Death of a River Guide [Hardcover]

Richard Flanagan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 27, 2001

With The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which made him one of Australia's most awarded young writers, Richard Flanagan made his acclaimed American debut. Now he gives us an extraordinary, deeply moving novel as big and brawling, as strange and compelling as the land and people it describes. Beneath a waterfall on a remote Tasmanian mountain river, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, is drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. He sees his father Harry, burying his own father Boy, under a tree that bursts into flowers in midwinter every year after. He sees Boy himself as a young man, working on the river; and his Auntie Ellie, on her way to fetch the doctor for her sick grandchild, chased by a cow she believes is a Werowa spirit. In the rain-forest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped of their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking, where the branches of his story connect to family stories that are Aboriginal, Celtic, Italian, English, Chinese, and East European; stories that ground him in the land. As the river rises his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of the past Aljaz discovers the soul history of his country. An adventure tale that transforms into a spiritual odyssey, by turns earthy, dreaming, comic, tragic, vulgar, and moving, Death of a River Guide is a beautiful, haunting story by one of the world's most exciting young writers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this brilliant, labyrinthine second novel, a drowning man named Aljaz Cosini is granted visions of his family history stretching into the distant past--even as he revisits his final days along the remote and treacherous Franklin River. Richard Flanagan's protagonist has been away from Tasmania for the last decade. Sick, lonely, and financially strapped, he returns to his hometown and soon runs into an old colleague known as Pig's Breath, who offers him a low-paying stint as a river guide:

I can see that Pig's Breath knows Aljaz well enough to see that Aljaz desperately wants to visit the Franklin River country, that there is a need in him, which Pig's Breath does not have, to go back there, and that this is his only way of doing it. And while Aljaz sits there trying to look as if he is chewing over numbers, Pig's Breath can tell that what he is in fact doing is smelling the river, hearing it run, watching the rain mists rise from its valleys, drinking its tea-coloured waters from his cupped hands.

Flanagan (The Sound of One Hand Clapping) has been compared to Faulkner for his loving attention to place, but his narrative talents are more akin to those of Günter Grass. There are echoes of The Tin Drum in the picaresque tale of Aljaz's emergence from the womb, wrapped in the caul that suggests second sight. Throughout, a series of similarly magical occurrences lends sparkle, if little illumination, to these hardscrabble lives in the Tasmanian wilderness. All of which goes to explain why Death of a River Guide is an unusually rich novel, and one of Australia's most distinguished literary exports in recent years. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

"The whole river is like a huge army on the march, overrunning the countryside, taking all before it, collecting ever greater strength from every dripping moss-lined rock face, from every overexcited stream." This body of water, Tasmania's Franklin River, is agent of life and death in Australian writer Flanagan's dark, prophetic novel. Jason Krezwa and Aljaz Cosini are the guides on a rafting trip that turns bad when the river floods. One of the paying guests dies and, shortly afterward, Aljaz stumbles into the raging waters and drowns. Granted the legendary ability of drowning men to see their life flash before them, Aljaz envisions his life, the lives of his mother and father and their ancestors, too. Family histories intertwine with the story of the four-day river journey, a trip perversely confirming Aljaz's sense of utter failure. The narrative skips from Aljaz's father, Harry, to his great-grandfather Ned Quade, a convict who died in the Tasmanian wilderness escaping from his captors. Aljaz himself has led a sad life, the low point the death of his daughter, Jemma, which permanently soured his relationship with his lover, Couta Ho. Aljaz's vision deepens some knowledge he already possesses--for instance, that Harry's grandmother was an aborigine. Harry and Aljaz are both decent men whose lives narrow to a cycle of futile efforts and bad luck. Like Australian Nobelist Patrick White, Flanagan (The Sound of One Hand Clapping) has a sense of history as a vast entanglement of genealogies, beginning with the original sin of deportation and compounded by the extermination or expropriation of the "blackfellas." Flanagan has written a Tasmanian anti-epic, an honest, painful investigation of the repressed, convict-haunted past. Agent, Heather Schroder, ICM. (Mar.)Forecast: Extracts of strong reviews from Australia, where this novel first appeared, may guide readers to this book, as will any publicity or display that ties it into the ongoing adventure boom while emphasizing Flanagan's literary prowess (The Sound of One Hand Clapping won the Australian Booksellers of the Year Award and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction). In any case, this novel won't sell itself but will benefit from intelligent marketing.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (April 27, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802116825
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116826
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #846,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A vivid narrative of utter despair., April 11, 2001

