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Caribou Island

by David Vann (Goodreads Author)

3.40 · Rating Details · 2,265 Ratings · 474 Reviews

On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unraveling. Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together. Following the outline of Gary's old dream, they're hauling logs to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in he

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Hardcover, 293 pages

Published January 18th 2011 by Harper (first published 2010)

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May 15, 2014 Will Byrnes rated it it was amazing

Shelves: all-time-favorites-fiction, alaska, books-of-the-year-2011, favorites

Caribou Island is a masterpiece. Set in the remote bleakness of water-soaked, small town Alaska, this is a tale of desperation, failure, of man-versus-nature but also of man so arrogant and self-involved, so removed from reality that he does not bother to properly prepare for the battle. Some hope is gleaned, some battles are won, but the war seen here is a dark, suffocating presence.

Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and i

Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn’t fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn't cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge. These tiny towns in a great expanse, enclaves of despair.

Whereas most fiction floats atop a watery base of prose, Vann’s characters and story sit amidst a thick stew of imagery. His writing has the density, the economy of a short story. No event occurs that does not contribute to the underlying momentum, or to enhancing our understanding of the characters or their actions. Salmon thrashing about on the deck of a boat echo how his characters struggle to survive the travails of their lives. One even dreams of himself underwater with the hooked fish. The Alaskan environment is as much a character as the characters themselves. While it can be a beautiful landscape, and that is noted more than once, it is mostly harsh here, offering chill wind, rain, snow, cold, the harshness of the venue reflecting the harshness of the characters’ emotional states.

The water was no longer turquoise. A dark, dark blue today, with blackness in it, a clarity, no glacial silt suspended. Irene didn't know it could change so completely in even a day. A different lake now. Another metaphor for itself, each new version refuting all previous.

Vann’s language is as unadorned as a block of Hubbard ice, reminding me of Cormac McCarthy, particularly in his frequent verb-free sentence constructions.

The primary actors in Caribou Island are a late-middle-aged couple, Gary and Irene. Gary is impulsive, controlling, a bully and a coward, who cannot ever see himself as being in the wrong. He wants to test his mettle by constructing a cabin on the shore of remote Caribou Island. Another character thinks about sailing a ship around the world, thus conjuring Robert Stone and Outerbridge Reach. Gary’s wife, Irene, desperately trying to save her marriage, reluctantly agrees to help, despite knowing that constructing this cabin is only another in a long history of follies. Their daughter, Rhoda, is a veterinarian’s assistant. She lives with, and expects to marry Jim, a dentist, who is going through a mid-life crisis. A sociopathic man-user rips through the scenery, leaving a trail of destruction, and a few minor characters are given lines. But their actions serve primarily to highlight the larger issues. Looming over all is Irene’s memory from age ten, when she found her mother, hanging.

What effect must that have had on such a young person? Vann ought to know. His own father took his life when Vann was thirteen. Irene carries that memory on her back like Jesus stumbling toward Calvary. Given Vann’s prior work, one must wonder if one or more of his characters will find their way to a similar a dark end.

But there is a route. There are reasons, challenges, revelations, lies, contemplations. Abandonment and isolation are prime here. Vann casts a laser light on how people manage to see past each other, how they miss chances to connect. He looks at how fear, whether of failure, or of being alone, can help cause the very things we most want to avoid. Even the sociopath is running from something. Vann shows how people can make each other invisible, whether consciously or not, and do so at their peril, and how their externalizing of internal issues and images impacts those around them. Are we doomed to repeat the crimes of our parents? Of our parents’ parents? Of forebears beyond counting?

The subject matter may be tough, but the journey is incredibly rich, the main characters well realized, the craft impressive. You will find yourself thinking about scenes from this book long after you have moved on to your next read. Vann is the real deal, and this is top notch literature. Climb into your leaky boat, brave the icy wind and squall-driven waves slapping at the sides of your craft and head over to Caribou Island . It is a memorable sojourn. And if this is not recognized as one of the best books of 2011, I will eat my copy.

Other books by David Vann
Legend of a Suicide
Goat Mountain ...more

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Mar 22, 2015 Julie rated it liked it

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, american-west, read-2015

I couldn’t put this book down. Even the moments when I wanted to throw it against the wall, Caribou Island stuck to my hands, the force of its narrative glue stronger than my desire to be rid of its woe and rage.

The backdrop is the great and terrible beauty of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, where Nature’s threat looms in every scene. The opening pages show Irene and Gary, a couple in their mid-fifties, standing apart as their thirty-year marriage unravels between them while they battle a storm from I couldn’t put this book down. Even the moments when I wanted to throw it against the wall, Caribou Island stuck to my hands, the force of its narrative glue stronger than my desire to be rid of its woe and rage.

The backdrop is the great and terrible beauty of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, where Nature’s threat looms in every scene. The opening pages show Irene and Gary, a couple in their mid-fifties, standing apart as their thirty-year marriage unravels between them while they battle a storm from their small boat. They are transporting logs to the remote island of the book’s title to build Gary’s mid-life crisis: a cabin, where they will live out their retirement, with "No foundation, even. And no plans, no experience, no permits, no advice welcome." That journey, the storm, and its consequences, set the tone for the story that follows, which is fraught with frustration, misunderstanding, disappointment, deception, and pain.

Each chapter alternates between characters’ points-of-view. We come to know Rhoda, Gary and Irene’s loving daughter, who like her father, is counting on a fantasy to save her from her own sad existence in this wet, dark town. Rhoda lives with Jim, a dentist—one of the few solvent bachelors in town—in his shelter magazine-ready home. Rhoda pines for the security of marriage and plans their storybook wedding on a Hawaiian beach, while trying to convince herself that Jim loves her. Meanwhile, Jim is living out his sexual fantasies with lithe and blithe Monique, who is drifting through town on a trust fund. Mark, Rhoda’s brother, runs a coffee shop out of a bus and fishes—the only time he really seems to come out of his pot haze to show a passion for work.

Mark is in fact living the authentic Alaskan experience his dad had come in search of thirty years earlier, when he abandoned a PhD in medieval studies to create his own poetic epic. Instead, Gary sank into mediocrity, until he can barely remember the ancient languages that once inspired his dreams.

