Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mesmerizing, disturbing story, January 29, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Samantha Harvey does a magnificent job of taking us inside the mind of a man, Jacob, who is slowly losing his touch with reality due to Alzheimer's Disease. The story and the circumstances, are from his point of view, and we come to realize after a while that they are sometimes confused. Things that are seemingly facts don't always match and the reader has to try and sort out the real from the imagined. But in Jacob's mind the events which cover parts of his childhood, his marriage, his children, and one or more possible affairs are all perfectly real for much of the book. Certain thoughts are strong and common throughout the book and others are only touched on and one wonders how they fit in. As the disease progresses, he too becomes more confused, but we are left with only his thoughts, not knowing which are of actual events and which are imagined or tangled with other thoughts and not entirely accurate.
When I first selected this book, I was drawn to the subject matter, a disease that is so hard to understand, but then turned away because I thought it would be depressing. I came back out of curiosity and the thought that this could be a unique story, wondering how the author would handle it. The subject matter is, of course, depressing. But Harvey is a very insightful and talented writer and the end result is a book that is both interesting and somewhat of a mystery at the same time as the reader tries to distinguish facts from increasing confusion in the character's mind. The book that made me empathize with the character as I tried to sort through his memories and come to my own conclusions about what was real and what was not. It's a story that won't leave me for a long time.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quite simply spectacular, February 17, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
But oh no, not an easy read. I'm used to racing through books, but who can race through the tangled wilderness of a deteriorating mind. And who would even want to skim quickly through the rich landscape of imagery created by this most-talented author...
Ms. Harvey deftly flips back and forth through time and memories as Jake's mind and world erodes. If we are lost, consider poor Jake-- or perhaps your mother, or your father-in-law, or your great-aunt Charlotte --as they wander through the tangled wilderness of their failing brains. Per Jake: "Time speeds up, rushing headlong into conclusions, then it stops. There is something teenagery about it. Something uncomfortable and maladroit as if it has not learnt how to pace itself with space."
And what is the nature of memory after all, when, in fact, the act of remembering irretrievably alters the memory. What's real in Jake's meanderings, what's manufactured? And what's with all this wandering around on the moors through blinding snow or fading yellow light to the jarring noise of random gunshots?
With prose worthy of Ian McEwan and the creepy imagery of Tim O'Brien's "In the Lake of the Woods", and finally and most completely, with her own talent and style, Samantha Harvey has created a masterpiece.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Hacking through the wilderness, February 26, 2009
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I couldn't help but compare Samantha Harvey's first novel, The Wilderness, with Lisa Genova's first novel, Still Alice. They are, coincidentally, both about victims of Alzheimer's disease, and both are recent releases, which only adds to the temptation to compare. My having read Genova's book first is perhaps why The Wilderness didn't strike the right chords with me.
While Ms. Harvey's writing is intelligent and informative, throughout the book I wanted her to step away from Jake's perspective and give the reader more places to plant her feet, more ways to separate truth from delusion. She certainly took a chance by writing the novel in the first person, thereby making it impossible to look at Jake's deterioration from any but Jake's point of view, something that was ever changing as his disease progressed.
This tactic worked so well in Nikolay Gogol's Diary of a Madman, where throughout the entire story, short periods of sanity provided a necessary counterpoint to a downward spiraling psychosis, but in The Wilderness, I never could pin down any of Jake's memories that were to be relied upon as building blocks of information. I felt adrift through most of the novel, as much a victim of his disease as was Jake.
I would recommend reading Still Alice before reading The Wilderness, or if you found The Wilderness too thick to penetrate. I will be very interested to see what is Harvey's next book. She is an excellent writer but took a big bite to chew for a first novel.
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