Crossing to Safety (Modern Library) (Modern Library Classics)

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The worst sin described is Charity's tendancy to be a bit pushy and Sid's tendancy to be a bit weak. Of course the good old days for us were the new unpredictable days of the mid-twentieth century for most of the country folk roundabout. It is one of the great secrets kept between couples…The hunt for love is always on, and in some tragic, truthful, stunning way it forever eludes us.

Sid needs Charity to give structure to his life, to provide direction; Charity needs someone to manage. I like books where ‘nothing happens’ although I’ve been put off reading Stoner as it seems very masculine. Well, that’s exactly what Wallace Stegner has done with Crossing to Safety, a book that captured my heart.I found all the name-dropping in Florence a bit tedious even if I did appreciate some of the analysis particularly of Massacio (one of my favoritea there) as well as the playing of Beethoven's 9th over the chilling conflict over dishwashing. A quiet book where I can derive pleasure from the beauty of the words on the page and the images they conjure. Be it the tension aboard a capsizing sailboat, around a barbeque gone wrong or the peace of a solitary early morning walk through a dewy forest, Stegner makes us feel present. She is running the life of her spouse and becomes disappointed when the goals she has set for him have not been met.

Each year the two couples get together at a summer family compound in Vermont owned by the wealthier couple. Dónde la velocidad, el ruido, la fealdad, todo lo que nos hace quienes somos y nos hace reconocernos en la literatura?

Walking, camping, swimming, getting out into the fresh air is much a part of the story as the academic striving for jobs and tenure. This time I was less enamored with it, but not because I found fault with Stegner’s writing or storytelling. He describes them minutely, painstakingly, even relating a section of Sid and Charity’s courtship as though he were an omnipresent observer, though he had not yet met them. The things in life that are most precious to us are the intangibles, the things we can barely identify ourselves, and the things no one can possibly rip from us.

At the time I’d read a very positive and passionate review and that was enough for me to know I had to read it. Both women are pregnant when the couples meet, and both men are working, on contract, in the English department of the university. Through the hardwoods along the foot of the hill, through the belt of cedars where the ground is swampy with springs, through the spruce and balsam of the steep pitch, I go alertly, feasting my eyes. In Crossing to Safety, Stegner explores the mysteries of friendship, and it extends Stegner's distinguished body of work that had already earned him a Pulitzer Prize (for 1971's Angle of Repose) [2] and the National Book Award (for 1976's The Spectator Bird). In this respect, Crossing to Safety reminds me a little of John Williams’s Stoner, a recently-reissued book that gives us the story of a man’s seemingly less than remarkable life.Stegner composed a brilliant life contrast: the optimism and enthusiasm of two young, married couples starting out in Madison, Wisconsin, when hope sprung eternal, versus these same marrieds, thirty years on, after life, though gracing them in different ways, has ineluctably dealt each major disappointments and forced them into cathartic concessions. The Morgans and the Langs meet in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin, during the Great Depression. As organized and controlling as Charity is, she cannot control death or any of what will come after. Their deviations from the norm are more subtle, and all the more fascinating for how well I can imagine them playing out in my own outwardly conventional world. As their careers mature, they take different paths, but they spend much of their time together on summer vacations in the small Vermont town where Charity's family has been coming for decades.