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All the Land to Hold Us
A strange and powerful landscape summons strange and powerful happeningsRick Bass brings a lyrical lushness to the harsh backdrop of West Texas in his masterfully crafted fourth novel. All the Land to Hold Us is a sweeping tale of those who live on the desert’s edge, where riches—precious artifacts, oil, water, love—can all be found and lost again in an instant.Roaming across the salt flats and skirting the salt lake, Richard, a geologist working for an oil company, hunts for fossils under the spell of Clarissa, the local beauty who plans to use her share of their plunder to get out of small, dusty Midland for good. A generation earlier, a Depression-era couple, Max and Marie Omo, numbly mines for salt along the banks of the briny lake until the emotional terrain of their marriage is suddenly and irrevocably altered. The strange, surreal arrival of a runaway circus elephant, careening across the sand, sets in motion Marie’s final break from Max and heralds the beginning of her second chance. Consequences reverberate through the years and the dunes when Marie becomes indelibly linked to Richard’s own second act.With a cast of characters rounded out by a one-legged-treasure-hunter, a renegade teacher, and an unforgettable elephant trainer, All the Land to Hold Us is a vivid portrait of a fierce place and the inimitable characters that possess the capacity to adapt to and also despoil it. The novel boasts all the hallmarks of Bass’s most enduring work—human longing and greed, nature endangered, and the possibility for redemption are all writ large on his desert canvas.
324 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
8 people are currently reading
506 people want to read
About the author
Rick Bass
119 books484 followersRick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.
Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.
Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
August 3, 2014
Rarely do I borrow a library book------yet feel the need to go buy it at full retail price the moment I finish it. Temper that endorsement until you read on.
I guess there are people who wouldn't enjoy this. Those people (with all due respect) simply don't value the same things I tend to gravitate toward when deciphering how to respond to what I'm reading. In the same respect that pieces of art are museum quality to some but rate as garbage to others, this one makes my list of favorites without question. Some will discard it and move on to the next exhibit without even remembering having experienced it.
You can't possibly digest it all, and for some it would ramble across way too much space (kinda like this review I guess). It is densely packed; wildly descriptive; eccentric......partly science lesson, partly fantasy, partly western, partly love story, partly self discovery, partly spiritual journey, partly religious essay, partly wilderness novel, partly memoir, partly landscape word picture, partly artistic observation, partly political statement. If you like plain cheese pizza or avoid casseroles, then you likely will get heartburn from attempting this one.
It's one of the most unique things I have ever read. No other author I have encountered has this unique viewpoint. I can't recommend this highly enough. If you don't like it, then pretty much look through my other books and read inversely to my ratings.
I guess there are people who wouldn't enjoy this. Those people (with all due respect) simply don't value the same things I tend to gravitate toward when deciphering how to respond to what I'm reading. In the same respect that pieces of art are museum quality to some but rate as garbage to others, this one makes my list of favorites without question. Some will discard it and move on to the next exhibit without even remembering having experienced it.
You can't possibly digest it all, and for some it would ramble across way too much space (kinda like this review I guess). It is densely packed; wildly descriptive; eccentric......partly science lesson, partly fantasy, partly western, partly love story, partly self discovery, partly spiritual journey, partly religious essay, partly wilderness novel, partly memoir, partly landscape word picture, partly artistic observation, partly political statement. If you like plain cheese pizza or avoid casseroles, then you likely will get heartburn from attempting this one.
It's one of the most unique things I have ever read. No other author I have encountered has this unique viewpoint. I can't recommend this highly enough. If you don't like it, then pretty much look through my other books and read inversely to my ratings.
February 3, 2014
If you are a reader with an open mind about how a superb book should develop, and allow this very different kind of narrative to captivate you, then you are ripe to allow Bass’s novel to stir you in surprising ways. It isn’t character-based, and yet, it is, if you allow for the land to be a character, and for the setting to evolve from geography/geology to the essence of the life cycle, the tincture and elixir of existence.