David Vann’s writing is extraordinary. Like the natural world he presents, it is both gorgeous and haunting, and like Monique walking across the glacier, you are awed by its beauty, but aware that the next step could see you crashing through the ice into a nightmare.

Ultimately, however, the absurdity of the story’s central thread—that goddamned cabin on that godforsaken island—thwarts the impact of the themes. Vann is incredibly compassionate with Irene and I understand the push-pull of her love and hate for Gary and Gary’s crushing disappointment in life, but their behavior was so illogical that I felt forced to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story. Had they just arrived from their native California with dreams of an Alaskan cabin, perhaps, but they had already lived in this remote place, had dealt with the realities of this harsh environment, for thirty years. It just doesn’t make any sense that Gary would be so helplessly inept at basic survival or basic construction skills. And fine, even if he’d taken leave of his senses—which he hadn’t, he was just stubborn—Irene's figurative bashing of her head, when she is already in literal excruciating pain, by attempting to help Gary feels forced and inauthentic. With or without her crippling pain, Irene’s denial of her warm, safe home, her stocked pantry and electricity and toilet and bed has no logic.

But I couldn’t stop reading. I knew where we were all going and that it would all end badly, but the power of the whole that resulted from the parts: the depth of the characters, the brutal and vivid environment, Vann’s rich lyricism, and yes, the story itself, made for an intoxicating, anguishing read.
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Jan 12, 2013 Lou rated it it was amazing

Check out my interview with David Vann in August 2012 >>http://more2read.com/review/interview-with-david-vann/

While reading this story i am thinking of the story Revolutionary Road written by Richard Yates a tale of marriage and the destructive behaviors of the human heart displayed in that story. If you have seen the movie it is probably even more engrained in your mind the images of despair and the path the couple found themselves down. The pursuit of happiness its funny how we try to at Check out my interview with David Vann in August 2012 >>http://more2read.com/review/interview-with-david-vann/

While reading this story i am thinking of the story Revolutionary Road written by Richard Yates a tale of marriage and the destructive behaviors of the human heart displayed in that story. If you have seen the movie it is probably even more engrained in your mind the images of despair and the path the couple found themselves down. The pursuit of happiness its funny how we try to attain happiness. I recently watched Shadowlands a movie with Anthony Hopkins playing the role of the great writer C. S. Lewis taken from his real life account. He unexpectedly experiences love in the very last stages of the two and fro of a friendship he did not understand love before only until certain situations came about did he understand his path. That movie gave an example of a person caught in the pursuit of goals of splendor in academic and religious constrains away from more palpable feelings and rewards of love and companionship.

In this story, Caribou Island, the characters are faced with many obstacles and challenges of trust, lust or illness. The accommodation of the characters of this story on a beautiful and wonderfully described Alaskan island Caribou island brings about a chance and opportunity to test the waters of these characters' trust and love. They eventually experience a wake up call of sorts.

Illness and despair, when the clock is ticking and that sand in the hour glass runs on its last bead of sand we have a whole different outlook towards those around us.
Calamities can bring about change for the betterment of the parties involved.
In this story there a people who are either in love, want love, think they have love and possibly trust the untrustworthy.

It's seems the fate of one parent and the legacy she left behind has tainted the family and has cast upon them melancholy and a dark over hanging shadow like a black cloud that follows your footprints determined to pour on you cold rains that somehow magically wash away traits of hope.
This Alaskan environment proves to be a form of paralysis to some individuals and brings to fruition love and despair and is all acted out in this story of tragedy.

David Vann has successfully brought to the table a captivating, deep felt, meaningful human tragedy in a prose with wonderful descriptions of landscape coupled with memorable and heartfelt characters.

“My mother was not real. She was an early dream, a hope. She was a place. Snowy, like here, and cold. A wooden house on a hill above a river. An overcast day, the old white paint of the buildings made brighter somehow by the trapped light, and I was coming home from school. Ten years old, walking by myself, walking through dirty patches of snow in the yard, walking up to the narrow porch. I can’t remember how my thoughts went then, can’t remember who I was or what I felt like. All of that is gone, erased.”

“Above all else, Gary was an impatient man: impatient with the larger shape of his life, with who he was and what he’d done and become, impatient with his wife and children, and then, of course, impatient with all the little things, any action not done correctly, any moment of weather that was uncooperative. A general and abiding impatience she had lived in for over thirty years, an element she had breathed.”

“Gary was a champion at regret. Every day there was something, and this was perhaps what Irene liked least. Their entire lives second-guessed. The regret a living thing, a pool inside him.”

“To Monique, the best part about this place was the scenery: the high, lush mountains close along either side of the river, the short valleys dotted with wildflowers, the swampy areas dense with skunk cabbage, ferns, mosquitoes, and moose.”

“A world that shouldn’t exist, far away and untouchable. You could bring a crab up, but you couldn’t go down to them, couldn’t join. And this was the truth about Monique. He could have her for a short time, and his money could make it seem almost that he could fit into her world, but she was untouchable.”

“He didn’t understand marriage. The gradual denial of all one desired, the early death of self and possibility. The closing of a life prematurely. But this wasn’t true, he knew. It was only the way it seemed right now, during a bad time. Once Irene got better and returned to her old self, he’d feel differently.”

“The lives of plants like humans, full of struggle and domination, loss and dreams that never happened or happened only briefly. And that was the worst, to have something and then not have it, that was certainly the worst by far.”

Review also at http://more2read.com/review/caribou-island-by-david-vann/ ...more

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Apr 30, 2013 A-bookworm rated it did not like it · review of another edition

David Vann uses no quotation marks throughout this bleak depressing read. Is his refusal to use quotation marks supposed to be some new "Style" of writing, like texting? Why not just throw out all punctuation? We could all write in one long rambling paragraph. Eventually we could even leave out the spacing between words. I HATE what is being done to literature by those too lazy, or too unlearned, to write properly.

