The country: A novel - Hardcover

Plante, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0575029382 ISBN 13: 9780575029385

Publisher: V. Gollancz, 1981

Synopsis

A son's coming to terms with his father and his father's death is the focal point of this novel recalling the legacy of a patriarch who was a descendant of a French fur trader and a Blackfoot Indian woman

About this title

About the Author

David Plante is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Francoeur trilogy-The Family, The Woods, and The Country-as well as a work of nonfiction, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three. His work has appeared in many periodicals, The New Yorker and The Paris Review among them, and has been nominated for a National Book Award. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York and London.

Review

There is grief and pain in The Country, and it is not the elegiac kind, but the haunting one . . . and it helps [Mr. Plante] to make, out of his own understanding, a book that belies its slenderness. A great reckoning in a little room.--Bernard Levin, Sunday Times (London)

"The Country is a haunting lament, a controlled cry of loss and knowledge won through language, sorrow, memory, impossible and comprehending love, love learned through childhood in the body of the family, the country."--Mary Gordon, New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Plante's understanding of the complicated, often perverse configurations that familial relationships can form remains unerring. By mapping out the ways in which beliefs, resentments and hopes are handed down, generation to generation, the ways in which love can mutate into hatred, neediness into rebellion, he creates a portrait of a family that is as uncompromising as it is moving." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Review

"Plante has created one of the most harrowing of contemporary novels." --Philip Roth

Edition details

• Publisher: V. Gollancz
• Publication date: 1981
• ISBN 10: 0575029382
• ISBN 13: 9780575029385
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 159