What of David vann he is the personification of the patient writer… I mean that type of writer who never stops being so due to pecuniary imperatives. If you are a writer, it is because you write, because you enjoy locking yourself in your good spare time in front of your naked story on display behind your computer screen.
If you like to write it is because you love to lose yourself in stories told by others, without that vainglory that pushes you to despise what is not born from your creative entrails. David Vann was a writer for the many years in which they would only read it at home (if they were in the mood for it) or at most a co-worker. And once he got the editorial random wand on him, he kept writing because he just never stopped being a writer.
It may sound like a truism, but this is how that writer's wood ends up being polished. Then comes the success, that umpteenth power of possible and impossible that expose opportunities based on what you have been able to polish your craft; and the desire that publishers have to bet on you, that unknown writer.
More than a decade after writing his first book, David vann he was finally able to publish his Legend of a Suicide, a stark story about self-survival. And of course, another of the great factors that can push a writer to success is precisely that, writing with your stark truth. What is not authentic does not sell because nobody believes it.
And so we find a patient writer convinced to count from the depths to convince more and more readers. An author who tunes especially in many occasions with Cormac mccarty, both determined to visit the dark side that can inhabit us.
Top 3 Recommended Books by David Vann
Sukkwan Island
The island as a symbol of paradise also has its opposite pole. Well known examples are, from the remote Robinson Crusoe of Daniel Defoe, to the haunting Shutter Island of Denis Lehane.
In the case of Sukkwan Island we come across a story that points to an impossible exorcism of David himself in his traumatic paternal relationship. In fact, the story points to that in a search for a shared physical space between Jim, the father and Roy, the son, seeking to finally harmonize their existence on the inhospitable island of Sukkwan.
The confidence that the debt of genetics and the spirit of overcoming controversies can remain abandoned there forever, while the two men return home purified is disrupted as the bucolic claim directly impacts the harshness of a remote place that can finally become two irreconcilable enemies in search of survival in a hostile space.
Caribou island
When you approach this novel you think of a new journey into the dark, towards that evil instinct that can occupy the human surpassing the worst of beasts.
Later you can believe that no, that it is a successful search for a free destination, away from the madding crowd. And yet this novel ultimately becomes something very different. Suddenly the island of Caribou Island, also in the icy Alaska, happens to be located in the middle of a big city in which two former lovers survive as best they can from the worn-out love that leads to the worst of loneliness, to hiding from oneself.
The cold of Caribou Island can become a current that runs through the corridor of a home converted into a prison. The story of Gary and Irene, with the shadow of their daughter Rhoda becomes any of those other islands that can be discovered at any latitude inland.
Earth
For David Vann, his patient literature is a bitter repose of particular experiences in the family. The only possible childhood paradise was for this author a tragic prelude to maturity.
This is how it is understood that their stories are filled with a dazzling color in scenery that is submerged in the gray and black of characters always located beyond the light, where eccentricity or madness, violence or the most flammable disenchantment resides.
A young man in his twenties lives with his mother, a woman back from everything who contemplates the grotesque of her life manifesting itself in a son who thinks he is enlightened. Her bewilderment is just as powerful and strident in her own son's notion of her, a deformed mirror in which coexistence always destroys, when it does not end up drifting towards the most stormy of the human being.
