Play Book Tag discussion

Håkan and his older brother Linus are sent to New York by their father to seek a better life from that on their isolated subsistence farm in Norway. Illiterate, unable to speak English, not even 'New York', Håkan is separated from Linus in the crowds in Portsmouth and ends up on the wrong ship, one headed to San Francisco. Håkan arrives in a San Francisco consumed with gold fever. Alone, uneducated, naive, and all of 14, he decides if he starts walking east, he will get to NY and find his brother.

Thus starts a western unlike any other I have ever read. It is through Hawk's (as Americans quickly mistake his name) eyes, mind, and heart that we experience the Old West, a deeply isolated and lonely experience. Initially it is language that isolates him, but as the years pass, that isolation becomes more deeply a part of Hawk's psyche as he wanders and hides in the vastness of the western wilderness - deserts, plains, mountains, even the frozen Alaskan arctic. In a profound way, Hawk becomes that majestic wilderness, slipping farther and farther away against man's relentless taming of the West.

Hawk meets and experiences many of the archetypes of Old West lore: gold seekers, pioneers, criminals, prostitutes, naturalists and more, even becoming one of the outlaw legends of the Old West, fed by the enormous height and strength he reaches and a violent encounter he had in his youth. There is nothing heroic, bigger than life, awe-inspiring about this Old West as Diaz casually shows, the cruelty, criminality, madness, racism, violence, opportunism that is at the core of the legends. He really opens the reader's eyes.

Time and actual location are irrelevant. Hawk has no idea how much time passes, has no need to measure. He has no sense of the geography of the world or of distance or of any of the places he walks through. It is all vast, whether before man has tamed it or after. I am really glad I read this right after spending 2 weeks driving through the Dakotas which still awe with their vastness as I had no trouble envisioning that world.

This passage just rang true after seeing a few bison in the Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt National Park:

He followed the path north for a few leagues until suddenly, behind a thicket atop a small hill, he saw, for the first time, buffalo. They followed each other down their trail one by one, in single file, with a slow step and great deliberation. Beyond this stately procession, as far as the eye could see, the heath was darkened with buffalo, grazing or wallowing in muddy basins. It seemed to Håkan that these beasts were made out of two different bodies ineptly put together. Their hind legs and quarters were positively equine—slender and toned—but with the last rib began a transformation, and, as if nature had changed its mind halfway through it, the animal swelled in a stupendous, monstrous fashion, suddenly becoming thicker and taller. Its back rose steeply and abruptly, leading to a head so massive (could that dense, anvil-solid block of bone that seemed impenetrable even to sound contain a brain or any flesh at all?) that, compared to the animal’s smaller back end, it seemed to have been dreamed onto the rest of the body. Below a pair of sharp horns, a pair of black eyes had been bored into either side of the skull. If any of the beasts that Håkan had seen in America had ever resembled his brother’s fabulous inventions, that creature was the buffalo.

Diaz paints a dark lonely cruel picture of the Old West, one very different from that painted by Zane Grey, Larry McMurtry, or John Ford. But he still gives you the majesty of the land and the bigger than life icons that lived in it.

This book is one of my favorites. So glad you loved it too!

The farther I read, the more impressed and immersed I became. And so original!

I read a bit about the author and was pretty amazed how he submitted his manuscript to what was essentially an open call for manuscripts by a small Chicago publisher who published it and found it nomnated for a Pulitzer and a Pen Fellowship award. Pretty awesome. His own description of his inspiration, purpose, and experience writing it was also fascinating.

Yes, quite impressive!

I loved this book as well. Great review.