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The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing
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Deep in the mountains of British Columbia, across an unforgiving landscape, one man’s pursuit of a fabled mountain lion leads him into the furthest reaches of himself. As he struggles to confront the wilderness surrounding him—from the baying hounds to the relentless northern snows—he journeys into his own haunted memories: a life of wild horses and ballet, fishing skiffs
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Paperback, First, 272 pages
Published
September 1st 2020
by Platypus Press
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What happened to me reading this novel was a magical experience I felt I had been missing — I feel we might all be missing in this global trauma... bringing ourselves to embrace places of tragic and painful reality, truly looking into ourselves, deepening the waters of our spirit and encountering the ghosts the man in this novel does. Fasano’s poetry is inseparable from him — that is evident here. His voice is true and wise and stable and consistent amongst his other works. As a first novel, I f ...more
A father and his nine-year-old son trek into the high mountains to hunt a mountain lion. Generations have hunted the lion and failed. The father had sworn to bring one home.
They depart in late in autumn when the snow shows the lion's tracks. The father patiently teaches the child. At night the boy still dreams of his mother who died in an accident several years before.
Fasano creates a world that can be experienced with all the senses, the iron smell of blood and woodsmoke ingrained in a child's ...more
They depart in late in autumn when the snow shows the lion's tracks. The father patiently teaches the child. At night the boy still dreams of his mother who died in an accident several years before.
Fasano creates a world that can be experienced with all the senses, the iron smell of blood and woodsmoke ingrained in a child's ...more
Joseph Fasano was my creative writing professor at Columbia and I've been so looking forward to this book. You can definitely tell from the prose that he's a poet, as well, and to me that's one of the strengths of the meditative / reflective passages. My favorite scene (and no I won't give away what happens) is the end. It's like the whole novel builds to this act that can only be described as an act of grace. It's triumphant. I recommend this to all.
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Fasano is my new favorite writer. I usually prefer short stories to novels, and the novelists I love are pretty different from one another--Virginia Woolf, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ontaatje, Willa Cather, Nabokov--but I think what those writers have in common is the innovative way they use language, breathing life into their characters with the idiosyncracies of their dialogue, creating a world with the music of the language itself. The title of this novel alone prepared you for the ferocious be
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Poets who turn their hands to fiction have done so with mixed results. Most recently, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was a tremendous success. Then, of course, there are the classics: Plath's The Bell Jar, James Dickey's Deliverance, and so on. Sometimes the results are disastrous (just think of Berryman's Recovery, all the more poignant in being an unfinished wreck of a book because of its subject matter and the fate of its author). I was won over by this one. I'd read mixed revi
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This is a book I took my time with, and I am so glad I did. Between the covers of this novel is a world of grief and pain—one might even say these are the main themes—but, I would venture to say that this is, above all, a story of perseverance and hope. To spend time within this world is to open yourself to the depths of the human heart.
The protagonist, a man hardened by loss and the brutality of nature, navigates the harsh weather and terrain of British Columbia, hunting what he calls "the mind ...more
The protagonist, a man hardened by loss and the brutality of nature, navigates the harsh weather and terrain of British Columbia, hunting what he calls "the mind ...more
This is what happens when a poet writes a novel. Clean, evocative language whispering things not yet named until the moment they’re read.
It's so rare to find a writer who can tell a captivating story in beautiful prose, and Fasano is that writer. I've been a fan of his poetry for years, and this novel just blew me away. I hope to read more from him, and I hope to see this book made into a film. I can imagine the incredible imagery, landscapes, and human drama of it playing out on the screen. This is a must-read.
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Another Canadian setting for this author (previously read his poem on Vince Li). This fails to hit the mark however as the overwrought imagery and poetic intonation becomes cloying and detracts from the narrative. Some definite beautiful passages, but overall not an enjoyable story -- which is why I chose a novel to read an not a poem.
This isn't what I would describe as the "typical" novel for my bookshelf, but that's probably what I loved about it most. The love story between the two main characters is so intense and gentle. And the dialogue between the father and son on their quest is really special, raw and tender. It's definitely a work of "literary fiction," in that it cares about both style and substance and sees them as inseparable. The only thing I wished for was more about the narrator's time in the Caribbean, but I
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Long-time reader of Fasano's poetry. I was excited about him writing fiction when I heard about this book a few months ago. I read it in one sitting and am still feeling changed by what I read. I'm still processing it, but I know I will read it again, especially the flashback passages, which somehow made me feel both the tragedy and the beauty of the characters' relationship. I have a few favorite quotes so far, but one that particularly stands out is: "When you love the dead in someone, you're
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Jul 04, 2021
Ina Halsor
added it
This book left me so frustrated, I really wanted to love it and enjoy the prose but couldn’t find a story to hang onto. I ended up skimming sections, then stopping at parts in the book - finding a sequence that was a dream, a hallucination or a memory - it was hard to tell if the book wasn’t just one long dreamlike text based in the wilderness.