“The landscape gathered all men, across the ages, as the anguished, hungry, confused, and even tortured blood of man surged this way and that, sloshing around in the soft human vessels as if such blood no more belonged in the brief reservoir of their bodies than would a flock of wild birds, bright birds, belong in a rusting wire cage.”
It takes place in and around Castle Gap, in West Texas, near Odessa, a place whose rimrock suggests the parapets of a castle, with a mile-long narrow gap that allowed passage, thousands of years ago, over the Pecos River. Geologically, Castle Gap originated over 135 million years ago as marine limestone deposits that subsequently resulted in a great mesa split by erosion. The inland salt lake sat atop a subterranean salt dome, an eighteen-thousand-feet tall underground mountain of salt. It is from the ancient history of Castle Gap that the story develops.
The land, literally and figuratively, becomes a reliquary of human and animal bones and skulls that have become buried, entrenched with the ghosts of those that came before this time, and a notice of those that will come later.
Richard, a geologist working in the oil fields in 1966, is an itinerant in the time of careless youth, who falls for a beautiful woman, Clarissa. Clarissa wants nothing more than to leave Odessa, so she prevents herself from falling in love with Richard. During this section, the author demonstrates his ability to parallel human relationships with the natural ossuaries in these limestone cliffs. The author’s setting becomes anthropomorphic, or where man and land become fused.
“The weight of the overlaying world was constantly squeezing down and reforming slightly this shifting, malleable, underground salt mountain, so that its movements were like those of an immense animal lying just beneath the surface, and almost always stirring, even if only slightly.”
The themes are powerful, profound, and envelop the timeless quality of what constitutes perpetuity, and the weighty meaning of our return to the earth, and its effect on the eternal evolution of the life cycle. Evolution itself becomes more than a scientific or philosophical theory; it is physicalized in a way that underscores what it is to be animate. Not just to live a life, but to share that inexorable connection to everyone, and everything in nature.
The narrative alternates with different people and a generation of time. After the section of Richard and Clarissa, another love story is described, this one with Marie in 1942, who married Max Omo, an industrious man who lived, and seemed to worship, the salt mines. As the reader progresses into their story, it is apparent how everything is rimed with salt—the air, the brackish water, and the house they built on this crusty whitened hardpan ground.
One night, Marie wakes to the distilled purity of one sound, a rhythmic thrashing, that she finally recognizes as an elephant, and begins to follow it. As she absorbs what she sees as the magnificent loneliness of this animal, she notices one wet, bright, shining eye, “filled with both terror and resolve, as well as bottomless loneliness…” And in that moment, “amidst such a surreal vision, Marie felt more grounded, sane and hopeful than she had in years.” The elephant’s presence alters Marie’s life in sublime ways that become more penetrating as she is maddened by her life on the salt dunes.
As the novel evolves, Bass’s utterly exquisite, lyrical, peerless prose binds the reader to the land, and to the fate of the characters, which also include a one-legged treasure-hunter, Herbert Mix, a broad-minded Mormon schoolteacher, Ruth, and a keen, intelligent ten-year-old named Annie. The peril of the environment, the dwindling of fresh water, the endangerment of life and innocence, and the greed of the exploiters that create it are integrated with individual human tragedies and suffering, love, regret, and redemption—all this is raised to colossal heights because of Bass’s mastery of prose.
There is no real plot here, but there is story—the story of mankind and of individuals, and the story of the land that ties us together. In the end, I felt the gravitas of my connection to all of humanity.
“Even from the beginning, and even in his youth, he understood he was tiny against the world, belonged merely to an unending procession of such desire…no more and no less than any other traveler who pressed against the world like one great animal swimming by itself in a vast sea…”
“The landscape gathered all men, across the ages, as the anguished, hungry, confused, and even tortured blood of man surged this way and that, sloshing around in the soft human vessels as if such blood no more belonged in the brief reservoir of their bodies than would a flock of wild birds, bright birds, belong in a rusting wire cage.”
