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theranchhands.com: To the End of the Land (Vintage International) (): David Grossman: Books
A book matching this AR Quiz is not available from Amazon. Big Nate Goes Bananas! You do not need a Keycode to search. Emotions, the intricacies of interpersonal relationships and the minutiae of daily life are what interests Grossman, not happenings--or at least not happenings that aren't filtered first through the distorting lens of emotion.
For pages Grossman meanders slowly through the inner life of his main character. As Ora hikes up and down, over, and around the mountains of northern Israel, we become entangled in her complex emotional life. Even more than Avram, who is privy only to her spoken words, we are her confidants as she contemplates her relationships with her sons and lovers. By the time we reach the end of the novel we know more about Ora, what she thinks about, and what she feels, than we do about even our most intimate associates. And yet, there is nothing extraordinary or even particularly compelling about her.
Neurotic, annoying, malignantly insecure, self-centered, and bereft of insight and perspective, Ora's failings, obsessions and vulnerabilities are the substance of this psychological novel. Why should the inner life of this imperfect heroine interest us? For many it won't, but for me, it was precisely Ora's flaws that made her so interesting, so real, so Human, and in the end so appealing.
For this reader at least, Human weakness is ever so much more interesting than its opposite.
To wander so deeply into the emotional wilderness of a female character, especially one as flawed as Ora, is dangerous terrain for a male author. With his preoccupation with emotional nuance and interpersonal detail, Grossman writes with a feminine sensibility that, depending on one's perspective, the reader will find either courageous or audacious.
As a male reader, I am perhaps a suspect judge, but I felt that, after my walk with Ora, I not only understand her, but had new insights into the flesh and blood women in my own life. While never polemical, To the End of the Land is without a question a political novel. Israeli politics are more than a backdrop; they are the novel's subject.
Curiously, Grossman has chosen to show us Israel through the eyes of a character for whom politics is at best a peripheral concern. Ora certainly doesn't dwell much on geo-political questions except where they affect her directly. We never learn what her views are--most likely they are too nebulous to be put into words. Ora is not ignorant, she is all too aware of how political forces beyond her control have shaped her life. But for her it is all an intrusion; she would prefer to be left alone. As much as she is a woman, mother, wife and lover, Ora is an Israeli--and for Israelis escaping from politics is more or less impossible.
Ora is as much a part of the land she is walking through as the stones she steps over. She can no more escape political realities than she can learn to fly. In a sense she is Israel. Her imperfections and her pain echo those of her country. Like Israel, Ora's troubles are largely of her own making.
She Walks in Beauty
And like Israel, the degree to which we embrace her has to do with our willingness to forgive her her many mistakes. Ora senses the contradictions, suffers the guilt, and struggles to make sense of the tragedy playing out in her homeland, and yet she doesn't quite have the insight to put it all together into a coherent picture. This, too, echoes her more personal struggle to understand herself--she see the pieces but can't quite put them together. This artful weaving together of the political and the personal is perhaps the novel's greatest strength.
Like its main character, the novel has its imperfections. Where the novel is weakest is when it makes forays away from Ora's inner life into the minds of the other characters. The novel would feel less unbounded if told exclusively from Ora's perspective. We should only know what Ora knows and feel what Ora feels. At times, Grossman seems torn between wanting to follow this artistic constraint and his desire to show us things beyond Ora's periphery. He attempts to resolve this by having her know things that seem improbable.
The long section when Ora relates the story of Ilan's attempted rescue of Avram feels contrived because it is unbelievable that she could relate this story with such detail having heard it only once over twenty years ago. In this section the author has strayed from Ora's inner life into Ilan's, and this lack of artistic discipline weakens the novel.
I also think that, given the breadth of detail about Ora's relationship with her sons and their fathers, the lack of detail about her family of origin is wanting. I can't help but think that if I knew more about her past I might understand her better.
