Customer Reviews

Legend of a Suicide

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Basically 6 short stories focusing on Roy and his relationship with his father, and the huge shadow his suicide casts on him. The main story, 'Sukkwan Island' has them together on an ill thought out adventure break in an isolated cabin on an Alaskan island and explores how Jim would react and respond to his sons suicide.
This is a poignant book on an extremely difficult subject, and Vann -over the span of the novel- exorcises the demons that must haunt the survivors of a suicide in the family;something the aurthor has experienced personally.
'Legend of a suicide' is a well written, absorbing book but the sudden change of emphasis and plot in the 'Sukkwan' chapter does throw you off the scent you picked up in the opening 2 chapters and resume with in the closing 3 chapters, so it is worth begining this book in the knowledge that it is basically 6 stories about suicide and its aftermath.
A brave book that acts as a kind of antidote to contemplation and enacting of suicide that permeate so many literary works-Hemingway, Mishima and Styron's spring instantly to mind.Well
'Legend of a suicide' is well worth a read.

This book of five short stories and one novella - 75% of the book - is an effort by the author to shed some light on suicide generally, but more specifically on that of his father some thirty years prior. Because of the autobiographical intent of the book, it is somewhat unfortunate that the author included strange, inconsistent twists in some of the stories that confuse and dilute the effort. However, little doubt is left concerning the psychic pain surrounding suicide - its haunting after effects, not to mention the mental deterioration leading to it.

The main story is set in a totally isolated fiord, surrounded by steep mountains, in southeastern Alaska where Jim, a lapsed dentist and twice divorced, has prevailed upon his thirteen-year-old son, Roy, now living in California with his mother, to live for a year in an A-frame cabin. It quickly becomes evident that they are almost totally unprepared for such a life; they lack both knowledge of primitive survival techniques and essential tools and supplies. Within days of being flown in on an amphibian plane, a bear breaks in and devastates their cabin, ruining most of their food supply. That is only a small sample of what the harsh, rocky, wet, and cold landscape suggests is to come.

Beyond the upsetting environmental surprises, little did Roy understand the psychological depths to which his father's life had sunk. His life had been spiraling downward for some time, with two failed marriages, numerous affairs, a failed commercial fishing venture, and a dentistry career left behind. Roy was not ready for the nighttime crying and talking of his father, which was covered with false cheerfulness in the mornings. The entire scenario was unsustainable, bursting with tension, and it all finally exploded with a devastating death. It quite literally took months for a rescue, but not before tremendous physical hardship and agonizing self-admonishments and rationalizations were endured.

The author does play with facts and no doubt employs much exaggeration, yet most of that is more than justified in trying to explain suicide. Reconstruction of thought processes may be about as close one can get to understanding suicide. Nonetheless, the reader is left wondering how Jim arrived at his mental situation beyond his more obvious setbacks. Mental states and actions do have a large social component.

The saga of life at the cabin is a little repetitious, but is fairly gripping; Roy and his father seemed to be on the verge of disaster on a daily basis. The other, shorter stories are not without interest, despite their somewhat dissonant aspects. Beyond suicide, this book would make any rational person have second thoughts about embarking on a life in the wilds of Alaska on no more than a whim.

In the postscript to this astoundingly original book, David Vann quotes Grace Paley in saying that "every line in fiction has to be true. It has to be a distillation of experience more true to a person's life than any moment he or she has actually lived."

Through that definition, Legends of a Suicide is a true book. James Edward Vann - the author's father - did, indeed, kill himself when David was only 13. But the circumstances described here are that of mythology - a real-world event that is imagined, transformed, repackaged, reimagined. The book holds fast to the truth of the suicide and how it affected the author, even when it diverges significantly from the facts.

In ways, one can describe this book as a howl in the dark; the tentacles of the father's despairing act reach through the years and ensnare the author for decades. The book - opening and closing interweaving short stories and a novella - are mostly set in Ketchikan and the isolated Alaska woods.

What emerges is the portrait of a self-absorbed, clinically depressed, damaged man. At one point, the fictional-but-real father says, "I need the world animated and I need it to refer to me. I need to know that when a glacier shifts or a bear farts, it has something to do with me..."

Half-way through the book, there is a gasp-out-loud moment that will totally transform the relationship between the father, the son, and indeed, the reader. Everything is suddenly reconfigured and as the book takes form again, the reader begins to realize exactly how the suicide has affected the author. I will not reveal this spoiler, but it is one of the most astonishing feats I've seen in reimagined fiction. And although the reader understands that he or she is truly in a psychological wilderness, it does not take away from the truth of the experience.

