from his responsibilities and duties; a man who left a "wife" and baby daughter one day and never came back. However, there is a much larger issue at hand. This is a man who really thought that his presence in his daughter's life was jeopardizing her safety. His wife even thought so. If this premonition didn't come to full fruition, then what about the next one he might have? Or the one after that? It is heart-wrenching to put oneself in these shoes; and it is heart-wrenching to watch him deal with this day in and day out for so long. In the end, it seems to make a very strong argument for the case that parental love in absentia perhaps can be just as strong as if the parent were present.
I highly recommend ABOUT GRACE --- it is beautifully written, has a quiet suspense that carries it right along, and a main character in David Winkler who the reader will come to admire and respect as a father, a father figure, and a man.
--- Reviewed by Jamie Layton
Rating:  Summary: Brilliant Review: If you've stood in a snowy meadow on a star-filled night and marveled at its stillness and beauty, or ever sensed a deep connection to the wind as it hit your face, then you will appreciate this book. It is filled with life. It is filled with thousands of moments we all experience, but rarely stop to appreciate.
About Grace is a beautiful book about a very ordinary man, David Winkler. It is in his humanity that I was able to identify and relate. One aspect of his life that is extraordinary, are the vivid dreams that come to haunt him in his waking hours. It is in the struggle to deal with these premonitions that we see the frailty of life, the strength of human will, and the power of love.
Anthony Doerr's book may stop you mid-sentence to marvel at what is being said. More likely it will stop you mid-sentence to marvel at how it is being said. It is written with clarity and soulfulness by a man that obviously walks through life with his eyes wide open. Savor it like a fine wine. It will remind you to wake up to the wonder and beauty in the details of your everyday life.
Rating:  Summary: Doerr "rolls strong"... Review: In his latest joint, "About Grace," Mr. Doerr hooks his audience by telling an honest, straight-forward, poetic story. Whereas some writers bedizen their prose with glinty & distracting baubles, Mr. Doerr's lyricism is more subtle. Perhaps I should provide an example: "Ice, glazing the road, sent back wedges and sheets of glare. The whole scene trembled, then fused with radiance..." or "...and a lawnmower growling behind the library, even beneath the sound of his own, faltering breath, he could hear it: the rumbling, the long plunge, the churning of the falls." This concise, palpable writing style also allows the reader to focus on the story itself (its action, characters, theme, etc).
Speaking of, several ideas regarding this book's "global meaning" have been floated my way by a couple no-chinned, waxy-browed dilettantes with whom I share an office. To pin down one, all-inclusive meaning for this novel seems treacherous. Any story with its chickpeas should be open to several viable interpretations. This book does just that. By the way, what does "global meaning" mean? And who invented Atari? My point is this: let's not focus on the trivial--open your heart and let the love and/or freshness flow:
"Just let your love flow like a mountain stream
And let your love grow with the smallest of dreams
And let your love show and you'll know what I mean it's the season." -- The Bellamy Brothers, 1975
That's deep & I came up with it on my own (song lyrics excluded). Hugs and kisses to YOU. And YOU! Check YOU later, Simone.
This book can heft great quantities of concrete and pig-iron over its head, I allow. Mr. Doerr's novel is similar (in a way) to Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," minus the peat bogs, random smoting, and of course, Heathcliff. Happy reading.
"I have pre-viewed this re-view." --mdr
Rating:  Summary: "Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, and of death" Review: In this highly symbolical novel, author Anthony Doerr boldly poses metaphysical questions about life, death, the human condition, and the ties that inevitably bind families together. Doerr has a beautifully structured style, and the narrative of About Grace is full of some of the most spectacular imagery, but the meaning behind the tale is often shrouded in the abstract and the mysterious. Memory, dreams, water, and the inescapable lust for life form the thematic core of this novel as David Winkler, the often-embattled main protagonist of the story, voluntarily exiles himself far away from his family and the life he is familiar with.