Vann's imagination is just so bleak, so depressing, he should see a doctor. He ob ...more

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Jan 26, 2012 Christy rated it it was ok

Shelves: 21st-century-american-lit, watery

Cold. Distant. Bleak. Unhappy. Depressing as fuck.

The characters are largely unlikeable, the relationships are thoroughly dysfunctional, and the style keeps the reader (or at least me) at arm's length throughout. Part of this distance is due to David Vann's Cormac McCarthy-esque refusal to use quotation marks to help mark characters' speech. This doesn't make it difficult to tell who is speaking, but it does diminish the sense of the characters as active participants in the story. Because the te Cold. Distant. Bleak. Unhappy. Depressing as fuck.

The characters are largely unlikeable, the relationships are thoroughly dysfunctional, and the style keeps the reader (or at least me) at arm's length throughout. Part of this distance is due to David Vann's Cormac McCarthy-esque refusal to use quotation marks to help mark characters' speech. This doesn't make it difficult to tell who is speaking, but it does diminish the sense of the characters as active participants in the story. Because the text doesn't clearly mark the boundaries between speech, thought, and narration, it all begins to feel like one voice instead of individual's voices, even when the perspective shifts, giving the reader little sense of individual humanity to grasp while reading.

Related to this, the book is incredibly fatalistic. The characters not only lack voice but agency. The overall effect, in fact, is that the characters are all doomed to their fates at the beginning of the book and we as readers must just watch them very, very slowly approach those fates. What's upsetting about this is that these are not people trapped by their external circumstances (e.g., poverty, prejudice, geography); these are people who perceive themselves as trapped by their own choices and because they think they're trapped they behave as if they are trapped and then they - surprise, surprise! - wind up stuck in the traps they have built and maintained for themselves. This just made me want to climb into the book and tell them how stupid they were being.

I don't want to make this seem like it's some kind of terrible book, though. Vann is a beautiful writer, and the book includes some wonderful descriptions of the Alaskan landscape and striking and memorable reflections on marriage, love, consciousness, and what makes a life. Looking at other readers' reviews, many of them very positive, there's obviously something here.

But still - it's just so depressing. I certainly do believe that there's a place for truly bleak and unhappy stories in literature, but this book adds too little to my understanding of the human condition or of the world to justify its unhappiness and is far too cynical in outlook for me to be able to enjoy it. ...more

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Nov 20, 2013 Rebecca Foster rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: cathartic, tragedy, dirty-realism, absolute-favorites, best-of-2011

My first encounter with David Vann blew me away. I’d heard his work compared to Cormac McCarthy’s in terms of bleakness, along the lines of: “The Road is a picnic in the park compared to Caribou Island.” Although there are ways in which Vann’s work resembles McCarthy’s (no quotation marks to denote speech, epic-scale tragedies taking place in vast open country), Blood Meridian, for one, is much more violent and nihilistic than Caribou Island.

The novel’s gory final tableau may have reminded me o My first encounter with David Vann blew me away. I’d heard his work compared to Cormac McCarthy’s in terms of bleakness, along the lines of: “The Road is a picnic in the park compared to Caribou Island.” Although there are ways in which Vann’s work resembles McCarthy’s (no quotation marks to denote speech, epic-scale tragedies taking place in vast open country), Blood Meridian, for one, is much more violent and nihilistic than Caribou Island.

The novel’s gory final tableau may have reminded me of We Need to Talk about Kevin, but the story I thought of most in comparison with Vann’s was actually Tom Perrotta’s Little Children. Perhaps it was something about the way that, in both books, the characters’ grand dreams cruelly mock the mundaneness or perversity of their real lives. Here Gary’s imagined world is an amalgamation of Icelandic and early English sagas; in building a cabin on Caribou Island he pictures himself as a Viking colonizing a new world, but in reality he’s just a bit of a loner and a failure, trying to run away from a life and marriage that have never lived up to his expectations (“Marriage only another form of being alone”).

Similarly, daughter Rhoda’s vision of a fairytale Hawaiian wedding and glamorous life as the wife of dentist Jim is relentlessly contradicted, first by the facts of Jim’s past and planned future adultery with as many women as he can entrap, and later in the horrific irony of the masterful last chapter. As Rhoda and Mark set out to Caribou Island to check on their parents and deliver them a satellite phone, Rhoda’s thoughts turn to her wedding plans. “Mark tossed handfuls of rock salt onto the ramp. Like rice at a wedding...A green, sunny bluff over blue ocean, far away from here...It would be magnificent...A place carefree, a day she had dreamed of all her life, the beginning, finally.” What Rhoda doesn’t know, although she has had premonitions because of her mother’s strange behavior, is that a gruesome scene awaits them, one that repeats family cycles of violence.

The novel’s language is simple, not overblown, but very powerful nonetheless. One of the very best books of 2011. ...more

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Nov 19, 2015 Josh rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015

"Because you can choose who you'll be with, but you can't choose who they'll become."

This is a story of Gary and Irene, not of an island. The island exists physically and figuratively, but this is a story of them. Their love, envy and hatred of one another. His failings and her failure to realize it too quickly.

They've been together for thirty years, both in their middle 50's and retired; they have 2 children, one that loves and one that ignores. The men in the family have always done what they ...more

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Feb 22, 2011 switterbug (Betsey) rated it it was amazing

This is a richly absorbing and dark, domestic drama that combines the natural, icy world of the Alaska frontier with a story of deceptive love and betrayal. If Steinbeck and Hemingway married the best of Anita Shreve, you would get David Vann's Caribou Island. His prose is terse and the characterizations are subtle, but knifing. His characters are saturated with loneliness and disconnection with their lives, with each other, in a pit of misperception, despair and exile, in a conflict of selves t ...more

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Dec 05, 2010 Jill rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-of-2011

Not long ago, I was mesmerized by David Vann’s exceptional and perceptive collection, Legend of a Suicide – a mythology of his father’s death. I wondered whether his first full-length novel would capture the magic and raw energy of that astonishing book.

The answer, I’m pleased to say, is yes.

