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A review by eiseneisen
The River Swimmer: Novellas by Jim Harrison
3.0
After a decade of intending to read him, I made my first foray into Jim Harrison's work with The River Swimmer, a 200-page volume which consists of 2 novellas. The first, titled "The Land of Unlikeness," is about a man experiencing an artistic reawakening at the age of 60. The second, titled "The River Swimmer," is about a teenager whose unceasing love for and pull towards the water conflicts with the modern world in which he lives.
Neither novella is exceptional, but both have exceptional passages. Both have moments that make you laugh, and pull at your heart, and marvel at Harrison's ability with words. He excels at expressing character's responses to life. Below is an example from "The Land of Unlikeness." Clive, the story's protagonist, is a failed artist turned art professor and art appraiser in New York City. Having returned to his boyhood home in rural Michigan for a month, he is rediscovering the artist within him, as evidenced by the fact that he has been painting daily for the simple satisfaction of it, and that he just had an emotional response to gazing upon a painting by Caravaggio:
"What was happening to him, for Christ's sake? He was certainly staring at Caravaggio as a painter and not as a professor. He hadn't felt tears since a summer afternoon in New York so many years ago, when he had received a registered letter of his final notice of divorce. He had been ignoring Mozart's Jupiter on the radio but his sudden raw and vulnerable emotions allowed the music to truly enter his being so that he delaminated, the layers of him falling from each other...
He wondered what a bright young writer struggling with his first work would feel on first reading Hamlet or Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. An explosion that would blow him through the window of his garret... It occurred to him that only purity of intent would save his own sorry soul. If he were to continue to paint he had to do so without the trace of the slumming intellectual toting around his heavy knapsack of ironies. He was well into his own third act and further delay would be infamous."
While not exceptional, both novellas are worth reading. More importantly, for me, they were a sufficient introduction to Harrison's writing---I will definitely be seeking out his more acclaimed works to read in the near future.
Neither novella is exceptional, but both have exceptional passages. Both have moments that make you laugh, and pull at your heart, and marvel at Harrison's ability with words. He excels at expressing character's responses to life. Below is an example from "The Land of Unlikeness." Clive, the story's protagonist, is a failed artist turned art professor and art appraiser in New York City. Having returned to his boyhood home in rural Michigan for a month, he is rediscovering the artist within him, as evidenced by the fact that he has been painting daily for the simple satisfaction of it, and that he just had an emotional response to gazing upon a painting by Caravaggio:
"What was happening to him, for Christ's sake? He was certainly staring at Caravaggio as a painter and not as a professor. He hadn't felt tears since a summer afternoon in New York so many years ago, when he had received a registered letter of his final notice of divorce. He had been ignoring Mozart's Jupiter on the radio but his sudden raw and vulnerable emotions allowed the music to truly enter his being so that he delaminated, the layers of him falling from each other...
He wondered what a bright young writer struggling with his first work would feel on first reading Hamlet or Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. An explosion that would blow him through the window of his garret... It occurred to him that only purity of intent would save his own sorry soul. If he were to continue to paint he had to do so without the trace of the slumming intellectual toting around his heavy knapsack of ironies. He was well into his own third act and further delay would be infamous."
While not exceptional, both novellas are worth reading. More importantly, for me, they were a sufficient introduction to Harrison's writing---I will definitely be seeking out his more acclaimed works to read in the near future.