David has a terrible problem. A chronic sleepwalker and a gifted hydrologist, he dreams about things before they happen, and the dreams are often terrible portents to death and disaster. He dreams of a man getting hit by a bus, he dreams he's on an airplane, returning home after twenty-five years, and dreams he's on an island dreaming of the future. But when he dreams that he will inadvertently kill his daughter Grace, while trying to save her in a flood, he becomes obsessed with protecting her. He sees Grace suffocating in his arms and realizes that his dreams are ordained perhaps by chance, or choice, or the complexities of some unfathomably large pattern.
Fearing Grace's death, Winkler leaves her and his wife Sandy behind and jumps on a ship that is headed to the Caribbean in an attempt to stop the dream from becoming reality. During his twenty-five year exile, David writes obsessive letters to Sandy begging to find out whether Grace is still alive, and is befriended by two Chilean exiles Felix and Soma, whose daughter Naaliyah comes to support him in unexpected and surprising ways.
Winkler becomes a reclusive island hermit who is wracked by guilt at what he has done. He goes from being a confident weatherman with a family to a type of disparate lost soul, where he lives his days and nights struggling against sleep, time and guilt - existing only for a flicker of hope that his daughter is still alive. He ekes out a living doing trivial jobs, working on construction sites, and relying on the good-hearted generosity of others.
Winkler eventually returns to the United States in search of redemption, forgiveness, and to find out whether Grace is still alive. The journey he embarks on takes him on an epic road trip across continental United States, to the blistery wintry darkness of northern Alaska, and back to Anchorage where his life journey started all those years earlier. Doerr cleverly likens Winker's experiences to the natural world. Winkler is a scientist obsessed with snowflakes and other forms of water, but he is also a man who is unmistakably human and frail. And like the snowflakes he studies, he is remarkably resilient to the world around him. David discovers that life is just like the ice crystals he studies - the basic design is so icily repeated and unerringly conforming. The filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars have a ghastly inevitability; both the crystals and humans cannot escape their embedded blueprints.
Whether he is describing the intricate arms of these snowflakes or the unending beauty of a tropical sunset, Doerr's powers of description are formidable and his ability to evoke the passions of the ever-changing natural world are unsurpassed. About Grace is a powerful story about family - "family is truth, struggle, retribution and time" - and also the ability to forgive. Through the power of redemption, David is able to better understand the meaning of life and more fully appreciate the beauty of the natural world that constantly encompasses us. Mike Leonard December 04.
Rating:  Summary: Boring!!! Review: Oh my gosh...I read the reviews and thought I found a winner. What I found was a snail-paced, painfully boring bunch of jargon where nothing ever happens. The characters are pathetic and unlikable. This is not a good book...in fact it's terrible. Pretentious people may say they like it in attempt to sound avant garde...but they'll be lying. The hands down worst book I've read all year, and I've read some dogs.
Rating:  Summary: beautiful writing marred by pace Review: Since he was young, David Winkler has occasionally been visited by "true" dreams, visions of things that he will later witness. When as an adult he begins dreaming of playing a role in his new daughter's drowning, he flees his rain-soaked home unsure of whether she is dead or alive and he doesn't stop running until he reaches a Caribbean island near St. Vincent, where he is taken in by a local family and becomes a father figure to their six-year-old girl. About Grace begins with his flight home a quarter-century later. Knowing nothing of his wife or daughter, his journey to find them will have him crossing the entire country, finally ending up in Alaska, his original home.
Before he left America, Winkler was a hydrologist/weather analyst and water in all its forms, but most especially snow, runs throughout the novel. The finest writing, in fact, often deals with water. At times, however, this is as much a negative as much as it is a plus. In the first hundred or so pages, the water references come flying at the reader in seemingly every paragraph (I exaggerate but only slightly), whether it be memory of his obsession with snow as a child, memories of a collection of photographs of snow, the days and nights of flooding, notes from Winkler's planned book about water, water on windows, glasses, doors, skin, eyeglasses, etc. After not too short a time they become more distracting than anything else, screaming out for attention, not only for the frequency but for their often highly stylized writing style as well. A lighter or at least more varied stylistic touch, a less frequent dipping into the well, a more balanced scattering throughout the book: all of these would have helped.
