18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The hunter becomes the hunted, November 28, 2006
This review is from: Julius Winsome: A Novel (Hardcover)
I heard Gerard Donovan read from this novel in Oregon about a month ago; he said it was one of the first times he was doing so in public. His words come out on paper with a tone akin to his speaking manner, measured and precise, densely detailed yet accurately sheared. The quirk that the narrator has-- I suspect symbolism may accompany his two names but no indication of this directly enters the novel-- of speaking with snips of Shakespearean vocabulary to himself and his prey make for a witty and distancing touch. I am uncertain if we are to interpret the narrator's growing obsession with a narrator from, say, a Poe tale. The ending does allow for multiple interpretations, and the book resists the reductive.
Donovan, in this his third novel (after Schopenhauer's Telescope, which I obtained along with this one and is my next novel to read, and Doctor Salt, a mordant take-- a hit in Europe but still awaiting publication in the U.S., tellingly -- on the American culture of pharmaceutical self-help and medical diagnoses for non-existent maladies) manages to keep the reader at exactly the right vantage point. The author, like Julius, knows dogs well, and has observed them closely and generously. We empathize with Julius, but do we cheer his pursuits on or recoil from his steady aim? Sympathy for the avenging angel or revulsion at the diabolical cunning?
Donovan explained that he sought in this book to explore where grief ends and revenge begins. If your pet was shot, how far would you go to track down the perpetrator? And then, once you were lucky or unlucky enough to capture the culprit, what next? The narrator muses how, once revenge takes solid hold, that he is the rifle, the gun, the bullet, the human made killer. He uses his grandfather's WWI Enfield rifle with which the elder man shot 28 Germans. The workings of the gun, of snipers, and of an educated mind left in the wilderness to ruminate, speculate, and percolate all make for engrossing chapters. At one point, the narrator considers how one man leading another with a weapon pointed in his back is the "oldest arrangement of power." (This vignette also characterizes the showdown in his first novel.) A sniper's vocation is compared to men who feel so much pain themselves that they can only lessen it by hollowing out part of their soul, so as to create pain in others as their only remedy. Such issues lift JN above a genre thriller or an inert character study.
It may serve even as an elaboration on the Second Amendment: how might we ethically employ ourselves by taking up arms under the ambiguous freedom granted us by the Constitution? How far could we justify the quest for justice? Similar to his first novel, the primal contention for mastery as the mind grapples against the spirit, the body seeks to outrun the pursuer, elevates this short novel into a rather philosophical realm. But it remains readable, free of cant, absent of posturing.
I read this in a single sitting. Donovan's poetic career prior to his decision to write only fiction makes for a well-told, intellectually provocative, and at times (as with the fate of the narrator's beloved terrier, Hobbes), almost unbearable poignancy. I recommend it to thoughtful readers willing to confront the possible, sudden, and violent loss of a beloved companion, and who deep inside their hidden selves may also have harbored unkind thoughts about righting wrongs done to the innocent. How far can we go before we forgive if not forget? As Donovan observed to us, animals cannot speak for themselves. I wondered as I read: should we then be their vindicators as well as their advocates? The results here offer no glib solution.
The author also told us that when he had talked to readers of JW, they were split on the decision that Julius makes to lash out in his anguish at the hunters who stalk the woods around his Maine cabin. Certainly those like myself (who has lived with many dogs at a time for my whole life) who cherish our pets may see the ramifications of what occurs differently than those who at all costs favor culpable human freedoms above the demands from innocent animal life. Donovan nimbly confronts the traditional, American, rural, culture of the gun and its various uses. Stripped down in elegantly trimmed prose during a bleak winter's coming, Julius Winsome hones down ancient elemental combat to its essential protagonists.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sweet Sweet Revenge, It Carries A Bitter Heart, October 20, 2006
This review is from: Julius Winsome: A Novel (Hardcover)
Set in far northern Maine near the New Brunswick border, this exceedingly dark and precise novel examines what happens when a loner's territory is encroached upon. The simple story is told from within the titular middle-aged character's head, as he describes his upbringing deep in the Maine woods. Raised by his widowed WWII vet father in a cozy wood cabin built by his WWI vet grandfather, Julius lives a quiet contemplative life dominated by nature and the 3,000+ books that literally line his home. Summer landscaping and mechanical odd jobs in town provide him with what little money he needs, and the lack of human contact in his life seems to suit him fine: "Many men live in these woods who cannot live anywhere else. They live alone and are tuned close to any offense you might give them."
The catalyst for the story is the murder of Julius' dog by an unknown hunter. Getting a dog was the idea of Claire, a woman who wandered into his life several years before and left just as easily. The easy companionship of the dog deflected whatever pain he felt at her abandonment, so when the dog is killed, he is doubly alone. This leads to a scene of startling simplicity and power in which the reader suddenly understands that the quiet, remote, seemingly benign Julius has utterly lost it. It's a brilliant meditation on revenge that completely draws the reader into Julius' orbit and has one alternately rooting for and against his tragic quest. Ignore the terrible cover art, this is a book worth savoring.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful And Unsettling, February 13, 2007
This review is from: Julius Winsome: A Novel (Hardcover)
Gerard Donovan is a poet and it shows on every page of this short novel. Literate prose in brief chapters reveal the history of a lonely man and how he responds to the cruelty of others.
Julius Winsome leads an isolated existence in a bleak wilderness in the north Maine woods, just across the river from New Brunswick. Since the death of his father two decades before he has lived alone in a book-filled cabin miles from his nearest neighbor. In summer he ekes out just enough income as a part-time gardener and mechanic to get him through a winter of reading. His 3,282 books isolate him from winter and the world just as in summer a flower garden separates him from the woods and the woods from people.
One day a woman walks out of the woods and into his life. He begins to see a new, brighter version of life. She convinces him he should get a dog because a man should not live alone, as he does, in the woods. Shortly after that, without explanation, the woman walks out of his life and he doesn't see her again until after his life is shattered anew and they are both different people. Winsome transfers his affection to the dog and the love is reciprocated and he is, again, satisfied with his life for four years.
Then, the dog is purposely shot and killed, shattering his serenity. As he seeks answers to who and why his dog was killed, he finds only more cruelty and it turns him on an unrelenting path of revenge which can have only one outcome.
It's a beautiful and haunting novel but, equally, unsettling. Even as we sympathize with his pain and his need for vengeance we must realize just how brittle the line between sane and insane, civilized and uncivilized.
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