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The City of Trembling Leaves
"The City of Trembling Leaves has something of the quality of a long and wonderful day out of doors, where you start from home early in the morning and come back late at night, tired out and full of mindless well-being. For an Easterner such days are comparatively rare, a break in the ordinary routine of life. For the Westerner they are likely to be the main substance of living."—Saturday Review
"Here is a book that is American in all its implications. It is big, full of beauty and hope. It is the record of an American boy's torments and thrills, his slow maturing, his inhibitions, his aspirations. It is a story of adolescent love and of creative activity in America."—Boston Globe
"Superbly written book which compares favorably with Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel."—Library Journal
"There is no question that Mr. Clark is an exceptionally gifted writer. His characters are complex and comprehensible individuals. His story is studded with vividly told episodes of high school life, horse-racing, swimming, tennis, dancing and mountain climbing, which sparkles with the vitality of good narrative prose....Most notable is his feeling for Reno and the mountain country around it, which illuminates the entire book."—New York Times Book Review
Born in 1909, Walter Van Tilburg Clark ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures in the twentieth century, as well as a leading interpreter of the American West. With such highly acclaimed novels as The Ox-Bow Incident, The Track of the Cat, and The City of Trembling Leaves, Clark is known as a writer of national and international distinction.
His contribution to American literature is particularly Western. Clark's feeling for man's relationship to the natural world is one that is not often found between the pages of a book. And through it all runs an underlying unity that evokes the wonder of the open West itself.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark died in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1971.
"Here is a book that is American in all its implications. It is big, full of beauty and hope. It is the record of an American boy's torments and thrills, his slow maturing, his inhibitions, his aspirations. It is a story of adolescent love and of creative activity in America."—Boston Globe
"Superbly written book which compares favorably with Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel."—Library Journal
"There is no question that Mr. Clark is an exceptionally gifted writer. His characters are complex and comprehensible individuals. His story is studded with vividly told episodes of high school life, horse-racing, swimming, tennis, dancing and mountain climbing, which sparkles with the vitality of good narrative prose....Most notable is his feeling for Reno and the mountain country around it, which illuminates the entire book."—New York Times Book Review
Born in 1909, Walter Van Tilburg Clark ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures in the twentieth century, as well as a leading interpreter of the American West. With such highly acclaimed novels as The Ox-Bow Incident, The Track of the Cat, and The City of Trembling Leaves, Clark is known as a writer of national and international distinction.
His contribution to American literature is particularly Western. Clark's feeling for man's relationship to the natural world is one that is not often found between the pages of a book. And through it all runs an underlying unity that evokes the wonder of the open West itself.
Walter Van Tilburg Clark died in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1971.
712 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1945
6 people are currently reading
311 people want to read
About the author
Walter Van Tilburg Clark
44 books55 followersWalter Van Tilburg Clark was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator. He ranks as one of Nevada's most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century and is known primarily for his novels, his one volume of stories, as well as his uncollected short stories. As a writer, he taught himself to use the familiar materials of the western saga to explore the human psyche and to raise deep philosophical issues.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 17, 2018
I won't pretend that this is a novel for everyone because, frankly, it isn't. And it's certainly possible that if I had read this during any other time of my life I wouldn't be rating it so highly. But, to indulge in something of a nascent spirituality, I believe art and, for me, literature, has a way of finding you when you need it.
I've been going through something of a personal transformation as of late. Love found and lost again, gone with the morning mist. A new dawn came and I was left holding the bag. Such as it was. But like a balm, protagonist Tim Hazard's trials and travails, his rejections as a lover, as a son, as an artist, rang true for me like a village of a thousand bells. For the last few weeks I've been reading this book obsessively, following Clark's prose through all its meanderings and ponderings, never getting bored but only comforted and excited as he continued to delineate the world of Reno with a Terrence Malick level of detail and dedication.
This is a work of man and nature, of man in combat with the world and himself, with art as the mistress to set him, and by extension the rest of us, free. It's a novel of defeat, failure, and the putting together again of a self in way that doesn't reconcile the Steppenwolf's in each of us (an inhuman notion) but rather accepting the filth and the dirt and the pain as integral to the human condition, and the shadow from which is cast the light of truth and beauty, joy and love.
