"It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war."
A love note to the American West, "Train Dreams" follows the existence of Robert Granier as he attempts to cope with unfathomable loss in the harshest of environments. Using sparse, powerful prose, Denis Johnson depicts the arrival of technology amidst the clockwork resurgence of nature in the face of trauma and disaster.
"His name is Bobcat such and such, Bobcat Ate a Mountain or one of those rooty-toot Indian names."
An ordinary man in extraordinary times, Granier embodies the struggle to embrace progress and the implacable, harsh forward momentum of life. Faced with the loss of his family, he is often a passenger in a broader journey, an observer of his own life and a witness to his own story.
With writing that calls to mind both Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway, Johnson has accomplished the feat of having a 116-page novella earn a Pulitzer Prize nomination. His tender tale is remarkably brief, but shot through with poignant meditations on grief, loneliness, and hope.
"The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in -- as if he'd been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream. They spent the whole afternoon among the daisies kissing. He felt glorious and full of more blood than he was supposed to have in him."
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