There are hints of Tobias Wolff and even Hemingway in the author's control of the style, but make no mistake: this is a very authentic new voice. At the end of the day, it's about a vulnerable son who does not have the mental apparatus to deal with an emotionally ill father who desperately seeks to stay on top of his life while falling through the crevices. It will transport you to unchartered territories. The friend who recommended this book told me, "THIS is why we read." I wholeheartedly agree.

By reading first the short stories and afterwards the novella 'Sukkwan' Island I maybe disturbed the author's intention of the structure of this stunning book.
To be honest, having done this I found the short stories well written, as good "designed and constructed" pieces of well taught creative writing. But slightly anecdotical.
As mentioned elsewhere one could trace the influence of the mastership of Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver mastership and the more homely tragedies of Kevin Cantry.
Still in 'Sukkwan Island' David Vann succeeds in reaching a higher, almost cinematographic level. Having seen the film 'Into the Wild' recently I could imagine the desolate atmosphere of Alaska better.
Vann describes the state of mind of the father like Jean-Paul Sartre did in his novel La Nausée. (Disgust?) Furthermore the subject of suicide reminds another Existentialist thinker/writer Albert Camus who wrote suicide is the only free choice we have in our lives we did not choose for by ourselves.
As an unmistakenly early 21st century masterpiece of American writing 'Sukkwan Island' could be the ultimate post-pioneer, post-Thoreau depiction of how the Americans finally lost touch with the wild they once were able to conquer. Nature bigger as mankind. Nature bigger as human mind.

This is a savage, gutsy probe of suicide and its aftermath. These allegorically linked stories, notably the middle novellas, bring the reader to a naked immediacy, a place where there is no escape and no room to sit on the perimeter. David Vann has re-imagined his father's suicide (thirty years ago, when Vann was 13) and mythologized it in this semi-autobiographical memoir, and he has done this with a graphic, naked brawn and authenticity that I have rarely encountered in other stories of suicide, real or imagined. There is a place beyond the threshold, a place where gifted writers access with the reader in the subconscious strata, a sort of "it" place, for lack of a signifier. And Vann meets the reader here with a staggering intensity. It produced a chemical reaction, and I was fully in that submerged dimension.

Vann's influences are present, such as Cormac McCarthy (who also produces that chemical reaction in me), Elizabeth Bishop, and Chaucer, among others. But this is uniquely Vann's voice, an echo of his personal history, his education and beloved authors, with his own original stamp. Every passage is nuanced and muscular. There are also acrid scenes of Kafkaesque absurdity and graveyard insanity that blew me away.

I read his later Caribou Island: A Novel before this one. There is a linked sensibility in both stories, and even some of the character's names are used in both books. They are fused or clipped or reinvented altogether, but it is evident that names are critical and symbolic to Vann. This book, in my humble opinion, is the best of the two, a legitimate masterpiece. (Although, now that I have read this, it gives more heft to the later work.) I was deeply moved and impressed by CARIBOU ISLAND and wanted to go back to this earlier work. LEGEND OF A SUICIDE is now one of my favorite books of the year, and would be on any list of mine of best books of a lifetime.

Excuse my gushing and just read the book. I can tell you that the Alaskan wilderness will emerge as a character, that the eyes of the fish will both tyrannize and seduce you, that the barren coldness will incarcerate you. You will be hunted down and haunted.

"He dreamed he was chopping up bits of fish and every piece had a small pair of eyes and as he chopped, there was a moaning sound that was getting louder. It wasn't coming from the pieces of fish or their eyes exactly, but they were watching him and waiting to see what he would do."

I recommend this to anyone who wants a sublime reading experience.

This was David Vann's first book of fiction and is comprised of five short stories and a novella. The stories are fictional but as David Vann states in the acknowledgements: `They're fictional, but are based on a lot that's true'. The book is dedicated to James Vann, David's father, who committed suicide in 1980 when David was aged 13 years.

Each reader can decide for themselves where and how firm a line to draw between the historical James Edwin Vann and the novel's James Edwin Fenn, and between David Vann and the novel's narrator and protagonist Roy Fenn. For me, the firmness of the line mattered less than the exploration of suicide and its impacts.

The stories and the novella are linked through Roy and his relationship to his father Jim, a restless man in search of self-fulfilment who is unable to deal with frustration and failure. The first three stories provide aspects of Roy's early life: the small child in Ketchikan, Alaska, leaves for California and a new life with his mother. Jim's suicide occurs during the first story; the remaining short stories revolve around Roy's adjustment to both the fact and consequences, both as a child and then years later when he returns to Ketchikan.

