Customer Reviews

The Town That Forgot How to Breathe: A Novel

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Reading this book was as tedious as running a mile in chest-deep water. Comparisons to King and Proulx are ridiculous. King, at least, keeps his stories humming while Proulx's writing is minimalist brilliance. Harvey's story is waterlogged and interminable, leaking page-bloating, tangential backstories every ten pages and peopled with annoying, boring characters. As for his style, it's bloated, taxing and sodden, the occasional surreal touch nothwithstanding. (Sure, an albino shark barfing up a human head is startling, but it, like so much of this novel, is ultimately meaningless.) Every time his character, Miss Laracy, opens her toothless mouth (how many times do we need a description of her pink, shiny gums?) and chatters endlessly in her apostrophe-riddled, irksomely rendered Newfoundland dialect, I got so weary I could barely hold the book up in my hands. Worse, while Harvey's story is intrigueing enough to keep you reading, his climax and resolution are so uneventful and silly and, well, boring, that I actually tossed the book aside after (finally!) finishing the last page. Four hundred and seventy-one pages of over-plotted, over-written monotonous drivel. Pure tedium.

I had great hopes for this book. The title was intriguing; the premise--- original. But I think the writer lost his way . . . about 3 quarters into the book.

The prose itself is wonderfully wrought and the images described are unforgettably vivid. Some standouts is the description of the child ghost: Jessica who haunted her mother and freely interacted with a living child. The fact that she was drowned figures greatly in how she is seen. And the writing is so crystal-clear that I could practically smell her . . . I imagined sea urchins, snails and rotting Sargasso seaweed. The scene where she manifested her deterioration in the sea after death was particularly dreadful! In a Classic Horror --- sort of way. (This is a compliment.)

Kenneth Harvey is gifted. For me, there is no doubt. His character development , most evident in characters who had the Sight: Tom Quilty, an artist savant, Miss Laracy and Robin--- was outstanding. And his attention to detail in the physical world in this book . . . is beyond the painful ability of most writers. His writing is just too beautiful for words.

But I think he couldn't figure out how to write the resolution of his tale? I am still puzzled as to the source of the villagers' illness. And how the illness affected their environment. I read how they appeared to be cured but it seemed incomplete somehow. It was unsatisfying. It felt as if the author was just trying to close the book. The big event at the end of the book just seemed contrived. A device to finish the story. A unruly knot to close the thread

I will read the writer's next book. In hope that his next tale's denouement will improve. Because the other elements of his writing skills are top-notch!! 3 and a Half Stars for allowing me the pleasure of reading this book at least 3 quarters of the way.

The Town That Forgot to Breathe is one of the most original and interesting novels that I have ever read. Our alienation from our roots, our families and ourselves is a common topic for modern novelists. However, few of them are able to take such a poignant and powerful route to capturing the pain of those problems.

Mr. Harvey has written a book that virtually defies genre description. The best I can do is to call it a modern fantasy fable . . . with an undertone of horror.

As the book developed, I often felt that I was in Stephen King's grip . . . but then a ray of love and light would penetrate the fog and uplift me. It's a startling use of contrasts that makes reading the book very engaging and intense. I found it hard to put down.

The depressed fishing village of Bareneed, Newfoundland finds itself beset with all kinds of unexpected events. People in town suddenly find themselves becoming angry, thinking murderous thoughts and losing their ability to breathe. At the same time peculiar fish begin being found . . . with even more peculiar contents in their mouths. After that the sea begins to disgorge even more unusual contents.

I love books with remarkable characters and this book has several of them. The one who will stay with you longest is an old woman, Miss Eileen Laracy, whose fiancas lost at sea when she was young. She's lived her whole life in the fishing town of Bareneed and never lost of child-like view of the world. Her eyesight is filled with beautiful auras around people, spirits and visions of what's coming next. Young Robin Blackwood will also intrigue you. She's the daughter of Joseph Blackwood (who's separated from her mother, Kim) who has brought her to Bareneed for a little vacation and to visit his great uncle. Robin soon finds herself also in contact with the spirit world. Tommy Quilty is a retarded man who knows more about love and values than everyone else in town combined. He is able to show the power of love to deal with our problems. Lieutenant-Commander French has an equal grasp of the scientific and the spirit worlds, and straddles them in helpful ways for the citizens of Bareneed. Doug Blackwood has been a fisherman all of his life and hews to the hard values of work and virtue. There are some other memorable characters I won't mention because describing them might spoil the story.