It takes place in and around Castle Gap, in West Texas, near Odessa, a place whose rimrock suggests the parapets of a castle, with a mile-long narrow gap that allowed passage, thousands of years ago, over the Pecos River. Geologically, Castle Gap originated over 135 million years ago as marine limestone deposits that subsequently resulted in a great mesa split by erosion. The inland salt lake sat atop a subterranean salt dome, an eighteen-thousand-feet tall underground mountain of salt. It is from the ancient history of Castle Gap that the story develops.
The land, literally and figuratively, becomes a reliquary of human and animal bones and skulls that have become buried, entrenched with the ghosts of those that came before this time, and a notice of those that will come later.
Richard, a geologist working in the oil fields in 1966, is an itinerant in the time of careless youth, who falls for a beautiful woman, Clarissa. Clarissa wants nothing more than to leave Odessa, so she prevents herself from falling in love with Richard. During this section, the author demonstrates his ability to parallel human relationships with the natural ossuaries in these limestone cliffs. The author’s setting becomes anthropomorphic, or where man and land become fused.
“The weight of the overlaying world was constantly squeezing down and reforming slightly this shifting, malleable, underground salt mountain, so that its movements were like those of an immense animal lying just beneath the surface, and almost always stirring, even if only slightly.”
The themes are powerful, profound, and envelop the timeless quality of what constitutes perpetuity, and the weighty meaning of our return to the earth, and its effect on the eternal evolution of the life cycle. Evolution itself becomes more than a scientific or philosophical theory; it is physicalized in a way that underscores what it is to be animate. Not just to live a life, but to share that inexorable connection to everyone, and everything in nature.
The narrative alternates with different people and a generation of time. After the section of Richard and Clarissa, another love story is described, this one with Marie in 1942, who married Max Omo, an industrious man who lived, and seemed to worship, the salt mines. As the reader progresses into their story, it is apparent how everything is rimed with salt—the air, the brackish water, and the house they built on this crusty whitened hardpan ground.
One night, Marie wakes to the distilled purity of one sound, a rhythmic thrashing, that she finally recognizes as an elephant, and begins to follow it. As she absorbs what she sees as the magnificent loneliness of this animal, she notices one wet, bright, shining eye, “filled with both terror and resolve, as well as bottomless loneliness…” And in that moment, “amidst such a surreal vision, Marie felt more grounded, sane and hopeful than she had in years.” The elephant’s presence alters Marie’s life in sublime ways that become more penetrating as she is maddened by her life on the salt dunes.
As the novel evolves, Bass’s utterly exquisite, lyrical, peerless prose binds the reader to the land, and to the fate of the characters, which also include a one-legged treasure-hunter, Herbert Mix, a broad-minded Mormon schoolteacher, Ruth, and a keen, intelligent ten-year-old named Annie. The peril of the environment, the dwindling of fresh water, the endangerment of life and innocence, and the greed of the exploiters that create it are integrated with individual human tragedies and suffering, love, regret, and redemption—all this is raised to colossal heights because of Bass’s mastery of prose.
There is no real plot here, but there is story—the story of mankind and of individuals, and the story of the land that ties us together. In the end, I felt the gravitas of my connection to all of humanity.
“Even from the beginning, and even in his youth, he understood he was tiny against the world, belonged merely to an unending procession of such desire…no more and no less than any other traveler who pressed against the world like one great animal swimming by itself in a vast sea…”
October 19, 2022
Rick Bass still writing love stories like they’re stories about time. About geology. About sun, and salt, and death, and bright colors. And water.
And maps.
And maps.
Instead, they mapped. It was like a covenant, a trust increasing slowly each day. It was not a leap into the abyss, not a plummeting nor a freefall. It was a steady, cautious edging forward, it was prudent and cautious, sustainable, it was informed by observation and sometimes even restraint.
August 7, 2014
I will give the first 200 pages a 1 star and the last 100 pages a 3 star bringing my final rating to a 2. Why did I hate the first 2/3rds of the book because it was too wordy for my liking. It took the author page after page to express a point. It took me 10 days to read this short book because there were so many details. I have no passion for this book at all. I would have abandoned this book if my husband didn't find this to be one of his favorite books of all times and continued to prod me to continue on this painstaking journey. I will give the author credit for a unique plot but way too much landscape detail!