But the short stories set a series of scenes over which the novella `Sukkwan Island' towers. This is a different exploration of the fact and impact of suicide and while I did not enjoy this story, I admire the power of it. The impact of the story is amplified by its setting. Sukkwan Island may have its own rugged beauty but it is an isolated and isolating place. Especially for Roy and Jim who are haunted by their own inner demons. This is a story that builds as Jim's lack of planning and unrealistic expectations feed into Roy's growing sense of dread. This story could stand alone, but I think this would reduce its impact, its reminder that suicide has an impact beyond a singular sudden death. Stories form their own reality.

It's almost an anticlimax, after `Sukkwan Island', to return to the final two stories. It's both reassuring and slightly unreal to return to Ketchikan with an older Roy.

I have mixed feelings about this book. I admired the writing and the way in which the Alaskan settings enhanced and amplified the stories. I admired, too, the way in which David Vann explores the difficult terrain of suicide. But I found the stories unsettling, and while this is partly a consequence of the power of the writing it is also related to the role of the writer as both storyteller and orphaned child.

`Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself.'

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Whether or not you know about the author's personal context (touched on in the Acknowledgements) that led him to write this deeply affecting and thought provoking collection of stories, the title itself implies that it will be anything but an "easy read". Not a book I would have picked up without strong recommendations. Five short stories, structurally grouped around the substantial and central novella, are linked together through Roy and his relationship to his father Jim, a former dentist turned luckless commercial fisherman and wilderness hunter in the wilds of Alaska.

David Vann uses the first three stories to set out in brief the backdrop for Roy's early life, from living as a small child in Ketchikan, Alaska, to leaving for California to a different life with his mother. Already in the first story we learn that the father, not able to cope with the realization of his various plans and ventures, forgoes his "many lives": on his ship, he takes a gun and commits suicide. The last two stories are set many years later and see Roy return to Ketchikan to attempt to reconnect with the memories of his father and to confront his own lingering and conflicting emotions that he carried since his childhood.

The writing in the short stories is detached and even young Roy's psychological turmoil is told in somewhat oblique tones. The emotional and imaginative power of Vann's writing, however, blows into the reader's face like an Arctic storm as soon as the novella, "Sukkwan Island", begins. Thirteen-year old Roy has accepted his father's invitation to spend a year with him "homesteading" in a cabin on this remote island in south-eastern Alaska. Intended to enable father and son to get to know each other better, they embark on an adventure neither of them could have imagined. Vann's evocation of the landscape's harsh and rugged beauty, the deep isolation that sets human beings against the natural elements and the dangers looming in the wild, is thoroughly captivating as it is intimate and personal. The daily challenges posed by the outer environment are reflecting deeply on the psychological dramas inside: neither son nor father seem to be able to confront their demons or fears.

Vann depicts the interplay between environment and human soul magnificently, like in this example: "The cloud enclosed him and his father in their own sound so that he could hear his own breath and the blood in his temples as if it were outside of him and this too increased his sense of being watched, even hunted. His father's footsteps just ahead of him sounded enormous. The fear spread through him until he was holding his breath in tight gasps and couldn't ask to go back."

Occasional physical successes, such as building the food cache or hauling in a good catch of fish result in positive energy, spreading temporary relief also to the reader. However, these glimpses of relaxation are alternating with longer and longer periods of deep despair and hopelessness until events reach the unavoidable climactic action. Nothing will be the same after that. Nothing is as expected or anticipated. From then on the story follows the dramatic aftermath and fall-out from the suicide. The poignant intensity of the experiences told in the novel's second part challenges our understanding of the resilience of the human mind when faced with mental illness and extreme crises.

With LEGEND OF A SUICIDE Vann has created one of the most intensely imagined, deeply moving portrait of a father-son pair who, in their effort to become closer through spending time together in a remote wilderness, fail completely. They are totally unprepared as they struggle for survival in this environment, risking their lives more than once, due to lack of knowledge, confusion and Jim's inability to address his deep despair and emotional and physical pain. At times, especially in the second part, I found some sections too drawn out or, for me, too much beyond the believable and therefore less than convincing. After finishing the intense and highly charged narrative in the novella, I found myself less connected to two last stories of the book. While they picked up the thread to the earlier short stories, the interruption in the narrative flow, created by the central story, was so profound that it rendered the rest a lot less meaningful for me. Noticing that "Sukkwan Island" is being offered as a stand alone novella, I can easily see the attraction of reading it as a separate piece of fiction and let the power of it carry the reader into a different world. [Friederike Knabe]

