Stegner, in a league of his own... | Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics)

Crossing to Safety | Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics) | Wallace Earle Stegner

books:


	• Crossing to Safety (Modern Library Classics) Wallace Earle Stegner Modern Library, 2002 - 335 pages average customer review:based on 125 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Stop reading pulp fiction and read this!

I don't understand why so many people buy the same old retread pulp fiction when there are books like this available. Angle of Repose is one of my favorite books of all time, and Crossing to Safety was brilliantly written as well. I encourage readers to get away from the formulaic mass-market mess and explore authors like Stegner. Superb!

Stegner, in a league of his own...

Deeply introspective book with a simple plot which follows the lives of two marriages over a period of years - starting in academia - where both husbands first meet. The friendship among the couples blossoms - as does the story of how friendship is maintained. Stegner demonstrates the complexities, vulnerabilities and love in a marriage and between friends. Characters come alive as does they setting they live in. No drama here. Just a compelling story of life and living in the quiet lives of two couples as they grow and age together. No tidy finishes or endings - no slick wrappings here. Book is generally one of a struggle, determination and a search for meaning and making a difference to others. The book, written by an author who can "turn a word" is a classic - ageless and timeless. A few of my favorite passages:

"Talent, I tell him, believing what I say, is at least half luck. It isn't as if our baby lips were touched with a live coal, and thereafter we lisp in numbers or talk in tongues. We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not. Born to the English language and American opportunity (I say this in 1937, after seven years of depression, but I say it seriously) we are among the incredibly lucky ones. What if we had been born Bushmen in the Kalahari? What if our parents had been undernourished villagers in Uttar Pradesh, and we faced the problem of commanding the attention of the world on a diet of five hundred calories a day, and in Urdu? What good is an ace if the other cards in your hand are dogs from every town?..."

"Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature. You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine..."

"We went through those three weeks in the summer of 1941 like people driving an open road while storms gathered ahead and to both sides. On them, the sun still shines. Who knows, the clouds might part, blow over, clear away; the rain might turn out to be no more than a hard shower. Meantime, the light is lurid and lovely, the mesas reach out of black distance and warm their cliff-ends in the sun, unexpected rainbows arch the valleys..."

"In the bed that was still strange to me I lay listening for outside sounds that I was not sure I could interpret, and I had a thrilling sense of the safety of hereness and the close dark. It didn't really matter what noise out there had caught my sleeping ear. Sally breathed quietly beside me. The clock ticked us toward morning..."

for more information click here

Crossing to Safety

A truly great novel. Stegner is an astute observer of the private lives of people...families, friends, husbands and wives. I bought a used copy and the qualiaty was excellent.

for more information click here

Glad to "discover" Stegner

Crossing to Safety is simply an exceptionally well-told story. Stegner demonstrates the power of language when every word is chosen carefully. The story opens on Larry and Sally in later years. They have had a life-long friendship with another couple. At once the reader understands that life has dealt Larry and Sally some serious blows and that another defining moment is about to happen. Then Stegner tells the back stories, but not in a traditional flashback.

In lesser hands this book would lose the reader. I am no fan of books that divert so long from the main story that one nearly forgets what the primary story was. Stegner's asides are such good stories in themselves that even though there were numerous changes in time, I was never lost in the telling.

I am delighted I finally "discovered" Stegner and look forward to reading many more of his novels. If you are a fan of particularly well-written fiction, fiction above the best-seller drivel often published, you will not be disappointed by Crossing to Safety.

for more information click here

Stegner's Other Classic

Wallace Stegner's ANGLE OF REPOSE won a Pulitzer Prize but CROSSING TO SAFETY is also a "winner." Friend Alice A. recommeded it for summer reading and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It's a book about marriage, friendship, loyalty, academia. Some people complain that nothing happens. However, this is Stegner's genius--that you want to read on about these people and regret summer interruptions until you can get back to them.

I didn't love everyone. Larry Morgan can be too tentative and melancholy, but he has sensitivity and dedication. Charity Lang--she's too overbearing and manipulative, perhaps for kind reasons, but she is oblivious to the effect she has on the people around her.

I didn't like Olive Kitteridge, by the way. This year's popular OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout [I liked her ABIDE WITH ME better] features a well-drawn busybody. Both Olive and Charity reminded me of Anne Hammersmith in Chandler Burr's YOU OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU, another book well-worth reading despite some quibbles.

While I'm on quibbling: my copy of CROSSING TO SAFETY had a photograph of a stone fence winding through the woods. Since the book opens with Robert Frost's "I could give all to Time ...," one can't help reciting "good fences make good neighbors," but, surely, that is not the message of this book.

Redeeming features--Stegner's language: "the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters"; teaching "if carried on too long could turn a good writer into a twenty-five watt Henry James"; the sun, coming in flat, knocks a prismatic oval out of the tumbler [of water] and lays it on the ceiling"; "tweed jackets [of some academics] that looked as if apples had been carried in the lining."

The Richmond Times Record News had called CROSSING TO SAFETY the "crowning achievement of Wallace Stegner's long and illustrious career as a writer and teacher." Alice, I agree!

for more information click here

Called a ?magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom? by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.