That Water, Those Rocks: (A Novel) (Western Literature and Fiction Series) - Softcover

Katharine Haake

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874175305 ISBN 13: 9780874175301

Publisher: University of Nevada Press, 2003

Synopsis

For several generations Katharine Haake's family has been intimately linked with the landscape and history of far-northern California. In That Water, Those Rocks, she offers a brilliant novel that interlaces autobiographical writing, natural history, and reflections on the craft of writing itself. Shasta Dam, the graceful, curved centerpiece of California's Central Valley Project, lies at the heart of this multilayered work. The dam's construction, and the impact of its presence, becomes the obsession and occupation for all of Haake's characters. Containing and controlling the water of three northern California rivers, the dam also structures the characters' efforts to understand the past in an attempt to find the transcendent in what they have witnessed or learned - about vanished native peoples, for example, or lost intimacies between water, earth, animals, and humans.

About this title

About the Author

Katharine Haake is professor of English at California State University, Northridge, where she directs the creative writing program.

Reviews

With the mesmerizing voice of a natural-born storyteller, Haake takes the "idea of a story," as she puts it, to create a novel that reads like a memoir. Or is it a memoir that reads like a parable? A parable that sounds like a poem? By book's end, neither the author nor reader can say. In a paean to the craft of writing and strength of language, Haake mixes her family's oral history with that of California's natural one, imparting a rich narrative of rivers, dams, and floods, mothers, sons and daughters. At its heart is the Shasta Dam project, both boondoggle and benefit to California's central valley. At its soul, two young girls, one raped, one blind. Weaving fiction with fact, Haake equates nature's basic elements (earth, fire, water) with those of mankind (love, livelihood, safety). Whether spinning a tale or stating the truth, Haake's eloquence has as much power to move mountains as the engineers and surveyors whose dams so dramatically changed the landscape of her beloved home. Carol Haggas
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0874175305
• ISBN 13: 9780874175301
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184