Again, this book isn't for everyone. It isn't beach reading. And the plot itself wanders and loses itself more than once. But who gives a damn? I don't. I am thankful to this book for existing. And I am better and stronger and wiser for reading it. You might not react the same, of course. But if you've been in pain and need assurance of the light in the darkness, the knowledge that personal reincarnation, rebirth into a better state of life, is not only possible, but wonderful in all its vicissitudes, then give this a chance. It just might surprise you.
I've been going through something of a personal transformation as of late. Love found and lost again, gone with the morning mist. A new dawn came and I was left holding the bag. Such as it was. But like a balm, protagonist Tim Hazard's trials and travails, his rejections as a lover, as a son, as an artist, rang true for me like a village of a thousand bells. For the last few weeks I've been reading this book obsessively, following Clark's prose through all its meanderings and ponderings, never getting bored but only comforted and excited as he continued to delineate the world of Reno with a Terrence Malick level of detail and dedication.
This is a work of man and nature, of man in combat with the world and himself, with art as the mistress to set him, and by extension the rest of us, free. It's a novel of defeat, failure, and the putting together again of a self in way that doesn't reconcile the Steppenwolf's in each of us (an inhuman notion) but rather accepting the filth and the dirt and the pain as integral to the human condition, and the shadow from which is cast the light of truth and beauty, joy and love.
Again, this book isn't for everyone. It isn't beach reading. And the plot itself wanders and loses itself more than once. But who gives a damn? I don't. I am thankful to this book for existing. And I am better and stronger and wiser for reading it. You might not react the same, of course. But if you've been in pain and need assurance of the light in the darkness, the knowledge that personal reincarnation, rebirth into a better state of life, is not only possible, but wonderful in all its vicissitudes, then give this a chance. It just might surprise you.
April 15, 2012
The author, born in 1909, was in his mid-30s when this novel was published in 1945, and he writes about being young with remarkable maturity. There is a melancholy and nostalgia, as if the story were told by someone twice his age. In its leisurely and intense unfolding of time, place, mood and character, it brings to mind Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel" and Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie."
Modern-day readers will find themselves making a big adjustment to the pace of this long novel. Its central story could be told in 250 pages: a sensitive boy grows up in a modest family in Reno, Nevada, befriends a girl who lives near him and a boy and girl whose parents are wealthy and live across town, falls deeply in love with one of the girls while in high school, and begins a career as a composer and musician, eventually marrying and finding himself as an artist. But Clark has much more to tell, immersing the reader in richly detailed incidents that can expand into 20 and 30 pages - a horse race, a high school party, a tennis match, a climb up a mountain, a gathering of locals at a bar.
While the story takes place in the 1920s and 30s, there are only passing references to historical events and period detail. Much of the story is internal, psychological, emotional. And much of the story has to do with the timelessness of place and the cycle of seasons. There is a celebration of the city of Reno (as a hometown, not a destination for gambling and easy divorce), its trees, the surrounding mountains, and nearby Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. Emotions and landscape are intricately interwoven. Clark's descriptions of places are infused with moods that shift and change like passing cloud shadows.
And finally, it's a story of the difficulties of becoming an artist, finding one's own voice and vision, developing one's talent, the personal costs and the struggle against discouragement and compromise, the social isolation and the impact on personal relationships. Part of Clark's achievement in this novel is the ability to take the reader with only words into the mind of a musician and composer. I recommend reading this book with an open map of Reno and western Nevada, and look online for pictures of Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. Both will enrich the experience of this fine novel.
Modern-day readers will find themselves making a big adjustment to the pace of this long novel. Its central story could be told in 250 pages: a sensitive boy grows up in a modest family in Reno, Nevada, befriends a girl who lives near him and a boy and girl whose parents are wealthy and live across town, falls deeply in love with one of the girls while in high school, and begins a career as a composer and musician, eventually marrying and finding himself as an artist. But Clark has much more to tell, immersing the reader in richly detailed incidents that can expand into 20 and 30 pages - a horse race, a high school party, a tennis match, a climb up a mountain, a gathering of locals at a bar.
While the story takes place in the 1920s and 30s, there are only passing references to historical events and period detail. Much of the story is internal, psychological, emotional. And much of the story has to do with the timelessness of place and the cycle of seasons. There is a celebration of the city of Reno (as a hometown, not a destination for gambling and easy divorce), its trees, the surrounding mountains, and nearby Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. Emotions and landscape are intricately interwoven. Clark's descriptions of places are infused with moods that shift and change like passing cloud shadows.
