Download PDF Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson
So, merely be here, discover the e-book Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson now and check out that promptly. Be the initial to read this book Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson by downloading in the link. We have some various other publications to read in this internet site. So, you could locate them additionally easily. Well, now we have done to provide you the most effective e-book to check out today, this Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson is really proper for you. Never ever dismiss that you need this e-book Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson to make better life. On the internet e-book Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson will truly give easy of every little thing to read and also take the benefits.
Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson
Download PDF Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson
New upgraded! The Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson from the best author and publisher is currently readily available below. This is the book Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson that will make your day checking out becomes completed. When you are seeking the published book Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson of this title in the book store, you could not locate it. The issues can be the restricted versions Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson that are given in the book establishment.
It can be one of your early morning readings Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson This is a soft data publication that can be managed downloading and install from on the internet book. As understood, in this sophisticated era, technology will ease you in doing some tasks. Also it is just checking out the visibility of publication soft documents of Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson can be additional attribute to open. It is not just to open up and also save in the device. This time around in the morning and other downtime are to review guide Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson
Guide Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson will still give you good value if you do it well. Finishing guide Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson to review will not become the only goal. The goal is by getting the positive worth from guide till completion of the book. This is why; you have to find out more while reading this Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson This is not only just how quickly you read a book as well as not just has the amount of you completed guides; it is about exactly what you have gotten from the books.
Considering guide Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson to review is also needed. You could select the book based upon the preferred styles that you like. It will engage you to love checking out other books Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson It can be also about the requirement that obligates you to read guide. As this Orchard: A Novel, By Larry Watson, you can discover it as your reading book, also your preferred reading book. So, find your preferred publication below and also obtain the link to download and install guide soft data.
From the bestselling author of Montana 1948 comes the explosive story of an artist, his muse, and the staggering price they pay for their chance at immortality.
Sonja Skordahl, a Norwegian immigrant, came to America looking for a new life. Instead, she settled in Door County, Wisconsin, and married Henry House—only to find herself defined by her roles as wife and mother. Destiny lands Sonja in the studio of Ned Weaver, an internationally acclaimed painter. There she becomes more than his model and more than a mere object of desire; she becomes the most inspiring muse Ned has ever known, much to the chagrin of the artist’s wife. When both Ned and Henry insist on possessing Sonja, their jealousies threaten to erupt into violence—as she struggles to appease both men without sacrificing her hard-won sense of self.
- Sales Rank: #987781 in Books
- Published on: 2004-06-08
- Released on: 2004-06-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .60" w x 5.10" l, .42 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Showing a deep maturity of thought and craft, Watson (Montana 1948; White Crosses) surpasses himself in his sixth novel, an uncompromising, perfectly calibrated double portrait of two couples in rural Wisconsin in the 1950s. Ned Weaver is a famous artist, Henry House an orchard keeper. Ned, like many creative people, is self-absorbed and cruel to his adoring wife, Harriet, with whom he has two grown daughters. Harriet, ignoring his serial adultery, has long ago accepted that Ned's art is what matters most in the world; she has "rehearsed her role so well that not even she could discern a difference between performance and belief." Henry House and his wife, Sonja, are younger than the Weavers; Henry was raised picking apples, and Sonja came from Norway to Wisconsin when she was 12. As the novel begins, they are grieving the death of their young son, who collapsed mysteriously one summer day just outside Sonja's kitchen window. Invited to pose for Weaver, Sonja accepts, not for the money or because she is attracted to Weaver, though her motives are unclear even to herself. When Henry finds out from his cronies that Sonja has been posing in the nude, he is wild with jealousy and plots revenge. Ned's paintings of Sonja inevitably call to mind Andrew Wyeth's famous Helga series. But whatever the novel's inspiration, it is in no way limited by the constraints of fact. Sentences and chapters unfurl with a sense of inevitability, and the narrative possesses an uncommon integrity. When Ned first paints Sonja nude, he marvels at her beatific poise: "The carpenter picks up his hammer, the artist takes brush in hand. This woman shed her clothes, nakedness her craft and art." Watson composes this marvelous novel with the same assurance.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Following his acclaimed series of Montana novels, set in the 1940s and 1950s, Watson has turned to more contemporary settings and themes, first in Laura (2000), about a poet and her influence on her lover's son, and now in this story of a talented but egotistic painter and the lives he touches in Door County, Wisconsin. When Sonia House, wife of an apple grower, agrees to pose for Ned Weaver, she unwittingly puts in motion a chain of events that leads to tragedy. Accustomed to having affairs with his models, the philandering Ned finds that his attraction to Sonia goes much deeper. Watson vividly captures the special self-centeredness of the artist, whose "capacity for generosity, honesty, and wholeness" is expressed only in his art, not in his relations with others (especially his saintlike wife, Harriet). As Ned and Sonia's husband struggle for possession of the surprisingly independent Sonia, Watson, flashing back and forward throughout the narrative, builds tension as he reveals inner lives. Another fine effort from a master of plainspoken prose. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“This book will leave you illuminated. . . . If there exists a literary equivalent to the artist’s play of light on a canvas, then Larry Watson has mastered it. . . . Every scene of Orchard is painted with deliberate, vivid strokes of radiance. . . . Watson’s sparse words and controlled prose turn a remote town and four lonely characters into a remarkable tale.”
