When Mountains Walked [Hardcover]

Kate Wheeler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 2000

Named a "Best Young American Novelist" by GRANTA, Kate Wheeler received numerous awards and the highest critical acclaim for her story collection, NOT WHERE I STARTED FROM. Francine Prose wrote, "This is a book you mention to your friends . . . Wheeler is a writer to follow, wherever she chooses to travel." In her much anticipated first novel, Wheeler takes readers to opposite ends of the earth in a story of passions that weaves together past and present. WHEN MOUNTAINS WALKED tells of two parallel love affairs, years apart, in places as remote as the deepest canyon in the world, as vast as the Indian desert. In the 1940s, Althea Baines follows her seismologist husband to the heart of the Indian subcontinent to trace the origins of earthquakes. Here, awakening to a form of spirituality she had never imagined, she eventually finds solace with a Hindu priest. Years later, her granddaughter Maggie follows her own idealistic husband to a canyon in central Peru to set up a health clinic. Alive to the culture and the place, Maggie falls recklessly in love with a revolutionary leader and follows him on an apocalyptic trip into the rain forest. The lives of the older and younger woman echo and illuminate each other as each gets swept up in her own time by powerful forces. This is a novel about love and compromise, about the difficulties of establishing an identity in the midst of extravagant desires. Like Wheeler's short stories, WHEN MOUNTAINS WALKED features American women seeking love and enlightenment in distant parts of the world. As the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW said of her, "Wheeler has a capacity for compressing the insights of cross-cultural dislocation into deliciously memorable epiphanies." Romantic and wise, evocative and compassionate, WHEN MOUNTAINS WALKED reaffirms Kate Wheeler's reputation as one of our most captivating writers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When Mountains Walked belongs to a tradition as venerable as American literature itself: the novel of Yankees seeking enlightenment abroad. Where Henry James opposed American innocence and European experience, more recent writers often substitute American guilt and Third World vitality. Debut novelist Kate Wheeler has a more nuanced view: her Peru is equal parts dread and desire, a place where her American heroine feels the dizzying pull of belonging even as she knows she cannot.

Born in Mexico, raised in Colombia, Maggie Goodwin has always felt like a foreigner in her own country. Her grandmother Althea was another expatriate, following her seismologist husband to unstable places around the globe. Late in life, Althea fed her favorite granddaughter on tales as notable for what they left out as for the fanciful escapades they left in. For the grown-up Maggie, leaving Harvard for Peru is a way to explore her grandmother's unsettling stories--and in the process, exorcise her own demons:

Maggie's soul had been haunted by deficits, shadows, and unknown things far more than by the facts that everyone knew and accepted. Secrets and absences could control a person's life. They'd pulled her here, to Piedras. She'd believed that when the secrets got explained, the hole in her soul would be filled in.

Together Maggie and her new husband Carson settle in a village at the bottom of the deepest canyon in the world, where they intend to run the long-shuttered local health clinic. "According to an intricate and perhaps unreliable story of her grandmother's," Piedras is the place where Maggie's uncle was conceived. Unfortunately, it's also a place where village women think the new gringos want to eat the fat from their children--and where revolutionary violence still simmers.

In the chapters that follow, Wheeler alternates scenes from Althea's marriage with Maggie's experiences in Piedras. The parallels are striking: both women have husbands whose idealism verges on sternness, and both fall fiercely, unexpectedly in love with other men. Throughout, the writing is both precise and visceral, as in this description of homemade cane liquor: "The resulting brew combined the oiliness of kerosene, the smell of an electrical fire, and pubic funk." As Maggie is swept away by forces both personal and political, paradoxically, she finds her own long-dormant will. This is, after all, why we travel: by coming to someplace strange, we hope more than anything else to understand ourselves. Wheeler vividly captures the feeling--recognizable to anyone who's traveled--of coming to a place infinitely distant from one's own experience and feeling as if it were home. --Chloe Byrne