David Vann's book is not conventional. The title and the first short story reveal where the plot is heading, so I do not think this is a spoiler. I read the book twice to enjoy the beautiful descriptions of Alaska, and the fascinating descriptions of survival off the land. Vann is as talented as Jack London in describing Alaska.
The format of the book is unusual. It consists of six related short stories, of which the longest probably is a stand alone novella. The unconventional aspect is that the object of the suicide changes in the two plot threads: in several, the decedent is the father, and in the novella, the decedent is the son. Since Vann uses the same two characters in all of the stories, I found this unsettling, until I relaxed and appreciated this as a collection of lovely short stories. When I quit evaluating the book as a novel, which it is not, I appreciated it more.
Vann's description of the father's mental illness is beautiful and nuanced. He never tells the reader what the father's ailment is, and then proceeds to describe the pain and suffering of a bipolar disorder. As a reader I found myself becoming impatient with the father, wanting him to just "straighten up". This book made me focus on my own attitude toward mental health issues. When I see someone in a wheel chair, I feel sympathy. When I interact with a mental patient, like many people I wonder why they don't just behave themselves. Vann's treatment of the disturbed father is a fair and painful treatment of the suffering of the mentally ill, the pain they inflict on others, and their inability to receive relief without major intervention. I thought of the old observation as I read about the father, that if I knew my pet was suffering as much as the father through his depression, I would put down the pet.
This book is essentially a treatment of two fictional suicides. It does not seem to rely on classic studies for explanation or plot development. For example, there is no comment on Durkheim and anomie as an explanation. And yet, both of the decedents were deeply alienated from friends, family and meaningful relationships, compounded by isolation in the magnificent Alaskan wilderness.
One should probably read this book while in a stable mental condition, as it presents disturbing images and interaction.
Vann has the potential to be a major force in fiction.

David Vann's "Legend of a Suicide" is a collections of short stories - a very peculiar one, by the way. The five - or 4 stories and a novella - features more or less the same characters, but the stories aren't really linked or related. The author writes about possible lives for these people - all the time focusing of loss, suffering and the attempt the recover, or, at least, survival.

The best and longest one is "Sukkwan Island". It is about a twice divorced father and his son, spending a time in a remote and isolated island in Alaska. These two people could be the same ones in a previous story named "Rhoda" - the name of a woman to whom a divorced father gets married. The second wife of the father in the novella is also named Rhoda, but who can be sure the story is about the same people. They could be, but, also, they could not. That's one of the beauties of this poignant book, in which Vann seems to think how the destiny of a group of people could unfold.

Another beauty of "Legend of a Suicide" comes from the language. In the back of the book, the author acknowledges some other writers who have influenced him. Among them are Comarc McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson - two of the best American writers working nowadays. From McCarthy comes a clear sense of language, and the narrative voice. The third person narrator of "Sukkwan Island" (all the other stories are told in the first person) has a voice likely the one in McCarthy's "The border trilogy", especially in "All the pretty horses".

"In the morning, Roy remembered the crying, and it seemed to him that this was exactly what he was not supposed to do. By some agreement he had never been witness to, he was supposed to hear at night and then by day, not only forget but somehow make it not have happened."

From Robinson, Vann has acquired the pace and some of the depth - especially in the father-son dynamics. "The thing is", the father says once, "something about me is not right. I can't just do the right thing and be who I supposed to be. Something about me won't let me do that".

But while Vann is inspired by elements from these two - and maybe some other - writers, he is not copycatting anything. In "Legend of a Suicide" we find a writer who can make his own style, his own prose and build characters with depth and humanity.

It is known that Vann's father committed suicide himself. This is a fact that somehow is present through "Legend of a Suicide", but with sometimes subverted. If writing the book was a personal catharsis for the writer, for the reader it is a touching experience. Like an iceberg at first we are able to see only the tip, but the more you dig in the book, the deeper the stories are, we realize.

I was not psychologically or emotionally prepared for the immense power of David Vann's Legend of a Suicide: Stories (P.S.). Let me describe this book as a monster which snuck up on me midway through, ferociously sunk its teeth into me, violently shook me to my core, sucked the breath right out of me, then tossed me broken into a heap of raw emotion.

I had read Vann's Caribou Island: A Novel first. It too left me gasping for air. My friends recommended that I follow up with LEGEND. They told me LEGEND is powerful but still I was not expecting such an impact. Legend of a Suicide: Stories (P.S.) hit me like a hurricane. The two part story entitled "Sukkwan Island" was so intense that even though I could hardly tear my eyes away from its pages, I had to take a break at the end of Part One... just to catch my breath and regain my composure.

Rare is the book that effects me so forcefully, so deeply. The exploration of both interior and exterior landscapes is edgey, turbulent and painfully severe. The fierce and beautiful atmosphere which Vann recreates from elements of his own life haunts me still. This is not a book I will be forgetting.

Vann's brilliant writing is personal and lyrical, sharp and unflinching. I can find no other words to review this extraordinary book of stories and do it justice. I must leave it as this and only urge you to read and experience Legend of a Suicide: Stories (P.S.) for yourself.