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Death of a River Guide (Hardcover)

Aljaz Cosini, a Tasmanian river guide, is trapped under water, his body wedged between rocks in the Franklin River, into which he has dived in an effort to save a reckless rafter. "I have entered the realm of the fabulous, of hallucinations, for there is no way anybody stuck drowning could experience such things," he thinks, as many generations of his family history pass through his mind. As this remarkable narrative unfolds, it alternates between Aljaz's dying, first person memories of his family's past and his objective, third person observations about life in contemporary Tasmania. Through Aljaz's memories, the reader learns the sad history of the island, a former penal colony for the most hardened criminals, the site of total genocide for the aboriginal natives, a remote colony with little hope and no tolerance for differences. A bright boy, Aljaz himself has intentionally failed everything in school, because "by failing, Aljaz begins to fit in with people...there is a camaraderie amongst the ranks of the fallen....They expect to be failed, to be unemployed, to be pushed around, to know only despair."

This is a story of abject hopelessness, the misery of Aljaz's family continuing through the four or five generations we meet during Aljaz's final moments and culminating in Aljaz's own predicament. The author does not even hold out the hope that Aljaz himself will be rescued, choosing to confirm the death in the book's title, before the reader even opens the book. What unites the generations (and keeps the reader going) is the clear and abiding respect for nature we see throughout the book--for the power of the river, for the unique animals of the island, for the stories and myths of the old people--and the belief that there is a unity of man and nature. And Aljaz experiences the ultimate unity with nature in his death in the river, as he becomes one with the sea eagle who "carries the spirits of the ancestors."

The characters one meets in this book are memorable, as they survive the best way they can. The tales of nature and the mystical moments that Aljaz experiences are vivid and uplifting, a fitting contrast to the reality of life. The action on the river is realistic and exciting, and there is a thematic unity which connects the generations of the past with the action in the present. It may be self-defeating, however, to create a novel in which the reader is asked to become personally involved with a main character whose death is foretold from the outset. Though that confirms and reinforces the point the author is making about the hopelessness of Aljaz's life, it certainly makes this novel a depressing ride for the reader. Mary Whipple

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great novel about life on Tasmania's Franklin River., January 12, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Death of a River Guide (Paperback)

I was interested to read this first novel by Richard Flanagan after reading his acclaimed novel "The Sound of One Hand Clapping". In going back to this earlier work I wanted to see if he was pursuing similar themes and if the writing was as compelling. It was. Here again was a master storyteller at work who refuses to release the reader until the last page has been read and the reader held in the grip of an idea that the broken in spirit will be redeemed.

This story of a man drowning beneath a waterfall provides the canvas to explore the emotional history of his family and by extension the emotional history of his island state, Tasmania.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars unique, July 19, 2002

By 

Sarah Yates "syates" (Nairobi, Kenya) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Death of a River Guide (Hardcover)

perhaps i found this book enjoyable because i have been a river guide and also because i enjoy magical realism. the sense of time and space throughout this book captures not only a family history but the essence of a river itself, and being caught up in it. as i began reading, i found myself hating the main character for his apathy towards his own life. i resented that i would have to wait until the end of the book for him to finally end his miserable existence and drown. but then as i read on i wasn't so sure what i wanted for the main character. a very satisfying read.