October 14, 2013
- Won on first reads giveaway-
This book is written with such depth and poetry that it must be read slowly. It is a sweeping saga of old Texas oil fields, salt mines, small town mind sets, and love in it's many forms. Often, I felt I was emerged in layer upon layer of geologic time. Each page took me further into the depth of Bass's writing. It is so poetic that the characters became alive for me and I felt as if I was among them. It is almost easier to describe as a haunting experience rather than a story.
In the end, I found it to be a gritty look at the hunger, yearning and taking of all things that men desire, and the women who know this constant taking will lead to their own ruin or break themselves apart. And it is the women who are able to remake themselves into something whole again. To pull back the one man who can starve off complete ruin, and make life bearable once again.
While this book is somewhat a masterpiece in writing, the subject matter is disturbing, and at times a painful read.
This book is written with such depth and poetry that it must be read slowly. It is a sweeping saga of old Texas oil fields, salt mines, small town mind sets, and love in it's many forms. Often, I felt I was emerged in layer upon layer of geologic time. Each page took me further into the depth of Bass's writing. It is so poetic that the characters became alive for me and I felt as if I was among them. It is almost easier to describe as a haunting experience rather than a story.
In the end, I found it to be a gritty look at the hunger, yearning and taking of all things that men desire, and the women who know this constant taking will lead to their own ruin or break themselves apart. And it is the women who are able to remake themselves into something whole again. To pull back the one man who can starve off complete ruin, and make life bearable once again.
While this book is somewhat a masterpiece in writing, the subject matter is disturbing, and at times a painful read.
August 20, 2017
I had a little trouble getting into this book at first. A novel with no dialog seemed too dense with narrative, at first. But I kept thinking I would read just a few more pages, and would be captivated by the author's use of language, and decide to continue just a little more. Pretty soon, I was totally absorbed in the rich descriptiveness of the landscape, and with the story. Eventually, nearer the end, there is dialog, after all! The characters are great, intriguing and unique. But the real star is the land, the west Texas earth, with it's ever shifting sand dunes, the salt flats and salt lake, the river and the fossils, and beneath the surface, the gas, oil and eventually the sweet fresh water.
This author's prose is poetry when he writes of the land. This is one example, as one character shows another the salt lake: "He wanted her to see how the movement of halite crystals, stirred each day by the same winds that rearranged the dunes, sometimes helped sharpen into angular prisms nearly every salt crystal on the lake, trillions of such prism-diamonds exploding the lake into a pulsing iridescence of almost maddening beauty...when the sun's angle finally properly bent and ignited the bouncing, magnified colorful rays through those crystals, to throw arcs and coronas of banded light up into the air above the salt lake, in addition to scattering the light like spilled gemstones across the lake's heated surface. "
I am so glad I stuck with this one, it was a great pleasure.
This author's prose is poetry when he writes of the land. This is one example, as one character shows another the salt lake: "He wanted her to see how the movement of halite crystals, stirred each day by the same winds that rearranged the dunes, sometimes helped sharpen into angular prisms nearly every salt crystal on the lake, trillions of such prism-diamonds exploding the lake into a pulsing iridescence of almost maddening beauty...when the sun's angle finally properly bent and ignited the bouncing, magnified colorful rays through those crystals, to throw arcs and coronas of banded light up into the air above the salt lake, in addition to scattering the light like spilled gemstones across the lake's heated surface. "
I am so glad I stuck with this one, it was a great pleasure.
May 30, 2014
If you’ve ever wanted to visit western Texas, this book could well dampen your enthusiasm. Between the salty brine lakes, the bends of the Pecos River, and the desert itself, there are numerous ways to die. Bass gives many examples in excruciating detail. As the remains of both animals and humans are discovered by excavators, I’d hoped that the lives of the entombed would be discovered and have an impact upon the excavators and other characters. But instead, the remains were described in great detail without relating to the plot. The best part of the book is the description of the area’s geology, but even this becomes tedious after the first hundred pages.
