Train Dreams

Una novel·la curta, però intensa que t’enganxa a la lectura (me l’he polit en dos dies) perquè tant la història que explica com la manera de contar-la són molt interessants. Narra la vida dura d’un home que als estius treballa talant arbres en els inacabables boscos del nord-oest d’Amèrica del Nord i a l’hivern fent feinetes al poble. Es casa una mica gran (per l’època) i tenen una nena. Tanmateix, un gran incendi forestal arrasa tota la vall mentre ell és fora treballant i quan pot tornar no troba ni la dona ni la filla.

La novel·la explica aquest sentiment de frustració i solitud que l’acompanyarà la resta de la vida, però que no li impedeix continuar escarrassant-se i tirant endavant. És un home solitari, malgrat que a la novel·la hi apareixen multitud de personatges secundaris, cadascun d’ells amb una història al darrere i units per un fil constant que és el tren. El tren en l’obra no és només un mitjà de transport, és una font de riquesa (molta gent hi treballa directament o indirectament) i pot ser també causa de la mort.

Una obra molt interessant, molt ben explicada, sense floritures, però amb un llenguatge ric i clar que ens transporta mentalment a un temps i un espai ben allunyats del nostre.

This might be a perfect book, if there is such a thing. I'm selecting an incredible passage to include here, but I think you could just grab any paragraph and be be blown away:

"The wonder-horse show that evening in 1935 included a wolf-boy. He wore a mask of fur, and a suit that looked like fur but was really something else. Shining in the electric light, silver and blue, the wolf-boy frolicked and gamboled around the stage in such a way the watchers couldn't be sure if he meant to be laughed at.

They were ready to laugh in order to prove they hadn't been fooled. They had seen and laughed at such as the Magnet Boy and the Chicken Boy, at the Professor of Silly and at jugglers who beat themselves over the head with Indian pins that weren't really made of wood. They had given their money to preachers who had lifted their hearts and baptized scores of them and who had later rolled around drunk in the Kootenai village and fornicated with squaws. Tonight, faced with the spectacle of this counterfeit monster, they were silent at first. Then a couple made remarks that sounded like questions, and a man in the dark honked like a goose, and people let themselves laugh at the wolf-boy.

But they hushed, all at once and quite abruptly, when he stood still at center stage, his arms straight out from his shoulders, and went rigid, and began to tremble with a massive inner dynamism. Nobody present had ever seen anyone stand so still and yet so strangely mobile. He laid his head back until his scalp contacted his spine, that far back, and opened his throat, and a sound rose in the auditorium like a wind coming from all four directions, low and terrifying, rumbling up from the ground beneath the floor, and it gathered into a 'roar that sucked at the hearing itself, and coalesced into a voice that penetrated into the sinuses and finally into the very minds of those hearing it, taking itself higher and higher, more and more awful and beautiful, the originating ideal of all such sounds ever made, of the foghorn and the ship's horn, the locomotive's lonesome whistle, of opera singing and the music of flutes and the continuous moan-music of bagpipes. And suddenly it all went black. And that time was gone forever." (115-116)

This is not a book I would choose to read if it weren't recommended in one of those articles about authors' favorite books. I can't remember which author liked it, but it is a very good book. At only 116 pages, it left me with a feeling of something much more epic, perhaps a Dennis Lehane novel.

The story takes place in the early part of the 20th century in the Idaho panhandle, and stars a man who spends his summers working on the huge trestle railroad bridges that were being built at the time. He winters in his cabin with his wife and daughter until he tragically loses them. Most of the rest of his life is spent trying to resolve his loss.

Robert makes his way while running into some pretty gnarly characters. The book is packed with their stories and with evocative descriptions of a wilderness that is gone. It seems to me an accurate depiction of life on the edges of the American West of the time. There are sparks of antagonism towards Native Americans, women, and the Chinese; and it's difficult to watch the wilderness being obliviously hacked away for the railroads, but it happened. For the brief time it took to read the book, I was absolutely immersed in the journey of this man, mostly alone, who is trying to make sense of a wild and irrational world.