And finally, it's a story of the difficulties of becoming an artist, finding one's own voice and vision, developing one's talent, the personal costs and the struggle against discouragement and compromise, the social isolation and the impact on personal relationships. Part of Clark's achievement in this novel is the ability to take the reader with only words into the mind of a musician and composer. I recommend reading this book with an open map of Reno and western Nevada, and look online for pictures of Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. Both will enrich the experience of this fine novel.
June 29, 2016
This book is a traditional autumn read for me. It is absolutely my favorite book by an American author. Clark nails the mundane spirituality inherent in the western landscape. His characters resonate with psychological truth.
What I know about music was taught to me in the 4th grade on a plastic whistle and still Clark is able to convey that the literal meaning of "universe" is one song.
My review could go on and on, but what it would stack up to is a fan letter.
Still, I am mystified that each person I have recommended this book to was put to sleep by it. Once, literally! I read it out loud to her in a northern cabin one rainy October, and she couldn't keep her eyes open.
So it's not for everybody, or even many. It is up to people like me to keep this book from slipping further into obscurity. Luckily, northern cabins and rainy Octobers are hell on books. As long as there are used book sellers I will be buying this one again and again.
What I know about music was taught to me in the 4th grade on a plastic whistle and still Clark is able to convey that the literal meaning of "universe" is one song.
My review could go on and on, but what it would stack up to is a fan letter.
Still, I am mystified that each person I have recommended this book to was put to sleep by it. Once, literally! I read it out loud to her in a northern cabin one rainy October, and she couldn't keep her eyes open.
So it's not for everybody, or even many. It is up to people like me to keep this book from slipping further into obscurity. Luckily, northern cabins and rainy Octobers are hell on books. As long as there are used book sellers I will be buying this one again and again.
July 13, 2024
This book now sits beside The Big Rock Candy Mountain as one of my favorite novels I’ve ever read. I only became aware of this book from a collection of essays by Wallace Stegner about western literature in which he praised the author and this work in particular.
The writing style is beautiful and richly descriptive and as I’ve come to increasingly appreciate about western realism, the environment and landscapes are just as central to the unfolding of the narrative as the characters and their inner lives. As I get older, I feel this kind of personal connection to place is increasingly important to me and I’m deeply moved by writers who write with a kind of conviction that they and their characters and stories belong to a particular place.
I’m especially delighted to have stumbled into a novel that explores intimately the life of a blue collar kid with musical ambitions and a hopeless romanticism toward others and the world around him as he struggles his way into adulthood, something I can personally very much relate to. Music and musicians are often featured in stories but this is the first novel I’ve read where a musician, Timothy Hazard, is the main character and writing music is the main theme - in this case, his most ambitious project, a symphony titled The City of Trembling Leaves and the many years of failures, false starts and frustrated attempts to write it.
I was a big fan of the show Everwood when it aired during the early 2000s and I myself was in high school at the time preparing to go to Blinn College of Music. If you’ve seen the show, you know it’s also about a kid with musical ambitions to go to Juilliard. I rewatched it while I was reading this book and it’s still just as wonderful and charming twenty years later. City of Trembling Leaves feels like it could have inspired some of the writers of the show. The two definitely share many common themes.
The book also very much reminded me of the film Synecdoche New York which focuses on an artist who wins a MacArthur Fellowship award that allows him to produce and direct his most ambitious stage performance. Though the movie is far more absurd in that it intentionally breaks away from realism, the main theme is similar, namely the pursuit of some large and seemingly insurmountable artist project and the repeated failures along the way.
All that is to say, if you enjoyed Everwood and Synecdoche New York, you will probably also like The City of Trembling Leaves. If you’re a fan of Wallace Stegner, you will almost certainly love Walter Van Tilburg Clark.
The writing style is beautiful and richly descriptive and as I’ve come to increasingly appreciate about western realism, the environment and landscapes are just as central to the unfolding of the narrative as the characters and their inner lives. As I get older, I feel this kind of personal connection to place is increasingly important to me and I’m deeply moved by writers who write with a kind of conviction that they and their characters and stories belong to a particular place.