Beware: Caribou Island is NOT for readers who are looking for “likeable characters” and Hollywood-type endings. It ventures into dark emotional territory that’s not always comfortable to reside in – the same Not long ago, I was mesmerized by David Vann’s exceptional and perceptive collection, Legend of a Suicide – a mythology of his father’s death. I wondered whether his first full-length novel would capture the magic and raw energy of that astonishing book.

The answer, I’m pleased to say, is yes.

Beware: Caribou Island is NOT for readers who are looking for “likeable characters” and Hollywood-type endings. It ventures into dark emotional territory that’s not always comfortable to reside in – the same type of territory that’s inhabited by, say, Martha and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff. In other words, it packs a wallop.

Gary and Irene are a couple who have lived for years in Alaska, “an open space, an opportunity to forget about something as small as heartache.” There’s a juxtaposition of Alaska as a grand and vast space with the downright claustrophobia of a marriage falling apart. Irene reluctantly “signs on” to Gary’s desire to build a cabin from the ground up in uninhabited and remote Caribou Island.

The cabin becomes a metaphor for their lives. Irene thinks, “Maybe you can nail each layer down into the next…if the could take all their previous selves and nail them together, get who they were five years ago and twenty-five years to fit closer together, maybe they’d have a sense of something solid.”

But that is not to be. Instead, Irene views herself as “chilled and alone…not the expansive vision you’d be tempted to have, spreading your arms on some sunny day on an open slope of purple lupine, looking at mountains all around.” Irene, if truth be known, is falling apart; she is having extreme flashbacks to the time when she found her mother, a suicide. And Gary is totally lost, searching for himself in the infinity of Alaska.

Gary reflects, “You could only find an outward shape…if you followed your calling. If you took the wrong path, all you could shape was monstrosity.” And indeed, it’s evident from the beginning that the cabin is, indeed, that monstrosity.

The legacy of mother to daughter – and daughter to her own children – plays out throughout this book. Rhoda, their daughter, is trying her best to reconcile her dreams of love with a man who is poised to disappoint her. And Mark, their son, has dropped out entirely, living month-to-month and unable to commit to much of anything.

For the sense of place…for the imagery and prose…for the fierceness of Vann’s imagination, this is a book that is stunning to read. Even though his characters will never fulfill their promise, David Vann has certainly fulfilled his.
...more

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Feb 20, 2011 TheGirlBytheSeaofCortez rated it it was ok

Shelves: literary-fiction, american-authors

Alaska felt like the end of the world, a place of exile. Those who couldn't fit anywhere else came here, and if they couldn't cling to anything here, they just fell off the edge. These tiny towns in a great expanse, enclaves of despair.

The sentence above, uttered by one of its characters, could summarize David Vann’s elegantly bleak debut novel, Caribou Island. (His previously published work, Legend of a Suicide, was a critically acclaimed collection of short stories.)

From the moment we meet Ire ...more

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Nov 26, 2010 Bree T rated it liked it

Shelves: kindle-version, netgalley

I feel as though this book should almost come with some sort of warning. It should be a bible for everyone out there who thinks they want to go and build a cabin somewhere in isolation and live there. Because chances are, they don’t know what they’re doing, don’t really want to go and actually do that and….that’ll be the least of the things that can go wrong.

Gary and Irene have lived in Alaska for 30 years. Drifting there by accident, somehow staying. Gary is a restless sort, he has many grand p I feel as though this book should almost come with some sort of warning. It should be a bible for everyone out there who thinks they want to go and build a cabin somewhere in isolation and live there. Because chances are, they don’t know what they’re doing, don’t really want to go and actually do that and….that’ll be the least of the things that can go wrong.

Gary and Irene have lived in Alaska for 30 years. Drifting there by accident, somehow staying. Gary is a restless sort, he has many grand plans and ideas but very few ever come to fruition, particular the fruition he dreams of. But his latest plan is sure to be different! He wants to leave their cottage and build a log cabin himself on an island accessible only by boat (and then only accessible in the warmer months of the year) and live there, permanently. No electricity, no running water, no telephone, no internet, no tv. Just man-vs-nature. And he’s dragging Irene along for the ride.

Irene is sure Gary is going to leave her, eventually and the prospect terrifies her. He’s been withdrawing from her slowly, pulling away. Their marriage is unravelling and Irene thinks this cabin will be the end of it. She’s gone along with Gary, supported him in everything and she even does so with this cabin but she doesn’t want to go and live on the island. She’s doing it because Gary wants to and because she still loves him. And wants to be with him.

Rhoda, Gary and Irene’s daughter is desperate to get married. She’s living with Jim, a reliable, financially independent dentist who is ten years her senior. Even though they’ve talked of marriage many times, Jim hasn’t yet popped the question. Rhoda doesn’t even know what Jim really wants – does he want to get married? Or did he just ask her to move with with him so that he has sex on tap and someone to run his errands? Is Rhoda so desperate to get married that she’s settling? And if Jim does propose, will that actually make her happy?

From the time I was 7, I wanted to be a writer. I wrote all the time, filling exercise books with stories. And when I was in high school I thought that living in some remote cabin in the wilds of Alaska (or other equally isolated location) would be amazing. No distractions! Just plenty of time to write and think. Even if I still had any dreams to do exactly that, this book would have well cured me of them! For starters, Gary just basically piles up a boat with logs, picks a random spot on the island, marks out what seems like an impossibly small outline (about 12ft by 6ft or something ridiculous) and starts basically sawing and hammering logs together. Gary is one of those permanently unsatisfied people who drifts through their lives, doing nothing with them and then blaming everyone else around for their lack of accomplishment. He was quite a loathsome character and the more bullheaded and stubborn and abusive he got about his disaster of a cabin, the more I wanted him to fall off his stupid makeshift roof and break his neck. Irene, on the other hand, as it seems to go with bullying men, was a doormat. She didn’t want to go out there and help build the cabin, or live in it and she plainly comes to a realisation that Gary has never loved her and just ended up with her because of his apathy and lack of drive and planning. Instead of growing a brain and a spine and getting back in the boat and leaving him and going home to their cabin with electricity and heating, she continues sleeping in a tent as the storms and snow come and spending days hammering and nailing and being bossed around by Gary. It’s a story of hopelessness all around and you can’t help but be dragged into the sombre mood.