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It seems likely that during her long introspective trek she would have reflected on the dynamics of the home she grew up in. However, these flaws are minor, compared to the novel's strengths. What Grossman has pulled off is rare in contemporary literature: Its scope is much broader than much of contemporary literature and yet he does this without sacrificing the intimate. I appreciated its slow, meticulous cadence and highly recommend this worthy read.
This is an extraordinarily powerful novel about families, war, and what happens when families and war are inextricably intertwined. I can't really say that I "enjoyed" ithis novel, but I found it engrossing and compelling, and I continue to think about the issues it explores.
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But I kept listening. I really couldn't have stopped, I cared so much about the characters, and I wanted to find out what happened next -- or more accurately what would next be revealed. Ex post, I am very glad to have read the book, and will recommend it strongly to friends and relations. It does what literature is supposed to do: And it is also, for a non-Israeli reader, very illuminating about what it means to be Israeli. Things from the inside are often far more complicated than they look from outside, and I learned a lot about the inside from this novel.
An Israeli woman has flashbacks of her traumatic childhood during one of Israel's wars. In contrast to Thoreau's "manly simplicity", nearly twenty years after Thoreau's death Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy, calling it "womanish solicitude; for there is something unmanly, something almost dastardly" about the lifestyle. After all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs". Today, despite these criticisms, Walden stands as one of America's most celebrated works of literature.
John Updike wrote of Walden , "A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible.
Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Walden with him in his youth, [28] and eventually wrote Walden Two in , a fictional utopia about 1, members who live together in a Thoreau-inspired community. Kathryn Schulz has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy and being sanctimonious based on his writings in Walden , [30] although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.
The game was released to critical acclaim on July 4, , celebrating both the day that Thoreau went down to the pond to begin his experiment and the th anniversary of Thoreau's birth. Furthermore, Walden was adapted into an iOS app published by a third party developer.
Life in the Woods is a quick play-through 2D game in which the player can, "explore the woods surrounding Walden Pond and play Thoreau inspired mini games. Digital Thoreau, [36] a collaboration among the State University of New York at Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and the Walden Woods Project, has developed a fluid text edition of Walden [37] across the different versions of the work to help readers trace the evolution of Thoreau's classic work across seven stages of revision from to Within any chapter of Walden , readers can compare up to seven manuscript versions with each other, with the Princeton University Press edition, [38] and consult critical notes drawn from Thoreau scholars, including Ronald Clapper's dissertation The Development of Walden: An Annotated Edition [40] Ultimately, the project will provide a space for readers to discuss Thoreau in the margins of his texts.
Protagonist Sam Gribley is nicknamed "Thoreau" by an English teacher he befriends. Shane Carruth 's second film Upstream Color features Walden as a central item of its story, and draws heavily on the themes expressed by Thoreau. The film Dead Poets Society heavily features an excerpt from Walden as a motif in the plot. The Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish makes several references to Walden on their eighth studio album Endless Forms Most Beautiful of , including in the song titled "My Walden".
The investment research firm Morningstar, Inc. In the video game Fallout 4 , which takes place in Massachusetts, there exists a location called Walden Pond, where the player can listen to an automated tourist guide detail Thoreau's experience living in the wilderness. At the location there stands a small house which is said to be the same house Thoreau built and stayed in. Phoebe Bridgers references the book in her song Smoke Signals.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the book by Henry David Thoreau. For other uses, see Walden disambiguation. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. August Learn how and when to remove this template message. Retrieved 8 August Walden Civil Disobedience and Other Writings.
Moldenhauer With a new introduction by Paul Theroux" Press release. Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1—3". Archived from the original on March 18, Retrieved December 28, New Beginnings After the End". Walden and Civil Disobedience. Barnes and Noble Classics.
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Studies in the American Renaissance: Columbia University Press, pp. His Character and Opinions". A Portrait in Paradox. Oxford University Press , A Matter of Consequences. Retrieved October 19, Archived from the original on October 19, Archived from the original on October 26, Retrieved October 21, Retrieved April 26, Retrieved March 19, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Walden, or, Life in the Woods.
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