I’m especially delighted to have stumbled into a novel that explores intimately the life of a blue collar kid with musical ambitions and a hopeless romanticism toward others and the world around him as he struggles his way into adulthood, something I can personally very much relate to. Music and musicians are often featured in stories but this is the first novel I’ve read where a musician, Timothy Hazard, is the main character and writing music is the main theme - in this case, his most ambitious project, a symphony titled The City of Trembling Leaves and the many years of failures, false starts and frustrated attempts to write it.
I was a big fan of the show Everwood when it aired during the early 2000s and I myself was in high school at the time preparing to go to Blinn College of Music. If you’ve seen the show, you know it’s also about a kid with musical ambitions to go to Juilliard. I rewatched it while I was reading this book and it’s still just as wonderful and charming twenty years later. City of Trembling Leaves feels like it could have inspired some of the writers of the show. The two definitely share many common themes.
The book also very much reminded me of the film Synecdoche New York which focuses on an artist who wins a MacArthur Fellowship award that allows him to produce and direct his most ambitious stage performance. Though the movie is far more absurd in that it intentionally breaks away from realism, the main theme is similar, namely the pursuit of some large and seemingly insurmountable artist project and the repeated failures along the way.
All that is to say, if you enjoyed Everwood and Synecdoche New York, you will probably also like The City of Trembling Leaves. If you’re a fan of Wallace Stegner, you will almost certainly love Walter Van Tilburg Clark.
December 1, 2011
A brief recommendation: I read this book a few years ago, and it took me months to finish--fortunately the church library is forgiving about overdue books. It was a collection of reminiscing and impressions filled in with minute detail to the point of tedium at times. It didn't seem to have much of a plot at all, but then things would proceed at the furious pace of a life being lived. Sometimes the plot elements just didn't make sense, and I don't feel the story was supposed to neatly tie together in a way that many novelss might. But ultimately it was one of the most evocative books I've ever read. I felt like the author was just spilling it all, trying to make you feel, hear, taste and see the things the way he was remembering them. Now it feels like a giant mural with big splotches of color set atop a rather murky background...or maybe the recognizable and stirring themes that recur in a long piece of orchestral music where the musical text alternates between rich layers and almost skeletal texture...kind of like a Mahler symphony. You have to listen for a long time to figure out where he's going, it seems. I love this book more in retrospect than I did at the time I was reading it. I read it to get a sense of Reno, and was disappointed because it wasn't the Reno I recognized. But now I find my impressions of Reno bending to fit what I've read, and I can't see the sign for Court Street or drive past Bowers Mansion without remembering things from this story.
December 11, 2017
Pacing is very, very patient, which is typical of Clark, but even more so here. Lots of poetry in the prose. Lovely and deep.
Update: three years after finishing the book it still really sticks with me especially whenever I think of Reno for whatever reason. Upping rating from 4 to 4.7!
Update: three years after finishing the book it still really sticks with me especially whenever I think of Reno for whatever reason. Upping rating from 4 to 4.7!
August 13, 2008
It reads like an F. Scott Fitsgerald book, only it's set in Reno in the 30's and is really true to place and time. I enjoyed reading it. I have been going to read Clark, ever since I moved to Nevada. He was THE famous Nevada writer for a long time. His novel An Ox Bow Incident was made into a movie, it's famous because it is the only major motion picture which has absolutly no female actors in it. OK back to trembling leaves. It is a LONG coming of age story. The characters are believable. You could take the book to Reno right now, and find your way around. It seems real.
February 27, 2015
This is one of those books that will change the way you see a place (in this case, Reno, Nevada) forever.
January 14, 2020
This was part of my learning about the City of Reno book series. The City of Trembling Leaves was written by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. More famous for the Ox-Bow Incident, this book is about his adopted hometown of Reno, Nevada. The opening sequence reminded me of Winesburg, Ohio and much of the book has a similar feel to it. However, instead of a nice small midwestern town, it reveals all the complexities of Reno. Some of the writing includes parts of Reno that are long gone from growth and development. You will never witness the South Meadows area with its trees and you will never run with the Mustangs in Spanish Springs (although you can still see the wild horses that roam the area if you go farther out). You still have the casinos that brought a culture that is just as bad today.
Timothy Hazard is born in San Francisco and moves to Reno as a teenager. We see him navigate his new environment and in exploring it he finds more about himself.
