Customer Reviews

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind

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As a writer, Ivan Doig is something of a favorite son in Montana, and for good reason. His memoir is a rhapsody of affection for the land where he grew up -- the small towns, homesteads and ranches in the Smith River Valley, along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, extending north to the Blackfeet Reservation on the Canadian border. It's also a wonderful and often touching story of a father and son. Born in 1939, Doig begins his tale with the emigration of his forebears from Scotland to Montana. At the end, in the 1970s, he has emerged as a writer with a graduate degree, living in Seattle, with rich and deeply felt memories of the people and the land he has known -- the house of sky.

An only child, his mother dying when he is six years old, Doig is raised by his father, Charlie, who works various jobs, sheepherding, haying, moving from place to place, and for a while leasing a small ranch of his own, his son in tow. Charlie is a hard-working man, with a big heart and tender love for his son. Concerned by a turn of bad health, he is reconciled to his mother-in-law, who did not approve of her daughter's marriage to him, and the three of them become a family that remains together until Charlie's death at age 70.

The book captures and preserves in detail a way of life that has almost vanished from America. Doig tells of growing up in wide open spaces among livestock and wildlife, learning from his father the skills of making a living off the land and surviving against the odds. He attends small town schools, spending the winters in rented rooms, seeing his father and grandmother only on weekends. Much of his time spent with adults or alone, he grows up more quickly than his peers and learns to love solitude.

At 300+ pages, this is not a long book, but it's no page-turner. You find yourself reading it slowly, relishing the rich prose style that captures the poetry in this landscape of mountains, valleys, and plains, as well as the people, with their personal quirks, habits, ways of talking, and often eccentric behavior. In fact, the book reads much like a novel, full of stories, colorful characters, humor, pathos, suspense, and adventures. The vividness of Doig's writing reflects his training as a journalist, and I suspect that he may have been influenced more than a little by the novels of Thomas Wolfe. I recommend "This House of Sky" to anyone with an interest in the West, nature writing, books about growing up, family sagas, ranching and rural life. As a companion volume, I recommend Wallace Stegner's "Wolf Willow," about his boyhood in southwestern Saskatchewan.

Read this in the company of someone else. Every five minutes or so you'll call attention to something in the text -- a choice description, a picturesque flow of words, a bit of hilarity that will reduce you both to laughter. This is a book to be shared.

Doig is a gifted writer with the facility of a James Agee in his choice of words and phrasing. On the page he presents a constant wild, vivid sensory impression, as if you were riding on horseback with him through his beloved Montana hills, sharing the terrain, people and history in ways you hadn't experienced before and couldn't experience anywhere else.

His descriptions show keen insight and attention to detail through carefully chosen, apt simile and metaphor. "I had noticed at Jordan's," he writes about a situation he experienced as a child, "...the boarding child is something like a stranded visitor that people get accustomed to half-seeing at the edges of their vision -- and no one, least of all me, seemed to think there was much unusual about my alighting here and there casually as a roosting pullet."

As a young boy, exploring: "For by greatest luck a silvered ship, high-hulled and pinging with emptiness, rode at the far end of the ranch buildings. A ship, at least to my imaginings. In the years when the machine chomped broadly through grainfields, it was called a combine. Now this dreadnaught stood, in its tones of dulling metal and cluster of idle gearwheels, for me to climb into..."

Here's the epitome of fine writing. You won't find more vivid images anywhere and he doesn't stint at all with language. Like this description of a teacher: "She was buxom, much like Grandma with a half more plumped all around; her mounding in front and behind was very nearly more than the lackadaisical dresses wanted to contain. Leaning forward from the waist as she hurried about, she flew among us like a schooner's lusty figurehead prowing over a lazy sea."

To read Doig's books is to experience Montana and a world long past. This is a book to be savored, treasured and read again and again.

Ivan Doig has captured my heart. I felt that he took my hand and led me to this magnificently rugged and sometimes brutal place, and shared all the joys and sorrows he shared there with the people he loved.He tells of his father's great inner strength, his father's love of the grandeur of those wild mountain ranges, deep-notched valleys, and the prairie fields that go on forever. He tells of his mother, whom he lost at the age of six, and the people who come into his life to get him through those tender years of loss, each one a rich, full-bodied character of the West, who leaves an indelible mark on Ivan's life. This is not a tear-stained narrative. This is a proud son of the West, with a deep love of his heritage and the people who made him the man he is today.I'm so grateful he was willing to share his story with us.If you love beautiful,richly-descriptive prose, great narratives, histories of the people who settled the West, please enjoy this fine portrait painted by a master of the art.

As soon as I started reading This House of Sky, I fell into Ivan Doig's world. By the end I was so mesmerized by his wonderful language and vivid characters that I was wandering around the house with the book up to my nose, bumping into things, trying to do chores one-handed while reading. I would never have believed that a book that starts out with the gasping, hideous suffocating death of one of the author's parents and ends with the gasping, hideous suffocating death of the other one could contain such boundless love of family, such joy, and such beauty. Doig's vivid writing shades perilously close to poetry, and he has an eye for the perfect anecdote to illustrate his point. Doig evokes in the endless drudgery of Montana ranch life a heroic struggle, and turns his hardworking, mercurial father into one of the great figures of modern literature. As a chronicle of Doig's childhood and its end and of the Montana sheepherding life in the early parts of this century, This House of Sky is a spectacular success; but as a tribute to his beloved family and especially his father, the book is a powerfully moving classic.

I ordered this book when it was first published for my dad. When I was home for his funeral the bookstore called to tell me it was in. I bought the book and read it about 6 months later. I have never read a book that was so unique in the way the author used language. If you want to know how cowboys and sheepherders in Montana speak read this book. If you want to know how people compromise themselves for the ones they love read this book. If you want to gain insight into a truely fine father and son relationship read this book. If you don't want to be moved to tears and laughter don't read this book. It took me over a year to finish this book because the language was so vivid it transported me back to my childhood and I felt as it I were sitting in my dads truck listening to him shoot the breeze with his cowboy friends. My fathers voice whispered in my ear and I would have to put the book down. Read this book you will not be disappointed.

Thank-you Ivan Doig. This book is wonderful. I had started the book and then put it down realizing that I wanted to savor this book. I picked this book up again after reading Close Range by Annie Proulx. What a relief House of Sky was. Great way to see Montana, the writing takes you there.

This is Ivan Doig's story of growing up in Montana. It was not an easy life. His widowed father kept Ivan close, made sacrifices, taught him everything he knew. The father even made a truce with his mother-in-law for Ivan's sake. Ivan was raised by two strong characters! Which made Ivan a strong character.

I would highly recommend this book. It touches all the parts of your heart.

Ivan Doig's "This House of Sky" is an American masterpiece. It's easy to see the influence this book has had, both directly and indirectly, on other notable Western writers such as Gretel Ehrlich, Pam Houston and Ron Franscell. It is pure poetry in prose form, and we begin to see how the Western mind is formed by the forever landscape.

Doig is clearly an underappreciated American writer, particularly outside of the West. I would suggest this book to anyone who likes to read beautiful language about heartfelt subjects. I would further recommend "The Solace of Open Spaces" by Gretel Ehrlich and "Angel Fire" by Ron Franscell, both cut from the same lyrical, evocative Western cloth.

This is my all time favorite book. Period. Beautifully written, thought-provoking. It will make you want to move to Montana. It will make you love open sky and a horizon that goes on forever and the importance of family.

This House of Sky is an incredible gift to Doig's (the author) father and grandmother. Doig writes with grace and beauty in remembering his life with them in Montana when life was sometimes something to be physically endured. For example, his picture of a small town after a blizzard: 'In the fresh calm, wood smoke climbed straight up from chimneys, until it appeared as if the fat gray ribbons were dangling all the town's houses down into a bowl of snow.'

You must read this book. Then, give copies as gifts to everyone you love.

As a native Montanan, I was drawn to this book. I don't know what I can say without reapeating the outstanding things others reviewing this book have stated. I, like a previous reader, pick up House of Sky just to read certain passages over and over. The use of the English language in this book is Masterful; absolutely masterful. The emotions that the words stir up in even the manliest of us men, is remarkable. Even if you are reading this review by accident, BUY THE BOOK. You won't be able to put it down... I guarntee it.