The weather is the perfect backdrop for this sort of novel – the Alaskan weather seems to be famous. Its beauty and its isolation go hand in hand and because Gary is Gary and hasn’t planned this whole cabin thing, it’s the end of summer and there’s not much time left before the weather starts to go pear shaped. Among the screaming winds and driving rain, the choppy lake and the slushy roads are peaceful forests and lakes of glass. It makes me want to go and live in Alaska but in a definite spoiled princess kind of way – a cabin that looks rustic but is actually palatial – equipped with a power shower and functioning bathroom, fluffy carpets, ducted heating and a wood fireplace, cable TV and internet. I could admire all Alaska’s beauty from the warmth and comfort of my cabin! Of course this is not real Alaska, but if I wanted that experience I could very well end up like Irene. Or Gary. The author is a native of Alaska and it shows – his descriptions are vivid and flawless and real. His writing is solid and harsh – almost like diving into an Alaskan lake. It’s a spray with icy water, no holds barred, no beating around the bush. Flaws are exposed and lay open for criticism. Emotions are bared for all to see. The characters are all too believable, all too real – we’ve all known someone like Gary, someone who is so full steam ahead with their own ideas and importance that they don’t stop to consider practicalities and planning for one minute, so that they avoid crashing headlong into one disaster after the other. We’ve all known people like Irene, who are tired, exhausted, wavering but sticking with it, staying in a situation that makes them unhappy, because they love the person creating the situation. We all know someone like Rhoda, who is sure that she could just be happy, if only Jim would propose.

That might be the most depressing thing of all – because we all know people like these characters, with similar characteristics, you know there can’t be a happy ending. ...more

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Apr 12, 2011 Colleen Henderson rated it did not like it

This book was awful. The characters are poorly delineated, and as a consequence they lack depth and emotional richness. The story line had potential, but was not fully developed - there were too many questions left unanswered. Was the main character traumatized by childhood events, or was she driven to despair by a cold, thoughtless husband and children that were very self absorbed? I kept reading because I kept hoping somehow the book would get better and the author would pull it all together, ...more

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Aug 15, 2011 Jodie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favourites, 2011

I love books like this. The characters so internal, the setting so riveting and used as so much more than a reflection of its characters. This book is not a happy read, indeed it is bleak and desolate, yet I found myself smirking at Irenes dialogue, she knows her lot in life and she is resigned to it, well at least she was, existing with a husband that is so fraught with illusions of grandeur that he constantly fails to see the essence that is his life, and this is just one of his many failings. I love books like this. The characters so internal, the setting so riveting and used as so much more than a reflection of its characters. This book is not a happy read, indeed it is bleak and desolate, yet I found myself smirking at Irenes dialogue, she knows her lot in life and she is resigned to it, well at least she was, existing with a husband that is so fraught with illusions of grandeur that he constantly fails to see the essence that is his life, and this is just one of his many failings. In Australia Gary would be called a gonna, I was going to do this, I was going to do that, always going to, but never actually doing any of it and always blaming everyone and everything else for it. And yet Irene is to blame too, but I can't help but feel so much more sympathetic towards her.

The writing by Mr Vann for Irene is truly wonderful (as it is throughout); sharp, sarcastic (when required) and touching too. It is important to note that there is no punctuation through this book to delineate the dialogue. You would think this may make it difficult to distinguish between the characters, but it isn't, and only because the writing is that good. I particularly loved Irenes internal dialogue when the cabin was being constructed.

Not a single word or event or picture painted in my mind was wasted or frivolous. I feel a little exhausted from it, but exhilarated too. There is so much I loved and appreciated about this book. The way he wrote about the pain in Irenes head was remarkable. I occasionally suffer from migraines, the agonising, red hot knifing pain is not anything that can be described accurately, but Mr Vann has come as close to anyone in getting it right, including the pain killers that come along with it. I knew throughout the book that there was going to be this inevitable conclusion, but yet I was still shocked to read it, and sad too, but only for Irene and Rhoda. This is a book that will sit with me for a long time I expect. I hold pictures in my mind of Alaska, cold, desolate, dangerous, and of Rhoda. What is it that makes people stay there letting the isolation that they craved become their undoing? Why do people stay in relationships that are so tightly bound in wrong when life is so frail? A compelling read, don't be put off by its coldness, it is very much a story on living. ...more

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Mar 15, 2011 Lisa rated it did not like it

Shelves: 2011

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Feb 23, 2012 Jasmine marked it as to-read

I have finally become too self absorbed. I had a very bad moment today.

I was surfing goodreads and I did that thing where you see an ad while you are clicking to the next page but I just saw a name. I clicked back but I got a different ad. So I searched, was david vann who I thought he was? he was and he had a new book.

WHAT THE FUCK WAS I DOING THAT WAS SO IMPORTANT I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THIS?

So I immediately took my self down to the store with my poor impulse control and bought it (and the top ...more

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Aug 19, 2015 LeAnne rated it it was amazing

Dark-ity, dark-dark, dark! The beautiful Alaskan wilderness was as much a part of this story as its characters - a couple in their mid-50s setting about building (and arguing over) a tiny cabin and their adult children. These people were drawn with outstanding depth and tone, and that is true for even sideline characters - the four friends and lovers who meander in and out of the tale.

Aside from Rhoda, the gentle hearted daughter, and a sweet side character named Carl, we see shards of the rott ...more

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Aug 26, 2015 João Carlos rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: l2015

5 Estrelas glaciares

Caribou Island - Alaska

O escritor norte-americano David Vann, nascido em 1996 em Adak Island, no Alasca, publicou em 2011 ”A Ilha de Caribou”, três anos após o “perturbante” ”A Ilha de Sukkwan” - 4 Estrelas.
Irene, é uma educadora de infância, recentemente reformada e Gary, é um docente universitário a trabalhar “eternamente” na sua tese de doutoramento, casados há mais de trinta anos, têm dois filhos; Rhoda, com cerca de trinta anos, assistente num consultório veterinário, v ...more

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Oct 18, 2012 Filipe Miguel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: horror, romance, suspense

Regresso ao Alasca, regresso ao drama

A praia de David Vann é, sem duvida, o drama. O drama depressivo, não o ligeiro apimentado aqui e ali com pitadas de comédia. David é brilhante no desmembramento das personagens e impressiona na sua capacidade de criar desconforto.