The book is enlivened by remarkable local dialect captured in the dialogue that rings and sings in your mind as you read it. I found myself reading some of it aloud for the pure joy of the sounds.

Don't read ahead to the end. You'll find yourself spoiling some nice surprises if you do.

Reviews from places like The Detroit Free Press, Bookpage, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others heap praise on this novel, calling it "meticulously created", "haunting, poetic, funny, and moving", "a thoughtful piece of literary horror." I hate to be the contrarian here, but I call it simply "goofy" - a pretentious bombast of confused messages and rambling prose that never manages to get to the point and is more (unintentionally) funny than scary.

Bareneed, Newfoundland, is an old fishing town in decline following the banning of cod fishing and the closing of the local fish factory. Soon after Joseph Blackwood and his young daughter show up, renting a home for a summer vacation in the picturesque coastal town, strange things start happening. Local residents, forgetting how to breathe - literally - while at the same time becoming violent and forgetting who they are - start filling up the local hospital. Then bodies - some apparently centuries old but perfectly intact - start bobbing up to the surface of the bay. Strange and mythical sea creatures romp in the surf, while those locals still breathing normally seem to spend most of their time drawing pictures, spouting New Age psycho-babble, or breaking out in seafaring folk songs. The respiratory-challenged, all tubed-up in ICU, were much less annoying than those Bareneed residents still able to function "normally". But this was the part of the book that was discernable. The rest - a tedious concoction of man's connection with the sea, with family, with death, spirits, amber lights, fish, mermaids and the Canadian armed forces - is less clear, if that is possible.

In summary, it seems that author Kenneth Harvey was trying to be Steven King - but Steven King with some important, moral message. He failed on both counts - even King's sub par "Cell" is a classic literature by comparison. "The Town that Forgot How to Breathe" is simply all wet - save your time and money and wait for the next port.

"The people react against the invading culture or the loss of identity. A mass hypnosis kicks in, one that everybody believes because they have to, in order to survive. Mentally, I mean. Survive beyond what has been taken away from them."

Ken Harvey's The Town That Forgot How To Breathe is an exciting and fast-paced novel that portrays what can happen to people when they lose their identity.

The connection between breathing and identity is wonderful, and Ken's story-telling abilities are finely tuned. Set in an isolated village in Newfoundland, Ken brilliantly unravels a moving tale of a community enduring inexplicable events that challenge their physical and psychological survival.

Other commentaries sometimes make comparisons to Stephen King, but in my opinion Ken's work is far more thought provoking and engaging. Ken Harvey has a unique voice that draws the reader into the interior of the narrative. This is a highly creative and intelligent novel.

While the quoted blurb on the back cover intrigued me by referencing Lovecraft, it took me about ten minutes of reading to realize that the author of the quote could not actually be familiar with either HPL or "The Town that Forgot to Breathe"...and, quite possibly, with neither.

No, this book has much more similarity to Stephen King...and while the later New England horror-writer was without doubt inspired by the earlier, their sympathies could not be more different. Lovecraft wrote of bookish scholars confronting alien powers, and quietly revered a certain elitist nobility that has failed to endear him overmuch to readers more swayed by literature that aims to speak to 'the common man'.

King, on the other hand, is often at his best when he portrays the more-or-less modern, more-or-less small town setting. He knows about working class people who are out of work, and he knows about middle-class people who are growing more or less out of touch with their roots. It is precisely this human perception, in addition to a master's grasp of the technique of narrative, that allows King to tower above the rank and file of modern genre writers. We may quiver in the night over his bloody clowns and monster movie remakes, but if the works stay with us at all, it is because his characters and settings ring rich and true.

Kenneth J. Harvey has even more of this power. It is somewhat of a shame that anyone familiar with King will be unable to avoid making easy comparisons (as I have just done). Harvey's setting is nearly stereotypical King: a depressed Northwestern coastal fishing town beset by the supernatural. His characters, like many from King's pages, include a colorful and keenly authentic cross-section of wise old-timers, small-town (forgive the phrase)'white trash', and often adrift middle-age professionals...not to mention the obligatory police and military interlopers.