One main theme is that life in the desert can make one crazy, and we see evidence of eccentricities in many of the characters. The author gets into the heads of the characters, using way too many metaphors and psychological analyses, combined with way too little character action and interaction. Most of what “happens” is description of the land and the thought processes of the characters as the author endlessly analyzes them. This analysis adds up to too much description and not enough action. Better editing could have made these descriptions less redundant.
In the end, the remaining self-involved characters have a chance to relax into love, find family, and make peace with the past and their desert home. But instead, the author twists the ending, adding a group of extraneous characters that mess things up, making for an unsatisfying conclusion.
Unless you really like reading about western Texas and can read quickly through the psychological analysis of the characters, I would not recommend this book.
One main theme is that life in the desert can make one crazy, and we see evidence of eccentricities in many of the characters. The author gets into the heads of the characters, using way too many metaphors and psychological analyses, combined with way too little character action and interaction. Most of what “happens” is description of the land and the thought processes of the characters as the author endlessly analyzes them. This analysis adds up to too much description and not enough action. Better editing could have made these descriptions less redundant.
In the end, the remaining self-involved characters have a chance to relax into love, find family, and make peace with the past and their desert home. But instead, the author twists the ending, adding a group of extraneous characters that mess things up, making for an unsatisfying conclusion.
Unless you really like reading about western Texas and can read quickly through the psychological analysis of the characters, I would not recommend this book.
August 5, 2013
I Review Rick Bass’s All the Land to Hold Us.
Go to my blog:
http://josephpeschel.com/HaveWords/?p...
and then to the Boston Globe
--Joe
There, men lust for and consume the desert’s treasures: salt, oil, water. Stones whisper secrets, elephants cry and dance, children cremate puppets in a funeral pyre, and sentinel-like skeletons hear music and possess a longing that hasn’t perished with their bodies. That harsh and lonely landscape, brilliant and searing, draws toward it treasure hunters, oilmen, and two pairs of lovers from different generations “as the eye of the needle of heaven is said to draw human souls.” Each searches for riches: oil, salt, fresh water, or romance; gold, glittering silica, human relics, or love. But no matter the treasure, no one seems fully satisfied; instead they hunger and consume.”
Go to my blog:
http://josephpeschel.com/HaveWords/?p...
and then to the Boston Globe
--Joe
February 2, 2015
I wanted to love this book. "Where the Sea Used to Be," Bass' first novel, is one of my very favorites. I thought this one might be for Texas what "Where the Sea Used to Be" was for Montana. And it almost makes it, with the same richly descriptive poetry of landscape and the complicated human heart. The plot just never quite comes together though. The last couple of chapters give a glimpse of what could be a larger, more complex story, with characters finally developing enough that you just begin to care about them. And then it's over. In the end, I liked it. I found beauty in it. I did not love it.
May 28, 2020
I have read two collections of Rick Bass' short stories and enjoyed them both. This is the first of his novels I have read. While the language itself was quite good, at times very beautiful and rich, the story was very much lacking. It really felt very much like three novellas loosely linked to one another. The first two novellas were very slow-moving and I wasn't interested in the characters or what was happening to them. The third novella was better, but not much. If I read more of Rick Bass, which I likely will, I think I will stick to his short stories in the future. They seem to come more naturally to him.
August 20, 2013
332 pages
novel
I enjoyed The Black Rhinos of Nambia (Non-Fiction) by Rick Bass, so I picked up this book.
It was slow going in the beginning, just like the hands of time, that mold us into what we become.
There were many meanings to explore in this book. I totally enjoyed the descriptions of the land while learning about its history and geology, and how everything has to adapt.
novel
I enjoyed The Black Rhinos of Nambia (Non-Fiction) by Rick Bass, so I picked up this book.
It was slow going in the beginning, just like the hands of time, that mold us into what we become.
There were many meanings to explore in this book. I totally enjoyed the descriptions of the land while learning about its history and geology, and how everything has to adapt.
August 27, 2018
I picked up this book because I was fascinated by the cover. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting through this book. It is meticulously researched. The extraction of oil, water and especially salt from the earth is described in great detail. I found the main character Rick a bit too loathsome to buy into his metamorphosis at the end of the book. The book at times seemed to dry and near lifeless like the desert environment where it unfolds. Too many deaths for my taste, it is redeemed somewhat by an interesting ending and two interesting teachers that appear later in the book.
