Dropping in with a quick update. I liked the book but didn’t love it. As I read it, I really liked it but now having had 6 weeks for it to percolate, I’m not loving it. It was a fast read and I was able to finish in time.
It is my preferred genre of magical realism and I loved the folksy tale-telling. However, it was hard for me to take Odie’s struggles seriously when considering the untold story of the Indian children and the unbelievable horrors they had to face. But I get that the book is not about that.
I found the harmonica a sweet touch — it’s a piece of his past that Odie is able to keep. I guess it was a bit annoying how many times it came out as the book progressed.
As with everyone else, I never guessed that Odie was Odysseus. Felt quite dumb when it was revealed.
Shades of Twain and Dickens permeated the writing. I didn’t see the connection to the Odyssey but I’m not usually very clued in to these things.
Overall, a good read but I’m not sure I would put WKK on my must read list.
@ignatius I can understand your frustration with this book, it was a hot mess in many ways, rambling, magical realism, crazy coincidences, unrealistic characters, moralistic…….
I just read the interview with WKK, and he says his process was just to let the story unfold, he didn’t know where it was going, Perhaps we felt that, and if you read the last pages, especially is prologue when he gives a “wink and nod” to his, “ story telling” to his embellishments, as @Mary13 pointed out in first post, he gives some pertinent info.
Those last pages aren’t to be missed.
“ What was the most challenging aspect to writing This Tender Land?
Believing in myself as a storyteller. I had no idea in the beginning where the story would take me. I simply had to trust that all my storytelling instincts would guide me correctly. There were moments of doubt, sometimes deep, but doesn’t every artist have those?
And the most enjoyable?
Whenever I felt the story flowing like the rivers that carried the four vagabonds along, it was sheer heaven.”
I’m another who wasn’t enamored of the book. It has been a few weeks since I read it. I thought much of the language was beautiful and quite poetic. But I didn’t care for the characters - I like the Homeric Odysseus but not so much Odie. Also, I was not comfortable with as much religion as kept coming in. And I thought the plot was…not quite contrived, exactly, but deliberately running into every variety of non-mainstream persons, for example. The coincidental meetings seemed forced rather than natural to me. And Odie sure knew a lot of songs for having been in his living situation, more than seemed possible.
I’ve definitely been there. That’s when the crossword puzzles come out.
One of the things I liked about This Tender Land was that it didn’t require too much concentration. I adored Hamnet, but needed to follow up with something at a different level of intensity.
Yes, that was deliberate. Says Krueger:
When I began to consider the story I wanted to write, which quite honestly, I envisioned as an update of Huckleberry Finn, the Great Depression appealed to me as the perfect, challenging setting.
and
I love the works of Charles Dickens, and in part, my decision to open This Tender Land in a fictional institution called the Lincoln Indian Training School was a nod to his powerful novels of social inequity.
[quote][quote=“VeryHappy, post:38, topic:3530511”]
That said, I have for the last several months been having difficulty concentrating on any books at all.
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I’ve definitely been there. That’s when the crossword puzzles come out.[/quote]
For me, it’s sudoku. I’m obsessed.
(ETA: I guess I don’t know how to quote a quote and another sentence.)
When you highlight the sentence you want to copy, the option to either “Quote” or “Share” will appear above. Select “Quote” and it will copy it into a new post. Then you can add your comments below.
I think the author was trying to make it clear that this was a spiritual journey for the Vagabonds as much as a physical one, but he wasn’t very subtle about it.
However, I didn’t feel like religion was being pushed down my throat; I just felt like Odie was working through some universal questions: Why does God so often seem absent when we need him most? Is there any reason for the trials we endure or is it all just random? How do you transition from anger over life’s tragedies, to acceptance?
Odie’s musings were pretty simplistic, but he’s a child. (And this book has a very YA feel to it. I think it would be loved by a 13 year old.)
I actually liked the religious parts a lot. This passage (end of Chapter 6) gave me the shivers:
“Maybe it really is like it says in the Bible,” I offered. “God’s a shepherd and we’re his flock and he watches over us.”
Finally Albert whispered, “Listen, Odie, what does a shepherd eat?”
I didn’t know where he was going with that, so I didn’t reply.
“His flock,” Albert told me. "One by one.
I, too, had a “D’oh!” moment when the name Odysseus was written out! Yes, of course, the story was an odyssey as well as a tall tale and a Mark Twain adventure.
I’m no fan of magical realism, but WKK’s storytelling let me roll along down the river with our travelers, accepting each new bend and twist. I did feel like it was “a bit of everything” rolled into one tale, and that was sometimes tiresome (“what box will be checked off in this chapter?”) I sure didn’t need the aunt/mother to be a prostitute and brothel owner – there could have been less dramatic but equally satisfying ways to wrap things up!
The harmonica was endearing, rather than annoying, to me. My Minnesota-raised dad and uncles always carried harmonicas in their pockets and needed no encouragement to bring them out. It was a way to express emotions without saying a word. Some of my sweetest memories are of spontaneous harmonica music!
I don’t know if This Tender Land will stick in my mind, but immediately after finishing it I checked out Ordinary Grace from the library – a better book, in my opinion, and one I won’t soon forget! (Themes of family, religion, Minnesota rivers and towns, and young boys growing up and figuring out themselves/the world are here again … I think I have a handle, now, on how WKK thinks.)
“I sure didn’t need the aunt/mother to be a prostitute and brothel owner” - That was one of the parts that had me thinking about East of Eden.
I actually liked the harmonica “character”, did not tire of those scenes. But I did think it was awfully far fetched that the boys would break in and demand its return.
@jollymama I read Ordinary Grace several years ago, well before I read This Tender Land. Though I appreciated WKK’s prose in both, I liked the plot much better in OG.
Re the harmonica: I wonder if it’s a nod to Olaf’s harmonica in Katherine Anne Porter’s story “Noon Wine,” another story about a rural vagabond. Don’t know.
Odie, like his namesake, uses stories to manipulate people and get out of bad situations.
I think making Mose mute is also a way of not trying to “voice” an experience beyond the narrator’s or author’s own. It’s literary tact. The novelist Lionel Shriver has argued that it’s the novelist’s job to adopt the voice of someone you’re not, but WKK may have felt differently.
It’s definitely a latter-day Huck Finn narrative, with the geography flipped.
I think that while the railroad vagabond section was terrifying, it’s not necessarily worse than the Lincoln school, which was an enclosed system of terror. Dictatorship vs. anarchy; you’re subject to evil either way.
I think you have to suspend belief a bit as to Odie’s prodigious repertoire and talent on the harmonica but it helped lighten a book that was pretty dark and heavy in many parts.
You also have to suspend belief on the extent of Albert’s amazing mechanical prowess, but it is a work of fiction after all.
It is fascinating that Emmy had the gift of slightly manipulating events in time. That was a twist I hadn’t imagined but it flowed with the story.
Moses was an interesting character as well—so strong, loyal and athletic.
I may try reading another book by this author. It is not my normal genre.
