Customer Reviews

When Mountains Walked

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

When there is as much disagreement among reasonable people as this book has engendered, it makes little sense to describe it as either "good" or "bad." So, will you like it? It's pretty long; when you get to the end, will reading it have been worth your while? Put simply, if you enjoy a character's examination of their feelings and believe that a suitable ending is that the principal character has come to terms with the difficult situation in which she finds herself, then yes. If you're a plot-driven type, then no. It's tempting to say that women will love this book and men will hate it, but it's not that simple. My wife ditched it after a couple of chapters, while I finished it, though I was not especially satisfied with how things worked out for Maggie and the men in her life. A quick note on the writing, which is very good. If you are just starting this book do me a favor and count the number of times Kate Wheeler uses the word "belly"/"bellies". I think it may be one of her favorites.

When Mountains Walked is rich with place-related details so exquisite and a real sense of what it means for people to be dislocated, what it means to be a stranger, an alien, both in time and place. Although the novel sags and a bit boring in the middle, it is nevertheless a fine literary achievement, capturing the experiences of the 'locals' where the strangers, especially Maggie, (the lead character) find themselves either redeemed or doomed.

I don't agree with the review posted above except in that Wheeler is a really talented writer. Alas, the short story seems to be more her form. Indeed, the stories in her first collection was beautifully written, emotionally resonant and often funny. Unfortunately her novel could use cutting and is filled with too many plot devices that don't feel quite organic. I don't think Wheeler isn't quite up to handling the longer form.

give me a time. I haven't opened the book yet. I have so many waiting for me to read. 4 stars are a mistake. you won't let me change it. Since I haven't read it yet, I don't know the rating.

The middle of this novel expects a lot of the reader's patience in staying with the story as it jumps back and forth between the main character and her grandmother. The author expects the reader to believe that Maggie understands the similarities of her life with her grandmother's even though there is no evidence that Maggie knows what we know about Althea's life. Though the author conveys the quiet life in the Peruvian canyon, it becomes boring and tedious. Then, the reader's investment does not pay off. The story jumps quickly back to her grandmother and then back to Peru. The final sub-plot seems like a tack-on, moves too quickly and is not very believable. Finally, the author follows an annoying habit of some modern writers of not bringing enough closure to the main character's dilemma. Put more bluntly, I get very irriated sticking with an author through a sometimes tedious book only to be faced with a "choose-your-own" ending. All the reviews that glorify the feminist themes and socio-political self-importance seem puffed up. The book was a total disappointment! I would not recommend it unless someone had no other reading material available.

An extremely weak effort by a talented "writer." Ms. Wheeler does give us some fine sentences, particularly if one is infatuated by deft employment of metaphor and simile. That said, "When Mountains Walked" illustrates why fine sentences do not a good novel make.

The basic problem with this work is its central character, Maggie, who is so extraordinarily naive, self-centered, and pathetic that what might have been a promising story line is lost in fret, self-pity, and blather. Maggie blames most of her disappointment with the nature of her reality on her long-suffering husband, Carson, but, compared to Maggie, Carson is a saint. When Carson observes of Vincente, Maggie's ill-conceived [pun intended] paramour, that, "He's a pathetic schmoe," he might as well have been characterizing his unfortunate bride.

And Maggie cannot shut up. She talks and talks and talks in a curious sort of "what are my real feelings and who is against me now" quasi-feminist, quasi-progressive monologue. Maggie appears not to realize how tedious her efforts to convey her deep, inner feelings are. Toward the end of the novel, she has cornered a poor Peruvian boy, Boris, through not fault of his own, and proceeds to lecture him to death, perhaps literally.... Maggie's view of this onslaught on Boris' good nature is, "their conversation had been truncated. She did want to talk more ..." Oh yes, get it all out, Maggie, so we can throw ourselves over a cliff or in front of the Peruvian police. Anything, anything other than more of Maggie's incoherent self-seeking babble.

It may be the most poetic of justice that Maggie's last destination is "The Plain of Slime." [I'm not making this up.] Perhaps Wheeler intends us to see that Maggie has come full circle ...

Unlike a laser beam, focused on the myopic eye, but rather like the dispersed light that grows out of the dawn, two books published in the recent past in Boston by Houghton Mifflin promise the rebirth of a clarity of national vision, knocked out of focus by World War II. The near defeat of the Americanist movement and its promise of hemispherical democratization slowly had given way to the Latin American movement and its concept of socialism and revolution, Marxist style.

Now, once again, we find ourselves approaching a consciousness of our own. Awakened and stumbling on the road, author Jeffrey Meyers in 1997 produced his work Robert Frost: a biography (see customer review). Nevertheless, it is Kate Wheeler who urges us toward the path less travelled.

As though they were fragments of a Freudian analysis, the elements of Wheeler's novel, WHEN MOUNTAINS WALKED, manifest themselves as the effort to put in focus, to relate adequatly the key parts of a renewed and renewable Americanist dream: a common image of social justice and politicial equality, grounded in an encounter with models of our own.

Let's take a closer look at three important signposts: (1) the female sojourner as protagonist, (2) the image of the Black Rainbow and (3) the theme of one woman engaged simultaneously in sexual relations with two men.

An encounter with Maggie, Wheeler's heroine, sparks a flame in the mind of the informed reader, leading consciousness backward in time to the 1920's and the appearance on the literary scene of Kate, the sojourner/revolutionary creation of D. H. Lawrence in his classic THE PLUMED SERPENT. Roaming in a field of memories, one soon comes upon another giant of those times: E. M. Forster, his novel A PASSAGE TO INDIA and a sister sojourner, apparently the precursor of Wheeler's Althea. So it is that today When Mountains Walked (in Peru a reference to mythic time) slowly finds its place in a wider historical context and an ambivalent conept of Angloamerican literature.

Viewed from a perspective both Latin American and Andean, Wheeler's novel represents an important step towards the formulation of a contemporary statement of Americanist concepts of aesthetics and communication. On the one hand we find the use of the Black Rainbow image as a literary theme, first touched upon by Arguedas, who judged its source, the poem INKA APU ATAWALLPAM, to be post-Inka. Later, in the 1980's in an international congress held in Lima, Lopez Baralt refuted this judgment and stated the poem was written in the 18th century. The ground of her thesis was twofold:linguistic analysis and visual semantics, taken from historical sources, both writen, drawn and painted.

During her stay in Lima, in a radio interview with well-known peruvian critic Hugo Salazar del Alcazar, Lopez Baralt had occasion to recite the poem. That is how peruvian painter Lucy Angulo became sensitized to the theme, introduced to the painting genre by Fernando Szyszlo twenty-four years before.

And the rest, as they say is history, a history that can be read in the book IDENTIDAD NACIONAL Y ESTETICA ANDINA, published in Lima in 1988 and available in libraries, public and private, from New York and Washington to the San fRancisco Bay Area.

At that time it was thought that the word pachakuti was a verbal form of the Black Rainbow and could refer to a 500 year cycle of mythohistoric time, Indic style. But, archaeolinguistic research carried out by Jara shows that the term refers to calendric time, a change of season from dry to wet, from ourselves to the ancestors, pattern common to autocthonous North America, as well.

Finally, we come upon the literary theme of one woman, two men and a pregnancy. Differently from European cousins, such as the well-remembered and much loved Fanny, for example, Maggie at the end of this novel trudges alone down the road, a solitary figure, perhaps on her way to a meeting with new and renewed American models, approaching a consciousness of our own and a restatement of terms such as Angloamerican, Latin American an, simply, American.

Kate Wheeler has taken a road less-travelled and, indeed, it has made all the difference.