Por vezes soa a Kafka, pela forma como nos agita e desfaz o mundo que conhecemos. Insiste em demonstrar também algo de nórdico, patente na escolha dos cenários onde insere as personagens, como as trata e como as dispõe. Ao mesmo te ...more

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Jun 01, 2012 Teresa Lukey rated it really liked it

Shelves: omg, didn-t-see-that-coming, fiction, depressing, 4-stars

I can surely see why this book does not have a higher average rating for the characters in this story are absolutely dreadful. Unlikable characters do make it difficult, for me, to rate a book, but the shock value at the end of the book really gave it an extra boost, something akin to Rebecca.

This is a story of Gary and Irene, a married couple, whose relationship has gone rancid. The couple struggles to get along with each other through the humdrum of their day-to-day activities, but they have l ...more

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Mar 15, 2013 Jo Case rated it it was amazing

Shelves: novel

Isaiah Berlin once divided writers into hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of one defining idea, and foxes, who draw on a variety of experiences and ideas. (Proust was a hedgehog, Shakespeare was a fox.) It’s rather early in David Vann’s literary career to be making broad pronouncements, but so far he’s displaying distinct hedgehog characteristics – as did Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), who Vann echoes in his precise mapping of the dreams and neuroses of middle-class America.

Van Isaiah Berlin once divided writers into hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of one defining idea, and foxes, who draw on a variety of experiences and ideas. (Proust was a hedgehog, Shakespeare was a fox.) It’s rather early in David Vann’s literary career to be making broad pronouncements, but so far he’s displaying distinct hedgehog characteristics – as did Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), who Vann echoes in his precise mapping of the dreams and neuroses of middle-class America.

Vann’s two works of fiction, the much-praised Legend of a Suicide (2008) and now his debut novel, Caribou Island, tell very different stories, but share several unifying themes – and recurring (if altered) characters. Legend of a Suicide explored the real-life suicide of Vann’s father (when the author was just thirteen) in a series of interconnecting stories, each taking different, often wildly contradictory, perspectives on events. Caribou Island is essentially a psychological thriller about marriage, but opens with one of the main characters, Irene, recalling her mother’s suicide when she was a child, an episode that casts a warning shadow over events to come. And the dramatic setting of the Alaskan wilderness – America’s last frontier – is integral to both works, acting both as a mirror in which the characters see their emotional lives reflected and an active agent in the way events unfold.

“If you wanted to be a fool and test the limits of how bad things could get, this was a good place for it,” reflects Irene, as she and husband Gary brave a raging storm to deliver materials to the uninhabited island where they plan to live out their retirement in a self-built cabin. For terminally unsatisfied Gary, it’s his last chance to realise the “authentic” Alaskan experience he’s been pursuing for years, some kind of immaculate fusion of environment and self. For Irene, it’s the latest in a long series of ill-conceived “impossible projects” she’s suffered the fall-out from; Gary views her concerns as a galling “lack of faith”. Her greatest fear, as she senses him moving away from her, is being left loveless and alone, as she was when her mother died.

Gary and Irene’s multi-layered tussle is juxtaposed with the lives of three other couples. The most integral of these is attentive daughter Rhoda and her live-in partner Jim, a wealthy dentist who she hopes to marry. Rhoda’s daydreams focus on a wedding in sunny Hawaii, but Jim fantasises about “great sex” with glamorous young backpacker Monique, who he vigorously pursues, despite her hapless boyfriend Carl (who Rhoda astutely assesses as “out of his league”). Disaster of varying degrees looms for all three couples – and each character is felled by their own particular weakness, and their failure to recognise or accept the gap between their imagined ideal and reality. Interestingly, the least idealistic character, Rhoda’s dope-smoking fisherman brother, seems the most content with his life and relationship. (“Your idea that you’ve deserved more than you’ve gotten, that’s the problem,” Irene tells Gary.)

This is that rare, delectable novel – equally driven by character and plot, which are expertly interwoven so that each feeds the other. The dark subject matter doesn’t stop it from being entertaining, either; Vann tells his story with layered observation and slivers of unselfconscious introspection, both of which often catch the characters in unintentionally humorous (and deeply telling) moments. For example, as Jim watches Monique, thinking that “even her posture showed class”, she says, “I’ve never been paid for sex”, brilliantly demonstrating the shallowness of his perception. Still more impressively, it’s replete with exquisite landscape writing that is never dull: it always has a purpose beyond mere description, telling us something about the characters or the action. Throughout the novel, its characters, events and landscape work together to build a visceral, finely paced dramatic tension.

As in Legend of a Suicide, Vann tells a psychologically complex story through competing narratives and perspectives – as in life, the reader’s sympathies and assessments shift depending on which character they’re spending time with, and the game of figuring out just where the “real” story lies is part of the allure. These narrators are unreliable in the truest sense – the most intriguing threads to unravel lie in the unpleasant truths they keep from themselves.

This review was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2011.
...more

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Feb 23, 2016 Brian rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Brian by: Proustitute

Outstanding.

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Jul 12, 2015 Christy rated it really liked it

This was a bruiser. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck when I finished it. The next morning, I attempted to explain it to my husband and he said "what made you continue reading it?" For me, and really anyone who enjoys fiction, it's the chance to safely explore dangerous situations, and the call of a good story. For lovers of gothic, it's the visceral response: the blood pumping, skin tingling feeling of anxiety, while your mind races along with the arc of the story. Like watching a train wreck This was a bruiser. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck when I finished it. The next morning, I attempted to explain it to my husband and he said "what made you continue reading it?" For me, and really anyone who enjoys fiction, it's the chance to safely explore dangerous situations, and the call of a good story. For lovers of gothic, it's the visceral response: the blood pumping, skin tingling feeling of anxiety, while your mind races along with the arc of the story. Like watching a train wreck, you know it's going to end badly but it's too late to turn your head.