However, where King shows the cancerous effects of the supernatural on his characters (a recurring Lovecraft theme), Harvey takes almost the opposite stance. It is humanity's disease which afflicts these townsfolk, technology and progress which have sapped the vitality and magic of the community. The ill omens of supernatural danger occur not because man has foolishly dared to come too close to mysterious things, but because he has strayed too far from them.

Without doubt, this is an ideologically motivated work. Some may dismiss it, seeing a misguided nostalgia for a simpler time, and some may welcome it as an ode to traditional virtues of community and locale. One may feel that it gently preaches, and affirm or rebel as suits their temperament.

The author makes missteps and sometimes fails to deliver on his promises. It's easy for us to say that a tighter editing would have resulted in a stronger work, and possibly a slightly shorter one...perhaps Harvey was trying to include a little too much and despaired of bringing it all together at the end. In trying to strike a balance between comfort and complexity, it is easy to drop a few threads along the way; many and more well-known authors have had the same problems, and vastly more have failed to produce anything as uniquely engrossing and enchanting as this book.

This is just barely able to be called a work of horror. Do not buy this because you've read everything else in the genre and need your horror fix (though it will serve a more specific Stephen King addiction, and offers a touch more substance than anything he's produced in the last thirty years). It is barely even a work of 'modern fantasy' (and by this I mean the many dreary books which have fairies talking on cell phones, or witches working at publishing houses). It is well worth reading, mainly because it is well-written and memorable and speaks Newfie like a native.

Read this, instead, if you want to smell salt air and hear the sound of the ocean at night. Read this if you want to reflect on the dangers of too much progress and the decay of small-town strength and wisdom. Read this if you've ever deliciously shuddered at the thought of mysteries of unseen depths that have nothing to do with man-eating sharks and lost undersea civilizations.

Just drop your expectations at the door and curl up with nothing more, and nothing less, than a good book that is both eerie and thoughtful. You'll find it easy to forgive a little clumsiness at times, because the rest is as satisfying as homemade soup and an old book of true true fairy tales.

After reading only a few pages I knew I was in for a great read .. Joseph Blackwood and his eight year old daughter,Robin arrive in rural Newfoundland for a brief holiday only to become
surrounded with cliff hanging suspense..
I thoroughly enjoyed being carried away on a rustic island full of colourful characters ripe with underlying traditions and the suspense of never knowing or guessing what the next page would reveal.... The talent of the author makes you feel you are in his descriptive settings meeting these island characters and loving it all ....
I highly recommend this book.

This wonderfully, deeply moving novel starts out with one of the most fully fleshed and interesting characters I have met inside a book for a very long time, Miss Eileen Laracy. The aging spinster is picking lilacs when she meets Joseph Blackwood and his daughter Robin, who have rented the old Critch house for a vacation in the town of Bareneed. Joseph, recently separated from his wife, hoped to find a pleasant and restful place to connect with his artitisic daughter.

But from the very moment he arrives, Joseph realizes there is something slightly off-center about Bareneed, something unsettling that at first he cannot pinpoint. He has a strange and enigmatic neighbor named Claudia Kyle, an artist herself with a studio in her house, along with a secret past and a heavy weight on her soul.

Soon, Robin begins to see Claudia's dead daughter Jessica playing in the barn, the town simpleton Tommy begins to draw strange pictures of the town and its people, strange and colorful fish are pulled from the sea, each one vomiting up something unnatural before they die.

Dr. George Thompson, and elderly country doctor, begins to notice a strange illness running through his town, in which his patients simply stop breathing for no apparent reason. Police Sergeant Brian Chase, a tall, half-native with a sick wife at home, begins to investigate the strange occurrences in his territory of Bareneed.

Joseph's estranged wife Kim, a marine biologist, catches wind of an albino shark being pulled from the waters of Bareneed Cove and immediately comes to investigate, but also, because she wants to see Joseph and Robin. Kim arrives in time to discover that Robin has become ill also, and that Joseph has started to change, so she goes in search of Joseph's gnarly, local uncle, Doug Blackwood.

