Possessed by Shadows [Hardcover]

Donigan Merritt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 17, 2005

Possessed by Shadows is the story of two climbers who spend a year traveling from the rugged desert of Joshua Tree National Park to the Alps, the Himalayas, and the High Tatra mountains of Czechoslovakia.

Philosophy professor Tom Valen narrates part of their story: the time he spent climbing with his wife, Molly, as she fought cancer. He also explores the journal she kept during the emotional period before her death, which occurred in the weeks before the Velvet Revolution in late 1989.

Told in alternating voices as Tom relives that year, Molly's journal reveals compulsions that he never suspected, her romantic life from adolescence into adulthood, and a shocking revelation about Stefan, a fellow climber who had once saved Tom's life. In the final scene of the novel, the three old friends climb the highest mountain in the Tatras one last time, where they find a kind of redemption in the face of impending death.

Possessed by Shadows is a tribute to selfless love and the bonds of friendship forged in the extremes of high mountains. It confronts us with the ultimate philosophical challenge: since we must die, how do we choose to live?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An avid rock climber refuses to go gently in Merritt's gorgeous sixth novel. The story of Molly and Tom begins with a terrible irony: doctors examining Molly after a climbing accident (a falling rock knocked her unconscious during a climb at Tahquitz, Calif., forcing her husband, Tom, to stage a dramatic rescue) discover an inoperable brain tumor. At Molly's insistence, the two travel to Europe to climb their favorite peaks again before she dies. That setup is enough for a compelling and tragic love story, but alternating narratives and a long-kept secret make the novel even more powerful. Chapters switch between Tom's devoted, melancholy reminiscences of his last year with Molly and the text of an autobiography she wrote in her waning days, giving the story great depth of feeling. And Molly's past affair with another climber, one of Tom's best friends, hovers over events like a gray haze, adding emotional complexity. The only real problem is that Merritt's fixation on the nuances of serious climbing will be of interest primarily to other climbers; everyone else will skim ahead before slowing again at the next moment of searing humanity. Agent, Kathy Green, Carlisle & Company. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The author, who has published five previous novels over the past quarter-century, is one of those too-little-known writers who deserves a wider audience. This novel, which chronicles the last year in a woman's life, is everything such a story should be: moving, tender, funny, abrasive, and (yes) inspiring. The tale is narrated by Tom Valen, a philosophy professor who is having a tough time dealing with his wife's terminal cancer, and by Molly, his wife, who has her own perspectives on life, death, and love. The two are avid rock climbers (Molly's cancer is diagnosed after an injury on a mountain), and they decide to spend Molly's final year doing the thing they love the most. Merritt uses climbing--overcoming long odds, conquering something large and dangerous--as a metaphor for Tom and Molly's inner journeys. The novel could have been ham-handed and obvious; instead, it's graceful and subtle. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Other Press (June 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590511581
• ISBN-13: 978-1590511589
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,473,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

To find biographical information and information regarding his books, please visit Donigan Merritt's author webpage at http://doniganmerritt.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Possessed by Shadows takes one on an unforgettable expedition deep into Slovakia's Tatras Mountains, September 12, 2005

By 

John D. Sherwood (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Possessed by Shadows (Hardcover)

Mountains matter in a country often referred to as the rooftop of Central Europe." Possessed by Shadows takes one on an unforgettable expedition deep into Slovakia's Tatras Mountains-a human as well as physical journey of three climbers and the tangled lives they lead.

Donigan Merritt, the author of five other novels and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' workshop, is a master at crafting a novel that moves back in forth in time and relies on several voices as opposed to a single narrator. This is a book that seems chaotic initially but comes together magically at the end. Bits and pieces of information coalesce into a logical whole by the closing pages of the novel.