From Publishers Weekly

Eagerly awaited since Wheeler's debut short story collection, Not Where I Started From, this atmospheric, insightful and suspenseful first novel confirms the ambitious range and depth of her literary skill. The narrative intertwines the story of two women struggling to define themselves in the vortex of overbearing men. Assigned to Peru as health care workers, Maggie Goodwin and her husband, Carson, find themselves in Piedras, a remote, primitive village set in a deep river canyon, not far from where, 60 years earlier, Maggie's grandmother, Althea, and her husband, seismologist Johnny Baines, suffered the tragedy of their baby son's death. In alternating accounts, Wheeler depicts both women's lives, each of them suffocating in the shadow of a domineering, ambitious husband and facing wrenching dilemmas concerning the father of the babies they have conceived. If these mirror-imaged lives seem too conveniently symmetrical, Wheeler adroitly emphasizes their differences as well. Now 79 and dying, Althea made a momentous decision in India, and preserved her marriage at the expense of truth. Maggie wants to emulate her grandmother's adventurous life, but knows Althea is emotionally dislocated from her true identity. Smoldering against Carson's chauvinistic behavior, Maggie is drawn to Comandante Oquendo, aka Vicente Quispe Cruz, the benevolent leader of a failed terrorist group called Black Rainbow, now in hiding from the Peruvian military, whose dealings in the cocaine trade brought fleeting semiprosperity to Piedras and fostered democratic cooperation among its citizens. When Carson discovers that the Canadian owners of a privatized gold mine in the hills above the village have callously poisoned the district water supply with toxic effluents, causing malformed babies and serious health problems among the peasant populace, he and Maggie enlist Vicente's support. Vicente exhibits the bravery and intelligence of a natural leader, and his innate idealism stands in contrast to Carson's stubborn self -importance. It is inevitable that Vicente and Maggie become lovers, and that her naivete about their future together will lead to a crisis culminating in Maggie's transformation from an easily cowed marital subordinate to a courageous, morally sure woman. Maggie's epiphany occurs when, alone and hiding from soldiers in the forest, she finally understands the nature of selfhood and of commitment, and determines the direction of the rest of her life. Wheeler's descriptions of the interior of Peru are both lush and graphic, conveying the "pulsing, vivid heat" in sensuous terms, the abject poverty of the villages as well as the harsh beauty of the landscape. Ably articulating the themes of a woman's role as wife and mother in a patriarchal society, and the political realities that occur when relentless economic deprivation victimizes people in Third World cultures, she has written a psychologically lucid and emotionally resonant novel. Agent, Denise Shannon. 3-city author tour. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st Printing edition (February 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395859913
• ISBN-13: 978-0395859919
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,753,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Story; A Gorgeous Psychic Landscape, October 27, 2000

By 

Gail D. Storey (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: When Mountains Walked (Hardcover)

I savored When Mountains Walked over the course of a summer to allow plenty of time to wander Kate Wheeler's exquisite psychic landscape. The juxtaposition of Althea's and Maggie's stories makes the novel fairly vibrate with emotional intensity. The dimensions of the story are amazingly complex but never confusing, one startling event resonating with another--the death of Althea's child, Maggie's wish to have a child, the conflicting claims of two men, the political and economic drama unfolding in a Peruvian village. I'm in awe of Wheeler's talent for creating characters who play out these interwoven levels with an urgency that accelerates all the way to the book's very satisfying ending. This is a book ambitious in scope and significance--geopolitical and mythic at the same time. The entire world of this novel is a feast for the senses as well as the heart. Wheeler is an elegant writer who attends to the deepest questions of how we are to negotiate desire. For a sense of her range, from the mysteries of love and spirit to the pizzazz of her wit, also read her collection of short stories, Not Where I Started From.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars can we make meaning?, April 11, 2001

By 

edward j. santella (Malden, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Mountains Walked (Hardcover)

Kate Wheeler's character Maggie is determined to make meaning in a world where there are those who suffer and those who are indifferent to suffering. She sees a world of great failures and small successes, in which the distances between daughter, mother and grandmother, between rich and poor, between sick and healthy, between the hunter and the hunted appear nearly unbridgeable. Nearly, but not quite.

This is a first novel and suffers from many of the usual faults of first novels. There's a certain amount of wandering in the plot. But Wheeler's characters are complex, fully human and definitely not the kind you'd expect in a made-for-TV movie. Her ability to set a scene is, well, gorgeous. She interlaces stories and relationships deftly.

And Maggie, poor Maggie? Does she make meaning? I think so, but you'll have to decide for yourself. I look forward to Wheeler's next novel.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A captivating and important novel, March 2, 2000

By 

prince hal "kind music only" (Santa Barbrara, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: When Mountains Walked (Hardcover)

Kate Wheeler is a superb writer. Her first book of short stories is exquisite and When Mountains Walked, her first novel, is a great achievement. She creates a crisp picture, and her characters are amazing -- led by her female protaganist, Maggie. Maggie is strong, smart, and sensual -- a true modern heroine. The relationships that Wheeler builds are fascinating and truthful. I strongly recommend this book for people who want to read about "real" people, whose thoughts and actions can provide insight into our own lives.