In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book I received a great surprise. The painting on the cover was made by a Patrick Barry! So for me the best came last in several ways.
In the Acknowledgements at the end of the book I received a great surprise. The painting on the cover was made by a Patrick Barry! So for me the best came last in several ways.
February 11, 2017
highly recommended. so elegantly structured in a good way. ties together almost to a fault.
April 19, 2019
Bass's writing is almost too effortlessly good.
December 5, 2019
Very hard to read. Verbose, long descriptions with no dialogue. I had to backtrack often to wade thru all the words to figure out what happened. Almost DNF, but finding water made it work.
December 23, 2019
His career was finding oil but [SPOILER ALERT] was transformed into finding drinkable water.
January 31, 2022
Okay this book was tremendous. Powerful imagery and subject matter. Bass is an incredible novelist. And I can’t figure out why more people haven’t read this, and why so many of his other books have so few ratings and reads? I’m going on Better World Books to buy the author’s entire catalogue asap.
March 17, 2024
It took me a little while to get into this one. But once I did, it was good! Very evocative of the arid landscape and the realities of living there.
January 23, 2015
Again Goodreads, can we have a rating between 2 stars "it was okay" and 3 stars "liked it"? Maybe, "kind of liked it" or even more accurately, "liked parts of it, but overall, didn't like it."
What I liked: Striking imagery. A graceful writing style somewhat in the vein of Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. Closely observed character studies. The redemptive search for water and Richard's evolution from a "taker" to a "giver."
What I didn't like: Except for the last hundred pages, almost no dialog. Excruciatingly long and appalling scenes detailing the horrible deaths of animals and the cruelty of men. Glacial pacing. A plot device involving a coincidence that I couldn't buy. (Really, if Richard was so obsessed with Clarissa, he would have surely tried to locate her in Dallas? And then most likely have found out about the child?)
What I liked: Striking imagery. A graceful writing style somewhat in the vein of Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. Closely observed character studies. The redemptive search for water and Richard's evolution from a "taker" to a "giver."
What I didn't like: Except for the last hundred pages, almost no dialog. Excruciatingly long and appalling scenes detailing the horrible deaths of animals and the cruelty of men. Glacial pacing. A plot device involving a coincidence that I couldn't buy. (Really, if Richard was so obsessed with Clarissa, he would have surely tried to locate her in Dallas? And then most likely have found out about the child?)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Read
October 2, 2013Very grateful to have won this book through a Goodreads giveaway. I'd always been curious about Rick Bass's work, so I was happy to get this opportunity. That said, the novel didn't work for me. I felt the whole time that what I was reading was exposition, instead of action. So much of it is about what "usually would" or "sometimes would" or "always would" happen, instead of what did. I felt the whole time that I was waiting to find the inciting action, and lost interest before I did. Bass is obviously fascinated by this landscape, and you can feel his pleasure in writing about fossilization and salt mines, etc. I wonder if this material just isn't best served in a novel form -- maybe it wanted to be a nonfiction project.
November 27, 2013
If a geologist turned writer decided to write a novel and forsake character development, plot, and for the first part, dialogue; that would include flirtations with magical realism, surrealism, and symbolism with no substance to either; and make the geology of an area a main character without making that geology especially compelling, he would write this book
The novel is set in Odessa Texas and the desert and a salt lake outside the city focusing on three separate time periods. A geologist, a salt miner's wife, and a one legged collector appear in more than one of the times seemingly to bring the novel together, but the result is a novel as much of the landscape it ascribes to detail
The novel is set in Odessa Texas and the desert and a salt lake outside the city focusing on three separate time periods. A geologist, a salt miner's wife, and a one legged collector appear in more than one of the times seemingly to bring the novel together, but the result is a novel as much of the landscape it ascribes to detail
November 18, 2014
beautiful writing that rambles to nowhere
West Texas, oil, wealth, death, geology... and, of course, The Land. I'm not sure much "meaning"-filled activity transpired during the 300+ pages of All the Land to Hold Us, but I am sure I love Rick Bass' poetic evocations of landscape and light, of fear, of loss, of emptiness. I felt I was there in those spaces, in those places, with those characters, but in the end, we'd journeyed from there to nowhere. Recommend? Yes, if only for the rhythmic movement and the beauty of Rick Bass' sometimes exquisite writing, though you might enjoy some of the characters, too.
