Carry Me Across the Water [Import] [Unbound]

Ethan Canin (Author)

Product Details

• Unbound
• Publisher: Random House Children's Books (July 2001)
• ISBN-10: 1588360075
• ISBN-13: 978-1588360076
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)

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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.