Things become worse as more folk sicken, and worse things become to come up from the sea. Only the elderly, children, and the simple seem to be immune from the pall that has fallen over Bareneed like a shroud, smothering even the soldiers sent in to keep the area isolated.

While the pace of 'The Town That Forgot How To Breathe' is languid, the story has stealthy claws that will reach out and scrap your flesh when you least expect it. This kind of chilling dread has long been missing from more modern works of mysterious horror.

What is tangible to the touch is not always the reality behind the frightening puzzles that face Bareneed. Secrets held but never whispered, knowledge with no one left to pass it on to, legends, myths, seductive lethargy, painful memories, and the tingles of fear of the unknown will enter through the hearty bone of your skull and skitter through your mind as you indulge yourself in this fantastic novel.

That shiver is telling you something. It's telling you something is not right in Bareneed. Something that seems to need more than you can possibly give. Harvey's prose is tight and poetic, his characters real enough to reach out and touch, and his creation of small town life as comforting as warm apple pie.

Don't miss this novel. It's an excellent foray into those creepy dark corners we like to cower in late at night. Enjoy!

"The people react against the invading culture or the loss of identity. A mass hypnosis kicks in, one that everybody believes because they have to, in order to survive. Mentally, I mean. Survive beyond what has been taken away from them."

Ken Harvey's The Town That Forgot How To Breathe is an exciting and fast-paced novel that portrays what can happen to people when they lose their identity.

The connection between breathing and identity is wonderful, and Ken's story-telling abilities are finely tuned. Set in an isolated village in Newfoundland, Ken brilliantly unravels a moving tale of a community enduring inexplicable events that challenge their physical and psychological survival.

Other commentaries sometimes make comparisons to Stephen King, but in my opinion Ken's work is far more thought provoking and engaging. Ken Harvey has a unique voice that draws the reader into the interior of the narrative. This is a highly creative and intelligent novel.

In the tradition of Michael Crummey's Galore and Carsten Jensen's We, the Drowned is the 2005 novel The Town That Forgot How to Breathe by Kenneth J. Harvey. Although it is lesser known than the novels by Crummey and Jensen, it is worthy of a read. Atmospheric and chilling, you'll wonder why The Town That Forgot How to Breathe ever escaped your notice.

Harvey lives in Newfoundland and is the author of Brud and Directions for an Opened Body. He has received the Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Books in Canada First Novel Award.

Joseph Blackwood and his daughter Robin vacation in the seaside town of Bareneed, Newfoundland. He has recently divorced and become estranged from his daughter; he hopes to reconnect with her. Blackwood's father was originally from Bareneed, and he still has relatives there. The seaside idyll, however, turns out to be anything but.

Bareneed residents cannot seem to remember to breathe. It is as if they have simply forgotten how to take breaths. At the same time, bodies of those who have perished at sea are suddenly washing up on shore. Next door to the house the Blackwoods are renting is the ghost of a little girl who died at sea. She wants to make friends with Robin and sings a little ditty over and over again: "My father went to sea-sea-sea to see what he could see-see-see and all that he could see-see-see was the bottom of the deep blue sea-sea-sea." You can see how Harvey beautifully sets the tone. There is such a chilling quality to this novel that I could literally feel the cold water in my bones.

Interestingly, like its people, Bareneed is a dying town. It, too, suffers from illness. Many are out of work and fail to make ends meet. The government had shut down the cod fishing industry, which was the primary livelihood of Bareneed. This, of course, hurt fishermen, but it also hurt those who worked in a fish plant in Bareneed. Those suffering from breathing problems are those who once fished or worked in the abandoned plant. Their world has drastically changed, and they are having difficulties adapting to life. As Harvey writes, these people are "fishers of men no more." The people of Bareneed have had their lifestyle threatened; they have lost their place and their sense of self. They are not sure if they will ever get it back either. I think many Americans in this economic crisis can relate to these people. Harvey also shows us a people who believe modern technology makes us sick and cuts us off from our deceased ancestors. It all makes for a curious read.

The lure of the sea is paramount in Harvey's work. The sea churns, envelopes bodies for years, and then spits them back out. This book has been on my to-be-read shelf since 2005 when I first bought it. I do not know for what I was waiting. I think it works well with Crummey and Jensen. If you enjoy sea lore, pick up The Town That Forgot How to Breathe.