I felt like this story was about connections. It explored almost all the human connections we might have: to friends, casual and committed lovers, spouses, children, siblings, and community. The setting is Alaska, which worked to lay the gothic tension as I wanted to celebrate the descriptions of Alaskan wilderness while they were instead used to enhance the feeling of isolation and the sense of being up against an indefeatable force.

The narrative follows the inner lives of two women, Irene--a recently retired teacher, wife to Gary and mother to Rhoda--and her daughter Rhoda, who works in a veterinary office and is in a committed relationship with Jim, a local dentist. Rhoda's brother, Mark, is a bit player as we never quite get the inner access that we have with the women, and with Gary and Jim. Mark is probably also the least evolved of all the characters, but seemingly the happiest. He lives in near-poverty, works hand-to-mouth on an Alaskan fishing boat, and is involved with a woman, Karen, who most others find "dumb" or "damaged". He is also the only person who is shown hanging out with friends. And in one of the scenes that shows his relationship with Karen, we see them nuzzling and hugging and being genuinely kind to each other, something that none of the other characters do. Mark seems to have accepted Alaska and its culture, and embraced a simple life, while the other characters are either at odds with it or wishing they'd escaped it when they had a chance.

The emotional landscape is quite bleak and passive, as others have described it, while the physical and geographic landscape is lush and active. The water, mountains, rocks, dirt, trees, and fish are all vividly portrayed, on cue with the 19th century fixation with landscapes of awe, aligned perfectly with the gothic feel of this novel. The people look away from their choices, never seek out what they want but rather beat up themselves and those around them for all their perceived failings. Rhoda ignores several red flags about her relationship with Jim as Irene spirals into madness, blaming Gary for the hatred and opposition that now define their marriage. Everyone in the novel goes along with choices they feel they never really made.

Families seem to connote ruin, the death of self, desire, ambition, freedom. And relationships are cages, trapping us in unfulfilling routines that lead to our doom. There is also commentary on men and women. The men are driven by their own desires, going through the motions of relationships while living (or regretting) other lives, and the women are captives to these relationships while inside their own heads they think and rethink what they're doing in them.

I think a subtext that is artfully played out is how what we do as parents affects our children. All the seemingly confined or sheltered actions of our lives ripple outward, away from us and our peer relationships and often leave a different and greater impact on our children. Irene and Gary are so self-absorbed in their dance of revulsion for each other, that only in the bone crushing finale does Irene finally understand what her choices will mean to her daughter and her community. To the community, she will never be more than her worst actions. To her daugher, her choices and the story of her life will echo forever.

I ended up hating Irene and Gary with such force that the novel's apocalyptic ending was almost a relief. I was sympathetic to Rhoda, though completely annoyed with her choice to "look the other way" in her clearly failing relationship with Jim. And Mark was too faintly drawn for me to connect with him. What I did love about the novel was Alaska, and Vann's treatment of it as an ongoing metaphor for Irene and Gary's relationship; its wildnerness, unflinching existence, and enormous presence on every page, and the interplay with the community that develops out of that wilderness, even characters as indecisive and bitter as those drawn in this story. ...more

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Nov 29, 2010 Kasa Cotugno rated it really liked it

Shelves: arc, genre-crime-thriller

After 30 years of marriage, Gary is finally building a cabin in the Alaska wilderness, aided by his increasingly fragile wife Irene. This is a cabin under construction by a couple whose marriage is under dissolution. In his impatience, Gary, lacking proper knowledge, materials or tools or even plans, forges ahead with his dream. The cabin becomes a symbol of their marriage with fissures between ill placed logs and no way to seal them and keep out the elements.

Vann chillingly evokes the harsh lan ...more

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Dec 27, 2013 Maria rated it really liked it · review of another edition

De sfeer opgeroepen in deze roman is zo verschrikkelijk beklemmend dat je weet: dit wordt alleen maar erger tot aan een destructief slot. Het verhaal over dit troosteloze, deprimerende huwelijk, deze familie is ontstellend meedogenloos opgeschreven. Ik ben blij dat ik al jaren gelukkig getrouwd ben en fijne kinderen heb. Je zou bijna niet meer durven na dit boek…

Er is haat, bedrog, een ongenaakbaar Alaska, er zijn confrontaties met de natuur, obsessies en teleurstellingen. Maar liefde, houden va ...more

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Feb 28, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it it was amazing

Many people think of Alaska as wildness with great open spaces in a mountainous wildernous with sub-arctic cold, dark and long winters, ever-light summers, bears and moose. This is not the Alaska of David Vann. His Alaska consists of what sounds like an area most likely the Tongass National Rain Forest. This is the northernmost rainforest on earth, and it extends into southeast Alaska. Trees here are huge but grow close together here much like in the Amazon. It rains up to 400 inches a year in t Many people think of Alaska as wildness with great open spaces in a mountainous wildernous with sub-arctic cold, dark and long winters, ever-light summers, bears and moose. This is not the Alaska of David Vann. His Alaska consists of what sounds like an area most likely the Tongass National Rain Forest. This is the northernmost rainforest on earth, and it extends into southeast Alaska. Trees here are huge but grow close together here much like in the Amazon. It rains up to 400 inches a year in this part of Alaska and the days are often dark and dismal with damp that cuts right through you. There is no vista in this forest; all you have are the trees that hem you in.

It is in this Alaska that Gary and Irene realize that their marriage is falling apart, that they go through the motions of one last try at redeeming their moribund marriage. They decide to build a cabin on Caribou Island, a place both isolated and isolating. Gary has no coherent plans and their cabin ends up as a bunch of sticks stuck together every which way with huge gaps everywhere. The elements are not kept out and the rain, snow and wind wails through the cabin even as the last nail is hammered crookedly in.

Irene blames Gary for her life, for not having fulfilled what she might have been without him, and Gary blames Irene for his life's failures as well. Once he was a promising dissertation student at University of California Berkeley. Now he goes from ill-conceived project to ill-conceived project, each one failing and losing money. Irene was once a happy hippy chick who now goes weeks with horrific pain in her head for which doctors can find no source. They have two children, Mark and Rhoda. Mark is barely in their lives but Rhoda has a dream of helping them find salvation with each other.