—Baltimore Sun
“Clear-eyed, close-to-the-bone, inherently dramatic and endlessly implicative . . . Watson’s insights into his characters not only bring them to life, but also shed light on the nature of art, love and marriage.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“An enthralling, thought-provoking read . . . This is a story that comes together at its own internal pace, and when whole understanding dawns, it is with clear power.”
—The Denver Post
“[A] powerful tale . . . captivating and haunting, and very hard to put down.”
—The Washington Post Book World
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Visit Door County instead of reading this disappointment of a novel
By Laura E.
Boy, what a disappointment. I was very intrigued by the setting, Door County, Wisconsin, but it rarely factored into the story aside from the apple orchard.
Every once in a while a passage came off as too blunt or graphic and didn't really fit in with the tone for the rest of the book. I had no sympathy or respect for Ned or Henry and no respect for Harriet, either. Hard to like a book when you can't really stand 3/4 of the main characters. And June's thought process was far too complex for a six-year-old, no matter the tragedy suffered. Yes, she will have complex feelings, but the thought process had more the feel of an adult not a child. Her voice was really the last straw which snapped my patience and I resorted to skimming until the end.
And the ending. Hated the roundup. Dry, journalistic approach to what had previously been a literary type novel.
The setting and premise of the story were so promising, but Larry Watson just did not pull it off.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Lofty themes in the most unpretentious of settings.
By Mary Whipple
As connected to the earth as the orchardist who is one of the main characters, this powerful novel weaves the intimate details of everyday lives in rural Door County, Wisconsin, into a riveting domestic tragedy. In simple, spare language author Larry Watson depicts the lives of two couples, very different from each other, each trying to fulfill dreams and cope with the silences and miscommunications which arise in their marriages, then brings the two couples together to make connections with each other.
Henry House is the orchardist, laboriously tending his apple trees and harvesting his crop, a hard-working man living close to the earth. He and his wife Sonja have been devastated by the death of their four-year-old son from a blow to the head. Consumed by grief, they are unable to reach out to each other in their need, each reliving the trauma separately. Ned Weaver, their neighbor, is a talented and respected artist who is willing to subordinate all other aspects of his life to his art. Despite his reputation for womanizing and his many betrayals, especially with his models, his wife Harriet loves him and has found some satisfaction in the role of caretaker of his creative flame.
Watson tells his story of these four people and their interactions obliquely, moving back and forth in time, building the drama and tension to a high pitch as the reader is presented with vivid scenes of danger and violence which sometimes have no context. We do not know, at first, who the characters are, how they may be connected, why they are behaving as they do, or in what order these scenes take place, and it is not until late in the novel that some of these mysterious events are explained. Contemplating how the scenes are connected, the reader becomes intimately involved in the narrative, an involvement which never lets up as the story becomes more complex.
Watson is an exceptionally "clean," no-frills writer, creating many layers of meaning in homely details and images which advance the themes and intensify the emotion. In one of the most unusual scenes in modern fiction, for example, Ned, sun-burned and peeling from an afternoon of painting along the lake, asks his wife to peel his back, a scene laden with far more significance than the simple need to scratch an itch. Themes of love and betrayal, freedom and control, suffering and redemption, innocence and guilt-all universal themes from the beginning of human history-are seen through the prism of an artist's life and his desire to leave a lasting legacy. In all its simplicity, Watson's novel carries the power and resonance of the very best of dramatic fiction. Mary Whipple
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Wisconsite chimes in
By msbosh
I don't know much about Wyeth, his muse Helga, or even other novels with art as a main character (unless you count "The Da Vinci Code," which looks like a poorly crafted nursery rhyme compared to Watson's book), but I DO know Door County, Wisconsin, and I can attest that Watson has captured this dramatically picturesque region as it was in the 1950s with deft and a sad and lovely nostalgia. Sad because, like most once gorgeous North American seaside areas, Door County is now a crowded, over-developed, and cynical exploitation of itself. That Watson grieves the loss of northern Wisconsin as it used to be is evident in nearly every chapter of "Orchard," with his loving descriptions of rocky (and gloriously empty!) beaches, his acolades to the rough winters and the hardy "year-rounders" who could tolerate them, and his detailed, insider portraits of apple picking, ice fishing, and small-town Christmas pageantry.
The post-war Door County he captures is innocent and still dominated by nature's mood swings. In the decades since it has become over-run with condos, golf courses, tourist traps and, yes, superficial art gallaries for the rich and naive (a few of them may even have decent art). It may not yet be a Wisconsin Dells but, to hear natives tell it, it's clearly well on the way.
In this Watson compares favorably to Dennis Lahane's "Mystic River," which captured pre-yuppie Baltimore with a similarly nostalgic view. I do appreciate the respect and compassion with which he treats a now long-gone region. Door County is as much a main character here as the two couples.
But it was Sonja's perceptions and lonely grief that moved me the most, even to the point of weeping a few times while reading this. I'm a sucker for great character portraits, and here Watson excels. Maybe, as others here have mentioned, the men aren't as fully drawn and believable. His handling of Sonja's grief, yearnings, regrets, and growing self-awareness more than makes up for it. She'll stay with me a long time.
Thank you, Mr. Watson, for a great read!
Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson PDF
Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson EPub
Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson Doc
Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson iBooks
Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson rtf
Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson Mobipocket
Orchard: A Novel, by Larry Watson Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar