8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Freedom's just another word. . ., October 1, 2003
I had no expectations when I picked up this novel, except that I'd read a nonfiction piece by the author, a Montana writer, enjoyed his point of view, and marveled at his gift of language. As a novelist, he offers up a story and characters that are vivid and real, and the language that describes their world is close to poetry. There's a wonderful precision in the detail and the word choice that makes you just slow down and relish each sentence as it evokes the experience of being alive under this big sky through the roll of the seasons.
The story is told through the perspective of a young man returning home to his father and grandfather, outside Helena, Montana. He's had some hard luck, an accident on a firing range that has put him in a military hospital, and before that a rodeo career that has gone nowhere. The stopover is meant to be temporary, but like wild horses drawn unwittingly into the blind corral of the title, he is unable to leave, spending a bitter winter with his dying grandfather, an aging rancher, instead of returning to Canada as planned and a woman he has taken up with.
There is an aching melancholy throughout the novel that fills the scenes with a sense of loss. The ranchland, which no longer supports the cattle business, is being bought up by developers. The generation that grew up there and made a living from it, through good years and bad, is now passing on. They have little to leave their descendants but the land itself, worth little more than what it can be sold for. And there is irony in how losing the land mirrors the same loss by the Indians who preceded them a century earlier.
But it's also a personal story, of the young hero's return from adventures that have left him empty and without direction. His fate is played out in a man's world where women, if they figure at all, are as tough and independent as the men. The toughness is both a strength that protects them and a tragic flaw that leads them into lives of emotional isolation. When an old man dies, the best that can be said of him is that "he was hard on horses; he never forgot a grudge; he either liked you or he didn't."
On the downbeat side, yes, but there is also a quiet beauty in this novel. The land, though scarred and abused, still consoles the soul. And the reader is left on the cusp of both sorrow and admiration for these characters who can tough it out, each a surviving fragment of the old West, clinging to a kind of dignity in a new West that is tawdry and shallow by comparison.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Out of print, but totally worth tracking down, March 29, 2000
This review is from: The Blind Corral (Hardcover)
I read this more than a decade ago, and have never forgotten it. It's a beautifully written novel about what one must lose to retain a traditional life in America. Find it, buy it, read it.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Going back for yet another read, September 10, 2007
I read it ten or twelve years ago, never forgot it. In recommending it to a good friend whose cutting horses are using horses on his own ranch, I began to remember, and relish, the poetic language and rhythm of this remarkable book. So, I'll dig it out and read it for perhaps the 5th time. McGuane, Didion, McCarthy and Ralph Beer. Hall of famers in my opinion. And, tonight, when I feed and fly-spray my own horses, I will see them, my dogs and the land in a little different light. A bit more appreciative.
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