It is one of the only large sweeping books about Reno. It rivals Winesburg, Ohio in its purity and love of place and the people that live there. It provides a modern gritty twist that persists in most of the literature about the area. City of Trembling Leaves, Sweet Promised Land, Motel Life, and the short story collection Grind all cover aspects that make Reno what it is today.
Favorite Passages:
Houses are incipiently evil which have been intended to master time and dominate nature. That is a moribund intention. It feels death coming on all the time, and, having no faith in reproduction or multiplicity, tries to build a fort to hold it off. p. 6
Thus Reno is reminded constantly that it is only one small stop on the road of the human world, that it trembles with the comings and goings of that world, and yet that the greatest cry of that world is only a brief echo against mountains. P11
...the beauty of everything promised and nothing resolved." P 12
Every person is also a jungle himself, a forest primeval, a prehistoric swamp in which life is rich, various and reproductive, in which it is very easy to get lost, but absolutely impossible to see everything. P 20
Tim could feel no motion in the air at all, vet a few of the little aspen's eighteen or twenty leaves were gingerly shivering and twinkling. It made Tim feel that he was in the presence of some vast, benevolent and very gentle force which he was too dull to perceive. Once in a while all the leaves would tremble-at the same time, making a faint rustling, as if in access of joyous but nervous expectation, and Tim would feel a sympathetic ascension. The heavier world of mountains and the house, of the voices inside and the burden of his own body, receded beyond the perimeter of his mind as be-yond a very far-removed horizon, and he was full of the motion and light of the little aspen. Perhaps this five-minute communion, stirring nearly forgot-ten leaves of the magic wilderness within him also, gradually becoming one tremulous expectation of something, performed the last preparation for Tim's conversion. He has compared it to another brief interlude, which came upon him years later. P107
"It was at this moment that I felt the birth of the world and the deep, sad kinship of everything in it. I had considered this kinship, of course, innumerable times, but I knew it then, beyond question. It was a revelation. It was in me without an idea. All that I had ever considered, argued and doubted about uni-versal kinship, by bones, and by atoms, by the seasons of fruiting and of death, by the immortality of generation, by the universes of space and of the grain of dust, was in that instant established and yet made a childish tinkering with notions. P109
It was August, but August is already autumn at that altitude...p165
I have always felt that Tahoe, when it was quiet, does not touch its bottom or shores, but is suspended like air, and coldly and constantly refreshed by its true affinity, inter-stellar. 165
Now I suppose I might say it’s the whole philosophy of life. I sit and listen for the sound of the nuclear. 204
The city was only dreamily astir as yet. Even the downtown section appeared clean and empty and filled with windows which observed the coming day with great hope. At such an hour in such a day, the power of the trees of Reno was great. Their certainty of forever, their knowledge that the river of life was brimming and rippling silently through God's pastures, reached even to the intersection of Virginia and Second. -Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves p. 232
The city was only dreamily astir as yet. Even the downtown section appeared clean and empty and filled with windows which observed the coming day with great hope...
Either you closed yourself and became one of the jealous or ambitious, or you were opened up, and became simply yourself, which was enough. P395
Yet there is one important difference between even this region and the truly moribund cities of the world, the difference which makes Reno a city of adolescence, a city of dissonant themes, sawing against each other with a kind of piercing beauty like that of a fourtheen-year-old girl or a seventen-year-old boy, the beauty of everything promised and nothing resolved. Even from the very center of Reno, from the intersection of Virginia and Second Streets, and even at night, when restless clubs lights mask the stars, one can look in any direction and see the infinite shoals of the leaves hovering about the first lone crossing light. (12)
Timothy Hazard is born in San Francisco and moves to Reno as a teenager. We see him navigate his new environment and in exploring it he finds more about himself.
It is one of the only large sweeping books about Reno. It rivals Winesburg, Ohio in its purity and love of place and the people that live there. It provides a modern gritty twist that persists in most of the literature about the area. City of Trembling Leaves, Sweet Promised Land, Motel Life, and the short story collection Grind all cover aspects that make Reno what it is today.