The other problem is at times water seems to overshadow the main character, who at times is wonderfully plumbed to his depths and at other times seems a watery shallow puddle of a man. There is relatively little examination of the effect on him of his early dreams beyond his relationship with his mother. His burgeoning affair with his to-be wife (married to a banker where she is a teller) begins with beautiful, vivid detail as he meets her for the first time outside a dream ("tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles."). And his devotion to her, captured of course in watery terms, is conveyed equally well. But there is little self-examination of his effect on a marriage, little sense of the sharp tension, so the whole thing plays a little bit unreal, more like an affair in a book than an actual affair.
With the birth of his daughter and the onset of his dreams, we enter another period of excellent, vivid writing, filled with an atmosphere of horror, desperation, suspense, and despair. It's some of the strongest writing in the whole book.
His time spent as a menial worker on the island has its best touches in the description of the natural world (the sun, the reef, the lagoon) and in the scenes between Winkler and his adoptive family's young daughter, Naaliyah. We watch as he observes her grow from six into a young woman who eventually leaves the island. Here too at times, some of the characterization seems a bit unreal, as for instance the all-positive "I'm a better person now that I'm using my hands" description of his menial work digging holes in the ground for hours a day. I can accept numbness, but his reflection on the positives shows he isn't numb. That he never complains/notices the sun, blisters, etc (except in a single line). is just too hard to believe.
Eventually, Winkler will come to learn something about his dreaming, will return to the States to look for his wife and daughter though he has no idea if they are alive or dead, will reunite with Naaliyah in Alaska where she is studying entomology, will try to come to resolution with the man whose wife he ran away with so many decades ago, will, perhaps, learn something he didn't know about water, life, and himself.
This section, like the earlier ones, is filled with wonderful descriptive passages, though better balanced than in the book's beginning. Some of the side characters come a bit more alive, especially Naaliyah's mother. There remain some pacing problems, the book feels longer than it is, and it is not a short book. And the main character remains still a bit too removed for my liking, a bit too formed and crystalline like the snowflakes he attempts to photograph. While there are some emotional scenes, there weren't really too many moving ones, a surprise after his debut story collection.
I can't say he has fully transferred the strengths of his short stories into novel form. In the end, I found the book's beautiful writing and intriguing storyline were almost if not quite negated by its slow and uneven pace, its sometimes artificial feel with regard to language and character, and the coolness of its main character. A book with lots of good writing, but I can't quite recommend it.
Rating:  Summary: Intelligent and Touching Review: This is a very intelligent and emotional book. I found I had tears in my eyes many times while reading it, because I totally felt Winkler's sadness and loneliness through Doerr's wonderful words. It has an unusual premise but brings to the forefront the everyday yet extraordinary things that can happen in one's life to shape it. From the beauty in a snowflake, to the kindness of strangers when there is no hope, to the power of forgiveness and love, there is much to discover and think about here. Even with Winkler's unusual "ability," to me it is basically a story about how we all struggle through life and are hoping in the end for just a little mercy and understanding.
Rating:  Summary: Fantastic! Review: This is an amazing book. It is intelligent, emotional, and magical. The story centers on Henry Winler who dreams things before they happen. As a child in Anchorage, he dreams that a man will be killed by a bus; a few days later he relives his dream and wintesses a man dying. As he grows he come to term with this strange ability. Eventually, he marries and has a child. In a vivid and recurring dream, he finds himself in a flood struggling to save his small daughter. In the dream, the daughter drowns as he tries to wade to safety. When rains begin and flooding starts, he reasons that if he is not there she will not die. So, he flees home and goes as far away as is possible. For years, he cannot return home and does not know if his daughter is alive. What follows is a touching meditation on love, sorrow, loss, and redemption. Throughout, Doerr uses the metaphor of snow crystas to point out the beauty in life and science that goes unnoticed. Some of the plot seems a bit far-fetched and unlikely; I still enjoyed this book quite a bit.
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