En stegner the stereotype of the literary goldsmith who constructs meticulously, with obsessive neatness in terms of scenes and characters, was fulfilled. The stridency is not an option either as a wink to the reader or as a mere slip. The hyperrealism it is thus, a carbon copy of life breathed through pores, with its more or less fortunate aromas but always deep to the abyssal depths of existence.
It is not a question of meeting Stegner for a piscinesque reading, but rather as an intellectual challenge and gratifying meditation observed on the transit of life, as new gods thanks to the imagination and the ability to develop new planes, new courses, uchronies of oneself or of the entire universe.
The best of all is that despite the attempt to materialize ideas, to make proposals tangible in that touch of certain things, everything ends up being an invention, like life itself. And so Stegner's novels finally wink at us, accomplices, as if telling us that now it's up to us to walk and create our novel despite the fact that nothing is true and nothing lasts ...
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Wallace Stegner
Angle of repose
There is no more History, with capital letters, than the one that leads each of us to where we are. Genes and circumstances of our ancestors trace the map of the hazards that locate us and even the tics that transform us ...
The historian Lyman Ward, now retired from his teaching duties, sets out to investigate the memorable history of his grandparents: a high society couple from the East Coast who, in the second half of the XNUMXth century, left the place where they both had grown up to settle in California, when this was a territory yet to be civilized. As he delves into the memories of his family, Lyman Ward realizes the intensity with which the past helps illuminate and understand the present.
Based on the correspondence of an American author and illustrator, Mary Hallock Foote, one of the first artists to deal with life in the American West, Angle of Rest portrays the effort that the people of the Old World had to make to face a new geographical, historical and human reality. This exciting account of four generations of an American family was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, and is considered to be Wallace Stegner's greatest novel and one of the best American novels of the entire XNUMXth century.
The Spectator Bird
A novel of heartbreaking realism from the melancholy of what has been dubiously experienced, but idealized as the only escape route from what remains...
Joe Allston is a retired literary agent living in California with his wife, Ruth; With no ancestors or descendants (his parents and only son are long dead), he feels like a spectator who attends the end of his life. The arrival of an old friend's postcard forces him to go back to the diaries he wrote twenty years ago when, for a few months, he traveled with his wife to Denmark to see the country where his family was originally from.
Ruth convinces her husband to read a fragment of these diaries to her every night, and thus they relive what happened during that trip, especially the relationship between their marriage and the mysterious Danish aristocrat Astrid Wredel-Krarup, who was their hostess in Copenhagen. The memory of that time awakens long-overdue feelings and questions in them and leads them to reflect on transcendental aspects of their lives. As in previous novels, Stegner manages to accurately portray the multiplicity of sensations and feelings that crowd in adulthood. The spectator bird it deserved the National Book Award in 1977.
In a safe place
Sometimes other paradises are created other than those lost during childhood. They are no longer the same strongholds of happiness but at least of security. Spaces sustained in the end in a limbo that is still recoverable at times as a breath of encouragement, as a utopia to continue observing ahead...
When two young couples meet during the Great Depression, a friendship develops between them that will last a lifetime. They initially share many things: Charity Lang and Sally Morgan are expecting their first child, and their husbands Sid and Larry are literature professors at the University of Wisconsin, although their relationship becomes more complex as they share decades of loyalty. , love, fragility and disagreements.
Thirty-four years after the beginning of this friendship, the Morgans visit their friends' summer colony in Vermont for what they know will be their last weekend with Charity. During that visit, Larry remembers all his years of friendship: the joys, the sorrows, the illusions and also the dreams that remained to be fulfilled; but above the story of the events beats a deep reflection on love and friendship, on the attempts of four people to face the tribulations of life.
