Carry Me Across the Water [Hardcover]

Ethan Canin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001

“Take the advice of no one,” August Kleinman’s mother says to him while August is still a young boy in Germany, and with these words to guide him, he escapes Nazi Germany and goes on to build a fortune, a family, and life on his own terms in America. At the defining moments that reveal character and shape fate — a shocking encounter with a Japanese soldier in a cave during World War II, the audacious decision to start a brewery in Pittsburgh and a violent reaction against threats to its independent success, a vacation in Barbados, during which his beloved wife mysteriously wanders off, the birth of his grandson — August’s instincts are determinative in a way that illuminates how lives unfold at the deepest levels. This is a brilliant, suspenseful, surprising novel by one of America’s finest writers. Publisher’s Weekly called Ethan Canin’s For Kings and Planets “Masterful … a classic parable of the human condition,” and the same can be said about Carry Me Across the Water.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A truly gifted short-story writer, Ethan Canin faltered when it came to his second novel, the turgid For Kings and Planets. This time around, though, the author has found an ingenious solution to his problems with the longer form. Carry Me Across the Water is essentially a book of short stories posing as a novel, and here's the surprise--it's pretty effective. The protagonist, August Kleinman, is a wealthy old man looking back on the span of his life. He recalls his early youth in Vienna as the son of a cultured Jewish family; his flight to America in the 1930s with his mother; his war years in the Pacific; his career as the beer king of Pittsburgh; his love for his wife and alienation from his children. This may sound relatively straightforward. Yet Canin shatters this portrait into a series of compelling vignettes, each rearing up unexpectedly and without the crude restraints of chronology.

This format of random flashbacks allows the author to handle a sprawling novel--and a complex life. At the same time, these compartmentalized moments are kept from seeming too small by means of an expansive prose style, which sometimes suggest Mark Helprin in high gear: "Downriver he could see the fierce furnaces throwing blue-black smoke into the air, the crude ore of the land being transformed by human ingenuity into girders and beams that were then floated downstream to ports and train yards and trucking depots, a vast delta of commerce that fanned out from there to all the great hubs of the earth." Throughout, Canin tempers his grandiloquence with a short-story writer's sensitivity to the details of character, and accomplishes exactly what he intended: an involving montage of 20th-century life. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

August Kleinman, the protagonist of Canin's (For Kings and Planets) latest novel, is 78 years old, rich and wise from a life filled with accomplishments and heartache. Yet as this spare, beautifully realized story opens, he is marveling at the fierce force he discovered in himself one afternoon when he was 18. That day, on his way to watch a friend from his Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Queens practice football at Fordham University, Kleinman slipped into the locker room and impulsively donned a uniform. He can still feel the way he soared through the air and the jolt of the tackle he landed before he was caught. Looking back, Kleinman can clearly see that it has been the sudden flare of this instinctive intelligence and fight, this drive to persist and assert his existence, that has shaped his life, bringing both abundance and loss. Canin deftly laces together the defining stories of Kleinman's life from fleeing Nazi Germany as a child with his mother to fighting the Japanese in World War II, building his fortune, enduring the death of his beloved wife and then his difficult relationship with one grown son. Each story contributes another instance of the fighting spirit and impulse to soar that so characterizes Kleinman. However, what is finally galvanizing and moving about Kleinman's life is not his individuality but his complexity. He is capable of being touched, and he yearns to protect and nurture what he finds good. This work has a resonance and precision that can come only when native storytelling ability and craftsmanship search out the deepest truths. Canin deserves a wide readership because he shows that truth even the truth that comes with age and experience is not boring.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679456791
• ISBN-13: 978-0679456797
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,988,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More great work from a gifted writer, May 17, 2001

By 

MacKenzie Bezos (Bellevue, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Carry Me Across the Water (Hardcover)

I loved this book. It's a riveting story of an old man's struggle to come to terms with a lifetime of decisions and their consequences. As Kleinman mounts a series of small, surprising initiatives to fight the boredom and loneliness of retirement and widowhood and to build a relationship with a grown son who distrusts and misunderstands him, he reflects with conflicting emotion on the experiences that have shaped his life. Canin covers an astonishing range of material here -- recognizing fear on his infant son's face in rough play, feeling peace as he and his mother fled Germany for America without his father-- these are moments so disparate in substance and scale and chronology that in most writers' hands the full story would take 600 pages to tell. Not in Canin's. He moves through them so seamlessly that despite my plans to get a good night's sleep I stayed up to finish the book in one sitting. And the compassion and emotional insight for which the author has earned a much-deserved reputation graces every scene. The CPR class Kleinman takes with his wife is alone worth the price of the book. This scene is less than a page (less than a page!), and reading it brought two friends who had not yet even read the rest of the book to tears.

For those of you who haven't read Canin's other work, I envy you. Read "The Palace Thief" after this one. I challenge you not to read it more than once.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Washington, D.C. reader, June 20, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Carry Me Across the Water (Hardcover)

This book was recommended to me by a good friend whose taste I trust, but I'm afraid I was disappointed. The writing is, of course, very fine, but I found the story splintered unnecessarily. I have read books where this technique works well, but here I found myself getting impatient. I wish the author had skipped most of the part with August's son and included more of the Japanese story. And I felt manipulated by the ending.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A charming story, July 17, 2001

By 

"janmcalex" (Humboldt, TN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Carry Me Across the Water (Hardcover)

August Kleinman, immigrant and self-made millionaire, has grown old. Nearing what he knows to be the end of his life, he now believes that everything he has worked for and achieved -- the money, the business -- are worthless when compared to what he has lost -- his late wife and the time he could have spent with her and their children.

The thread that makes this more than just another "old-man-looks-back" story involves some papers August had removed from a Japanese soldier he had killed during World War II. Keeping the documents which included a love letter, August had them translated and framed after the war. Almost 50 years later, in what may be one of the final achievements in his life, he traveled to Japan and returned the letter to the Japanese soldier's son. The trip, from the memory of the hunting and the killing of the soldier to the son's reading of the letter containing secrets he had not been told, allowed August to make amends, freeing him from the emotional and psychological baggage he had carried for so long.

This was a quick read for me (just a few hours), but this isn't a light read. Canin succeeded in making August a multi-faceted character, both aggravating and endearing. The decisions made by the characters, including August's mother's decision to flee Nazi Germany and August's struggle with Judaism, help to round out the story. Very enjoyable.