Irene is the survivor of her mother's suicide. Her father was cheating and her mother decided to take her own life instead of living for Irene. Rhoda is on the verge of marrying a dentist who has already begun to cheat on her during their engagement. He has things all planned out. He'll keep switching receptionists, having affairs with them and then letting them go. It sounds like Rhoda is heading for the same train wreck as her mother and grandmother - a distant marriage and an unfaithful husband. Many of these themes appear in Vann's brilliant first book, Legend of a Suicide.

Caribou Island has many of the same themes as Legend of a Suicide - the inability to find intimacy with others, the desire to hurt those we try to love, and not knowing how to do things right in our own lives and for others. This book is not for the weak-hearted. It is bold and brutal, never a syrupy sentence or a hi-jinks kinda laugh. It is as serious as the death of a loved one. Even aspects of the book such as boat rides take on a dire nature and I had to wonder what awful thing would come next.

This is a reader's book. It is a book for people who love to read and it is why we read. It is one of the best books I have read this year and it knocked my socks off. More importantly, it changed how I see the world. It is THAT good.
...more

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Jun 03, 2011 Lydia Presley rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, dark-fiction, contemporary, 2011

This book is .. there is no single word to describe it. Some words that come close are:

Bleak
Cold
Aching
Void
I was unprepared for the heavy, depressive feel of the story and, thinking back on it, I should have been prepared. The cover is dark, the setting is not known for it's warmth (thus inspiring feelings of joy), and, although I felt my mood descending with each page read, I couldn't tear my eyes or my thoughts away from the train-wreck of a story the people in Caribou Island were living.

I foun ...more

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Jul 09, 2011 Helen (Helena/Nell) rated it it was ok

I hated the style. Not the lack of speech marks round direct speech, which apparently annoys some readers,but the terse little verbless sentences. I thought them self-conscious and artificial. Easy to read though:

"Hollows inside him, only hollows. No substance. She had somehow blown the center out of him. He could see her face, when they had first gotten together, when it seemed that she loved him. Her smile a little hesitant, even, as if she were nervous too."

Very simple, but not high-class wri I hated the style. Not the lack of speech marks round direct speech, which apparently annoys some readers,but the terse little verbless sentences. I thought them self-conscious and artificial. Easy to read though:

"Hollows inside him, only hollows. No substance. She had somehow blown the center out of him. He could see her face, when they had first gotten together, when it seemed that she loved him. Her smile a little hesitant, even, as if she were nervous too."

Very simple, but not high-class writing. 'No substance' is just over-stating what's already been said. And what's with "when it seemed that she loved him" -- how could that possibly be good writing? First of all the 'that' needs cutting. But even then, that phrase doesn't echo how a real human being thinks and feels. It should read something like: "He could see her face, when they had first gotten together, when she loved him -- or seemed to." Not much mileage in this endless staccato, repetitive method -- except (and I bet this is deliberate) to add a sort of signature style to a novel in which not enough is going on.

He starts with a suicide, or a memory of one. His last book, which I haven't read and which allegedly is better, focusses on suicide -- and it's a powerful theme. But to me, this novel is dreary, and the violent ending half unbelievable and half predictable, if those two thoughts can be combined. Most people's lives have been touched by suicide, some closer, some further -- but this one taught me nothing about it, no new insights.

But mainly, I didn't enjoy reading it because I thought the quality of the writing was rubbish. I didn't 'see' anything afresh, didn't engage with the characters (actually from time to time I got them mixed up).

And every now and again, I stopped and thought: this is really BADLY written: "The salmon began appearing with heads. Gutted and gills removed, but heads on. Some change in the plans, and Carl hadn't been notified, but his job still the same. The eyes wide, dilated, silver-rimmed. Hooked lower jaws on some of them, almost like beaks. The males, perhaps. He wasn't finding membranes."

I don't think a good book should be easily parodied. No -- that's not true. I don't think good STYLE should be easily parodied. But this is: look.

The book began appearing with characters. Gutted and motivation removed, but characters still. One had a headache, and that I liked, but the headache fizzled. The characters dreary, unhappy, stuck. The relationships dysfunctional, almost all. Between Irene and Rhoda different maybe. But not for long. Suicide finished that. Done and dusted. Book shut. Yeuch. Let me out of here. ...more

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Dec 23, 2010 Alecia rated it it was ok

This is the first book I've won from first reads and I was very excited when I first received it. However, my excitement died with the turn of each page. Let me start by saying that I really do like Vann's writing style, his attention to detail and the believability of his characters is flawless. I just didn't like the story. I'm not really a glass half empty or glass half full kind of person, more like, at least there's something in the glass kind of person. But this story is so damn depressing ...more

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Mar 04, 2014 Elizabeth rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

I wasn't feeling this one. In a word? Overwrought. I struggled to understand the actions of the characters and disliked that after a couple of chapters it was apparent how it would all end. In this regard it reminded me of The Book of Ruth. Still, the descriptions of Alaska and the sense of isolation these characters felt were cracking.

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Aug 14, 2012 Mario Rufino rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: com-críticas

O meu texto, no Diário Digital, sobre "A Ilha de Caribou" de David Vann
Bem-vindos ao Inferno...

http://diariodigital.sapo.pt/news.asp...

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About David Vann

Published in 19 languages, David Vann’s internationally-bestselling books have won 15 prizes, including best foreign novel in France and Spain and, most recently, the $50,000 St. Francis College Literary Prize 2013, and appeared on 70 Best Books of the Year lists in a dozen countries. He has written for the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, The Sunday Times, The Obse ...more

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“Because you can choose who you’ll be with, but you can’t choose who they’ll become.” — 2 likes

“He hadn't yet seen his life wasted, hadn't yet understood the pure longing for what was really a kind of annihilation. A desire to see what the world can do, to see what you can endure, to see, finally, what you're made of as you're torn apart. A kind of bliss to annihilation, to being wiped away. "But ever he has longing, he who sets out on the sea", and this longing is to face the very worst, a delicate hope for a larger wave.” — 0 likes

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