I would very much like to get back to this book, I’d like to give it another go when I’m perhaps in a different mindset. I can tell there’s a treasure to ...more
I would very much like to get back to this book, I’d like to give it another go when I’m perhaps in a different mindset. I can tell there’s a treasure to ...more
This is an outstanding work of literary fiction. In a world that would reduce us to easy moral categories--good and evil, this or that--this novel reminds us that we're all complex, stumbling creatures trying to find our way, trying to love and be loved, to redeem and be redeemed. My reading group recommended this to me because of my interest in philosophy, and I think they were right that this book has some profound reflections in it, but, to me, one of its virtues is that those reflections are
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I loved it. This novel is about tenderness and forgiveness as much as it's about the brutality of what we do to others and ourselves. The main character's relationship with his father is one of the things that interested me the most, even though it goes on mostly in the background of the story. That's how life is, isn't it: we're shaped by the things we barely see. For its sweeping scale and tender intimacy, I give this a resounding 5 stars. The ending left me breathless.
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What I love about this book is that it reads like a dream that becomes suddenly real. The writing is stunning, and I found myself pulled into both the love story and the narrative with the lion. It's hard to categorize this book, which, to me, is refreshing. The narrator is complex, living a story that slowly makes him realize his shortcomings, and that steadily makes us realize our own. Transformative.
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I hadn't read Fasano's poetry before reading his novel, but a friend recommended it to me and i'm glad she did. I spend a lot of time in nature and this book has an incredible atmosphere, like a world I didn't want to leave. The story and language are heartbreakingly beautiful, and the ending...just wow. Didn't see that coming.
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When I saw a Kirkus review that called this "Ahab-like", I had to have a look, Melville being my favorite writer. The comparison is really more about the obsessive quest of the main character, not so much the style, which is poetic but very much its own thing. The writing and story are extraordinary. I'm recommending this to my book group.
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Dnf at 200 pages, but close enough that I’m marking it read. Didn’t enjoy the cutting back and forth from mountain scenes to past relationship. Wilderness descriptions became monotonous at times. Got tired of how drawn out everything felt.
This novel came to me at a time when I needed it most in my life, and I'm so grateful that it found me. I feel like at its heart this is a book about redemption, and we could all use that right now. Maybe always. 5 stars +
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A triumph.
Fasano perfectly captures the spirit of the wilderness, and the miracles of tenderness that can happen in it. I cried at the end.
Outstanding
A good story that reads like a prose poem.
This is a new author worth reading
I'll be looking for future books from this writer ...more
A good story that reads like a prose poem.
This is a new author worth reading
I'll be looking for future books from this writer ...more
One of my new favorite books. Fasano understands how to use silence.
Some of the descriptions of nature are quite powerful, and meditative, and beautiful. More than I can remember from any recent book, I had to go to the dictionary to look up so so many words, which I didn't mind. But the jumping back and forth from wilderness to the protagonist's relationship with his wife really killed the pace and power of the book for me. The vague ambiguity that Fasano uses to paint that relationship really irritated me. Oh well, it didn't quite work, but I'll certainly read
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Joseph Fasano is the author of the novels The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the "20 Best Small Press Books of 2020." His books of poetry include The Crossing (2018), Vincent (2015), Inheritance (2014), and Fugue for Other Hands (2013). His honors include the Cider Press Review Book Award, the Rattle P
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“...I knew that forgiveness, too, was a fire, and you carried it in the small tinder of your own two hands, and if you did not fail it, you could illuminate the world.”
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“When a man has fury in his bones he can do wild things, some of them fiercer than what he is, and sometimes afterward he wakes to what he has done, and if the waking is graceful he can make it right with his atonement. But when a man has crossed past fury, silently and without his knowing, so that somewhere in the night he crosses over into the cold and shimmering country of indifference, the barren country where he looks up into the stars and knows only the cold fire of continuance, the pith of wintering in things, then he has come to a place where he himself is the wild thing that will undo him, and he is no more himself than the snow that will cover him in oblivion, and he blows through the land and his own bones like the snow itself, and wherever he drifts he is banished, and wherever he arrives he will never return, and wherever he travels, he is never there.”
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