Island Sojourn - Hardcover

Arthur, Elizabeth

3.56

32 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060101563 ISBN 13: 9780060101565

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1980

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In Island Sojourn, Arthur has a painter's eye for recording the world's voluptuousness, a philosopher's ability to get inside the objects of experience, and a writer's sensitivity for handling feelings...Her journal can join other works on life in the Canadian wilds, such as Wacousta, and Roughing It In The Bush, as a powerful witness to the wilderness experience. Literary Guild of Canada

Arthur labors at tracking down essences and essential relationships in the progresses of wind and water, or human and animal...There are magnificent, stormy crossings to and from the island, both threatening and intimate;there are heart-stopping visions of an eagle, of swans contemplating the end of fall, of the shooting and soft death of a moose...Vigorous, scouring reportage which places Arthur firmly in line to join the Hoaglands and Dillards and other astringent precisionists. Kirkus, March 1, 1980

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From the Inside Flap:

Inspired by a distaste for the materialism of city living and a faith in the idea of wilderness, in 1974 Liz Arthur and her first husband, Bob Gathercole, went to live onan island in a remote Canadian lake. Island Sojourn istheir story, as Liz remembers it.

They planned tostay forever, and so they built their house to last,carrying the materials piece by piece up the hill to thesite they had chosen. In building, they learned what itmeans to make a mark upon the earth, to master tools, tocreate not a rude cabin but a home in which beauty - a Home Comfort stove, a cathedral ceiling - takes precedence over efficiency.

As they built, they explored the wilderness that surroundedtheir three-acre island, exhilarated by the sense offreedom unknown in cities. In their explorations they cameupon abandoned cabins on other islands; the lake with itsunknown depths and uncertain moods, sometimes threatened; the beautiful house was nearly burned. But they shrugged off the signs of danger, even as they began to realize that like theIndians who were their nearest neighbors, they would haveto work for some time in the town to obtain what theyneeded to complete their creation - to live in thewilderness.

The second winter began well. Free atlast from the demands of building they were snug in their island home. When storms cut them off from the Indian villages on theshore, they were not displeased, for they had come to theisland seeking privacy and the sense of self-reliance thatgoes with it. But time passed and the storms howled onuntil, on a day no different from the long days that hadpreceded it, they turned on one another with a violencethat shattered the wilderness idyll. They knew then that,although they would return often to the wilderness, the one thing they could not do was stay.

As much as this is the storyof an island sojourn, it is also, then, the lyricalself-portrait of a young woman who moves within frominnocence to knowledge, from a desire to escape the worldand stop time to an acceptance of the world and theinevitability of change.

About the Author:

Elizabeth Arthur is the author of two memoirs and four novels which were published by Harper and Row, Doubleday, and Knopf.She has two new novels forthcoming and is currently working on a seventh novel, as well as a book about consciousness and language.

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