Favorite Passages:
Houses are incipiently evil which have been intended to master time and dominate nature. That is a moribund intention. It feels death coming on all the time, and, having no faith in reproduction or multiplicity, tries to build a fort to hold it off. p. 6
Thus Reno is reminded constantly that it is only one small stop on the road of the human world, that it trembles with the comings and goings of that world, and yet that the greatest cry of that world is only a brief echo against mountains. P11
...the beauty of everything promised and nothing resolved." P 12
Every person is also a jungle himself, a forest primeval, a prehistoric swamp in which life is rich, various and reproductive, in which it is very easy to get lost, but absolutely impossible to see everything. P 20
Tim could feel no motion in the air at all, vet a few of the little aspen's eighteen or twenty leaves were gingerly shivering and twinkling. It made Tim feel that he was in the presence of some vast, benevolent and very gentle force which he was too dull to perceive. Once in a while all the leaves would tremble-at the same time, making a faint rustling, as if in access of joyous but nervous expectation, and Tim would feel a sympathetic ascension. The heavier world of mountains and the house, of the voices inside and the burden of his own body, receded beyond the perimeter of his mind as be-yond a very far-removed horizon, and he was full of the motion and light of the little aspen. Perhaps this five-minute communion, stirring nearly forgot-ten leaves of the magic wilderness within him also, gradually becoming one tremulous expectation of something, performed the last preparation for Tim's conversion. He has compared it to another brief interlude, which came upon him years later. P107
"It was at this moment that I felt the birth of the world and the deep, sad kinship of everything in it. I had considered this kinship, of course, innumerable times, but I knew it then, beyond question. It was a revelation. It was in me without an idea. All that I had ever considered, argued and doubted about uni-versal kinship, by bones, and by atoms, by the seasons of fruiting and of death, by the immortality of generation, by the universes of space and of the grain of dust, was in that instant established and yet made a childish tinkering with notions. P109
It was August, but August is already autumn at that altitude...p165
I have always felt that Tahoe, when it was quiet, does not touch its bottom or shores, but is suspended like air, and coldly and constantly refreshed by its true affinity, inter-stellar. 165
Now I suppose I might say it’s the whole philosophy of life. I sit and listen for the sound of the nuclear. 204
The city was only dreamily astir as yet. Even the downtown section appeared clean and empty and filled with windows which observed the coming day with great hope. At such an hour in such a day, the power of the trees of Reno was great. Their certainty of forever, their knowledge that the river of life was brimming and rippling silently through God's pastures, reached even to the intersection of Virginia and Second. -Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The City of Trembling Leaves p. 232
The city was only dreamily astir as yet. Even the downtown section appeared clean and empty and filled with windows which observed the coming day with great hope...
Either you closed yourself and became one of the jealous or ambitious, or you were opened up, and became simply yourself, which was enough. P395
Yet there is one important difference between even this region and the truly moribund cities of the world, the difference which makes Reno a city of adolescence, a city of dissonant themes, sawing against each other with a kind of piercing beauty like that of a fourtheen-year-old girl or a seventen-year-old boy, the beauty of everything promised and nothing resolved. Even from the very center of Reno, from the intersection of Virginia and Second Streets, and even at night, when restless clubs lights mask the stars, one can look in any direction and see the infinite shoals of the leaves hovering about the first lone crossing light. (12)
September 4, 2017
Some books are inhaled. This is a book to savor a chapter at a time and keep to reread again.
June 6, 2018
Loved this book. So glad to have discovered this author.
August 26, 2019
Excellent use of topography as memory for a city and a character
January 11, 2024
there is no better book set in Reno, perfection
December 27, 2009
The first half of the book I would rate as a 4 star. Then the main character moved to Carmel, CA and I was forced to skim those parts. Blech. Why didn't his editor tell him that this section doesn't fit in with the rest of the book?
By the end, I was glad to have this book behind me. Almost 700 pages is a long time to spend with one character, but still a worthwhile read.
By the end, I was glad to have this book behind me. Almost 700 pages is a long time to spend with one character, but still a worthwhile read.
Read
April 16, 2010The author's use of Reno, Nevada, as a major character in "the lives and loves" of the main character--who is followed from young boy through maturation as a composer, along with a number of close friends who contribute to his maturation. Clarke's major writing seems to have been "The Oxbow Incident," which did nothing for me!
January 19, 2011
The reviews on Amazon are better than any I could write. I guess I like these big fat books that a person 'lives in' for awhile.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews