可借阅:*
图书馆 | 资料类型 | 排架号 | 子计数 | 书架位置 | 状态 | 图书预约 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
正在检索... Central | Book | FICTION | 1 | Fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
正在检索... South | Book | F PAVELICH | 1 | Fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
正在检索... South | Book | F PAVELICH M | 1 | Fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
正在检索... South | Book | FIC PAV | 1 | Fiction Collection | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
链接这些题名
已订购
摘要
摘要
In 1865 a baby--too large a baby to pass through anyone's hips--is born to a couple at the crumbling edge of Europe where the horror of pending war is already in the air. By any measure too large, our hero can develop no patience for his determined, dinky fellows, and so from the Balkan backwater of his birth and his youth as a precocious highwayman, to intrigues at court in Vienna, the problem remains the same--he is by one means and another continually wearing out his welcome.
In this bawdy first novel by Matt Pavelich, Danny Savage migrates to the New World in 1899, where he finally settles an empty, rough corner of Wyoming with his epic shrew of a wife, Stoja. In Savage's wake are spent empires, ruptured families, collateral lives that have touched and fallen away.
Not since Ken Kesey burst on the scene with Sometimes a Great Notion has the West produced such an exciting and accomplished new novelist. Matt Pavelich has given us a giant's coat tails to ride upon, let us wear for a while his seven-league boots.
评论 (4)
出版社周刊评论
Difficult to classify, this striking, perplexing first novel is made up of stories that swirl around its strange protagonist and his picaresque adventures. In the darkness of the mid-19th-century Balkan hinterlands, Danilo Lazich's birth kills his mother; he is simply too large a baby for her to bear and live. The giant of a child eventually becomes an infamous young highwayman and travels to Vienna, where he is "collected" by the Empress Elisabeth, who employs him as a bodyguard and physical curiosity over her husband's objections. As the clouds of war gather in the region, Danilo, now known as Daniel Savage, marries the spinster daughter of an innkeeper and sometimes revolutionary. Her dowry is a ticket to Montana, where Savage, now calling himself Danny, takes his ill-tempered bride. There he becomes involved in the lives of the region's miners, then relocates to Wyoming, where he turns himself into a feared and respected entrepreneur. What saves the novel from becoming an unsatisfactory leapfrog through time and space and a simple showcase for Savage's superior intellect and rapacious curiosity is Pavelich's lyricism and original wit. Sketches of minor characters are evocative and memorable, although all too often these characters are abandoned before they are fully integrated into the story. Plot connections are frequently skipped as the story breaks off, then resumes awkwardly and bewilderingly in a different place and different time. The result is a frustrating sense of incompletion, though Pavelich's stylistic flourishes and cunning vignettes give the novel flair. (Apr. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
Balkan attitudes and American possibilities mingle successfully in a first novel picked from the slush pile. Danilo Lazich was the death of his mother. Outsized at birth, the baby quickly outgrows the feeble control of his cobbler father and abandons the shoddy civilization of his Bosnian Serb birthplace for an outlaw life in the hills where, known to his superstitious neighbors as Vuk Hajduk, the wolf, terrorizing travelers and living off the land, he grows to enormous size and, most interestingly, enormous intellect and curiosity. Besting the police and the militia at every encounter, Lazich works his way to Vienna to become, briefly, bodyguard to the Empress Elizabeth, one of many superb character sketches Pavelich throws into this pleasingly undisciplined book. A return to the Balkan provinces results in marriage to Stoja, the incarnation of shrewd, hard-working, unforgiving, bad-tempered, passionate Slavic womanhood. The unloving couple flee to America, landing in New Orleans and hiking to Baton Rouge, where they catch a train for Butte, Montana. There, thousands of their compatriots and other immigrants work the richest lode of copper in a country busy wiring itself from coast to coast. Now known as Dan Savage, Lazich decides that digging is for suckers, but finds plenty of work as an enforcer until he gets the hang of the business and engineering ends of mining, and eventually moves his family to Wyoming, where huge amounts of coal lie waiting for the railroads. Angelene, the only child of the Savage marriage, presents Dan with an American grandchild Rade--Red--who will be truly New World, and Savage's true companion in his old age. Pavelich starts and abandons a score of novels as he traces Savage's life. Stoja, for example, plays the stock market successfully, but where the fortune goes is the reader's guess. As is Angelene's fate. Readers who can cope with the chaos will be rewarded with a very canny look at the process of Americanization. A fine mess. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
《书目》(Booklist)书评
In this first novel, Pavelich tells the epic story of Danny Savage. Born in a forgotten backwater of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was a man of gigantic proportions. Forced out into the countryside by his father, who could no longer afford to feed him, this boy-giant became the legendary Vuk Hajduk--the highwayman, the wolf. Fleeing the authorities, he made his way to Vienna, and in this most worldly of capitals, he became a darling of the aging and eccentric Empress Elisabeth. Falling out of favor with the authorities, he found passage to the U.S., along with his shrewish wife who harbored a vengeful grudge toward him throughout his life. He eventually landed in the great open spaces of the West, where he settled along with many other fellow Slavs. Amid harsh mining towns he prospered, raised his family, and found peace. This tale of a gentle giant is a rapturous and remarkable look at both the failing of European power and the settlement of the West in the early twentieth century. --Michael Spinella Copyright 2004 Booklist
《图书馆杂志》(Library Journal )书评
This debut novel follows the adventures of an Eastern European boy named Danilo who grows into a giant called Savage. His life is told in a series of snapshots, beginning with his birth in 1865. Because of his colossal size, he is feared by his town's residents, but he temporarily finds suitable work as a bodyguard. Savage changes professions continually until his wandering nature takes him to America, where he works in the mines until finding easier ways of making a living. When he suffers a debilitating concussion, his grandson Red helps him recover, and the story switches to Red's budding love for a girl named Dove. The characters in this family narrative are never fully developed, and the constant skipping forward in place and time never allows readers a sense of closure as they are rushed from one event to the next. Not required for most collections.-David A. Berone, Univ. of New Hampshire Lib., Durham (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
目录
| Vuk Hajduk | p. 1 |
| Therefore Viennese | p. 29 |
| His Own and Some Other's Blood | p. 66 |
| If It Is So Far | p. 91 |
| The Soils of His Choosing | p. 122 |
| Twilight Coming | p. 164 |
| A Thought to Caresses | p. 201 |
| Flesh Wounds | p. 218 |