West Texas, oil, wealth, death, geology... and, of course, The Land. I'm not sure much "meaning"-filled activity transpired during the 300+ pages of All the Land to Hold Us, but I am sure I love Rick Bass' poetic evocations of landscape and light, of fear, of loss, of emptiness. I felt I was there in those spaces, in those places, with those characters, but in the end, we'd journeyed from there to nowhere. Recommend? Yes, if only for the rhythmic movement and the beauty of Rick Bass' sometimes exquisite writing, though you might enjoy some of the characters, too.
August 31, 2016
May have made this same point before, but Bass beautifully balances a fierce love of the land with sharp insight into human needs and desires. All the Land features brilliant naturescapes and deep personal dives. The narrative has a superb arc, using both recurrence and sharp transitions deftly. He changed my conception of the desert, specifically West Texas, forever. And this is by far the best use of an elephant in a story outside of, well, Saramago's Elephant's Journey.
Mufti's (the elephant trainer) insight that adults, unlike children, can't figure out how to "pass freely" between freedom and rules, is one for the ages.
Mufti's (the elephant trainer) insight that adults, unlike children, can't figure out how to "pass freely" between freedom and rules, is one for the ages.
March 16, 2014
Didn't quite grab me, but I like some of the prose.
Each traveler’s life passing through that sea like the equally brief phosphorescent specter of time or memory that trailed in the traveler’s wake: though always, after that phosphorescence faded, there would be one more traveler.
Castle Gap in the West Texas landscape
Oh, yes, a geologist. We know about the indefatigable and insatiable hearts of geologists.
Each traveler’s life passing through that sea like the equally brief phosphorescent specter of time or memory that trailed in the traveler’s wake: though always, after that phosphorescence faded, there would be one more traveler.
Castle Gap in the West Texas landscape
Oh, yes, a geologist. We know about the indefatigable and insatiable hearts of geologists.
June 13, 2014
Rick Bass' loving, lyrical ode to the land isn't the kind of book a lot of people are going to pick up on the spur of the moment. Not a linear story, or even one with a main character or, for most of the book, dialogue, but engrossing nonetheless. Bass knows his oil-drilling, explorations in the desert for water and how the heat colors everything that goes on in life. Despite the format and the way the story is told, this book moves quickly and is thoroughly engrossing.
July 21, 2014
It took some time for the book to take hold of me but I'm glad I persisted. The extreme landscapes- of both the physical world of the novel and the emotional world of the characters intrigued me. The scarcity of love and other natural resources makes men and women mad. We adjust to survive, but it's not pretty. We make do without love, companionship, food and water for a time but there is a cost.
December 30, 2013
A bit odd, but not unpleasantly so. After page 30, I figured I'd read to about 60 and just give it up. But then the characters started getting interesting and I wasn't ready to leave them yet. Lots of fantastic descriptions of the desert and what the sun can do to your skin and your mind. A pretty interesting read. Worth your time.
November 12, 2013
Bass does an excellent job of creating characters who nicely mirror the harsh west Texas landscape. However, everything is so epic and portentous that the reader gets sucked into that salt lake, as it were, frozen, unable to slog past the skeletons of those lost before.
October 21, 2013
This is a very dense book with not a lot of dialogue. After reading this book I think someone would think twice before becoming a petroleum geologist. There must be a lot of symbolism (e.g. the elephant, the giant fish) that I missed which is perhaps one reason I didn't enjoy it that much.
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March 15, 2014I thought this was a beautiful novel, filled with writing to be read slowly and enjoyed. It tells a story about a landscape and the passage of time and some people who live there. Thoughtful, elegiac, moving.
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