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开 本: 32开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9781400031115
After nearly 30 years away, Rember, a Harvard-educated English
professor at Idaho’s Albertson College and holder of various odd
jobs, returns to his backwoods roots in Stanley, Idaho. The
hardscrabble wilderness of his youth has seen major changes: pushed
to the brink of environmental disaster from nuclear waste runoff
and overbuilding, it has been reclaimed by well-meaning
preservationists and returned to something that resembles home,
only “what once was familiar was unfamiliar. What once was real was
no longer real.” Native fish have long disappeared, replaced by
farmed fish; wild game replaced by protected “wildlife.” Yet,
sunsets are still magical and the old fences and ruined cabins
still have stories to tell. As Rember relives his youth, his focus
moves away from the ways his surroundings have changed to the ways
he has changed. As he revisits his home grounds-looking at the
antlers his trapper/fishing guide father collected; finding an old
photo of his grandma, who lived “on the ragged far edge of
consensus reality”; remembering the elks he shot and gutted-he
relives the turning points, the revelations, the small epiphanies
“for which all subsequent living is merely repetition and
elaboration.” He used to think life was about “free will,” but now,
feeling the tug of his own history, he can settle for “free fall.”
Rember writes sentences so elegantly crafted they seem effortless,
tells stories so well turned readers will want to read them aloud.
Beneath the writing, it’s Rember’s voyage to self-consciousness
that gives his story power and meaning.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text
refers to the edition.
he had been brought up. He returned out of a homing instinct: the
same forty acres that had sustained his family’s horses had
sustained a vision of a place where he belonged in the world, a
life where he could get up in the morning, step out the door, and
catch dinner from the Salmon River. But to his surprise, he found
that what was once familiar was now unfamiliar. Everything might
have looked the same to the horses that spring, but to Rember this
was no longer home.
In Traplines, Rember recounts his experiences of growing up
in a time when the fish were wild in the rivers, horses were
brought into the valley each spring from their winter pasture, and
electric light still seemed magical. Today those same experiences
no longer seem to possess the authenticity they once did. In his
journey home, Rember discovers how the West, both as a place in
which to live and as a terrain of the imagination, has been
transformed. And he wonders whether his recollections of what once
was prevent him from understanding his past and appreciating what
he found when he returned home. In Traplines, Rember excavates the
hidden desires that color memory and shows us how, once revealed,
they can allow us to understand anew the stories we tell
ourselves.
From the Hardcover edition.
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