Merritt also is skilled at creating characters. Although he is a male writer, his female characters are the most masterful and compelling-especially Molly and Sasha. Furthermore, it's obvious from this book that he has traveled and climbed in Slovakia and understands the country's cultural and physical geography very well. His book captures a very important slice of that country's history-the dark period just before the Velvet Revolution in 1989. I would recommend it to anyone interested in Slovakia, climbing, or human relationships.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Story of Two Lovers and Their Love of Climbing., August 18, 2005

By 

William H. Wulftange (Lodz, Poland) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Possessed by Shadows (Hardcover)

This is a love story about two married mountain climbers, whose final climb together takes place in the beautiful Tatras mountains of Slovakia.

It has beautiful naratives, authentic characters, as well many thoughtful relections.

The book ends in Slovakia near the end of the Communist era and recalls to mind how awful that period was in Eastern Europe. How quickly we forget.

It is a good read for climbers or non climbers alike, and for anyone interested in the realities of life in Eastern Europe before the Wall came down.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shaken from my stupor, October 1, 2009

By 

Court Merrigan (Torrington, WY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Possessed by Shadows (Hardcover)

I recently went through a print reading slump. For some reason when I got back to the States about 6 months ago, I just lost all motivation to read anything much more challenging than a newspaper supplement. I mean, I was still getting countless tens of thousands of words off the internet, but while that is reading, in that eyes were moving over words, it's not reading, like eyes moving over, say, During the Rains.

Not that I didn't try. Oh, I tried. Picked up Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust from the local library, a book utterly unavailable in my former Third World abode, which I'd been looking forward to reading for a long time. Couldn't get into it. Tried Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I was forced to read in high school and wanted to come back to as an adult. It didn't take. Went for Richard Ford's A Piece of My Heart, which read like Cormac McCarthy For Kids. Nope.

The obvious culprit: wireless internet and a lightweight, non-thigh-scorching laptop spewing out the ceaseless offerings of the google-deity. And a comfy couch. I'd never lived in a place with all three before. I surrendered. Wallowed in mudpits of sweet, sweet information. (Though I never took to tweet-bleating.)

Probably a deeper malaise was at work. Crossing the pond will do that to you, I guess. More on that later, possibly, if ever I get on a confessional jag in these blog parts. Better, it'll get turned into some stories worth reading.

I use this long prologue by way of introducing Donigan Merritt's Possessed by Shadows. This was the book that, a few weeks back, shook me from my stupor. For an excellent full review, I direct you (once again) to Brad Green. He gives the kind of write-up that does this fine book justice.

For my part, I'll just say that I've thought a lot about Possessed by Shadows, and why it grabbed hold of my literary attention span where half a dozen other candidates - and not a ringer in the bunch - failed. I still don't have a good answer, but I didn't want to put off writing this post any longer. For one thing, I promised Donigan Merritt, who I now have the excellent good fortune to be in contact with and who is a regular EE commenter, that I would. For another, a day that goes by when you aren't reaching for Possessed by Shadows is a day you're squandering. I can't pin down just what it is Possessed by Shadows has. But it has it in spades.

Merritt pulls off the very tricky trick of writing about a foreign locale without being either smugly knowlegeable or all guidebooky. Is Bratislava, Slovakia a place you're dying to know about? Me neither. But Merritt makes Iron Curtain-era Czechoslovakia a grayly fascinating place, while sparing us the Wiki-isms a lot of writers insert like they're being graded on it. He also writes compellingly about rock climbing, another topic in which I am marginally interested at best. Same rules apply: no needless trivia, no constant assertion of authorial authority.

All this is to say nothing of the finely fluid writing and the carefully etched characters. The opening scene on a California rockface will set your heart to going, so that you won't even mind that one of the main characters gets cancer.

Possessed by Shadows is not without its flaws. The plotline is a touch hackneyed. (Come on: cancer?) But that just shows how extraordinary this book is: I was utterly absorbed anyway. Read the whole thing in two, two and a half sittings. This is what books are supposed to do to you. Grab you by the spinal cord. Now, thanks to Mr. Merritt, I'm neck-deep in half a dozen books and willingly, gladly, regularly, setting aside the laptop. I'm not able to offer up much better praise than that.