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The Penguin English Library features the best novels in the English language. Get lost in the amazing stories, browse the Penguin English Library. |
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"Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enhancement of life". -- Los Angeles Times
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The novel tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks nonetheless on a search to rediscover his grandmother, no long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier.
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First Sentence
Now I believe they will leave me alone. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Now I believe they will leave me alone. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
How is it that a person can go his or her whole life (however short or long that may be) and be completely oblivious to the surrounding world and all that is in it? That is how I felt after reading Angle of Repose. Until that fateful day, during a casual browse at my favorite bookstore, I had never even heard of Wallace Stegner (and me, with a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature...humph!). I am guilty of not fully and consciously acknowledging that with every moment that goes by, I am losing valuable time from reading beautiful, magnificently written books. And if, until recently, I had never heard of Wallace Stegner, who else haven't I heard of? This is a troubling question indeed........
I will not say that Angle of Repose is the best book I have ever read (I am not sure I believe in such a concept), nor will I go into a boring and subjective analysis of Stegner's work, but I just want to say that months after reading this book my heart is still racing with the excitement of having discovered an author whose writing is still new and refreshing years after it was penned.
I will not say that Angle of Repose is the best book I have ever read (I am not sure I believe in such a concept), nor will I go into a boring and subjective analysis of Stegner's work, but I just want to say that months after reading this book my heart is still racing with the excitement of having discovered an author whose writing is still new and refreshing years after it was penned.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Angle of Repose was my first Stegner book. Chosen by my bookclub, half the members loved it, the other half found it frustrating, but we all agreed it would have made a great movie with Gary Cooper and ____? (choices for the female lead ranged from a young Barbara Stanwyck to Maureen O'Hara)...funny, we couldn't imagine it made with anyone in the current star circuit, it was definately an Old West story. Film version aside, Angle of Repose has held a place in my heart as a good read: images of Susan's art,her journals, the struggle up the rugged mountain road, the journeys to impossible places (not like travelling in this day and age), their house. I loved it. The only thing that my bookclub agreed on was that the ending of Angle of Repose kind of wimped out. It made more sense when we heard a recording of an interview shortly before his death when the interviewer mentioned that the ending was somewhat abrupt, and Stegner commented that he was in a hurry to get the book to his publisher, before he (Stegner)went on his way to Europe, so he kind of hurried the ending. What?! That aside, Wallace Stegner had a way of getting inside relationships, showing the love and/or the antagonism, like the couples in Crossing to Safety and the writer and the guy camping on his property in All the Little Live Things. Just a guess, but from the three Stegner books I've read, I would bet their author was a pretty feisty guy. There is a seduction to the antagonism, I wouldn't want it in my life, but I enjoy peeking at it in the lives of his characters.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
As a child of the rural american west, including some of the places in this book, I was drawn to how stegner touches on our strange and sometimes masochistic desire to follow an american dream in this vast and sometimes empty land. The novel has a quiet, meditative quality that gets into your head, if you let it, and for me set off a long period of self-contemplation. The many subtle facets of this tale of wandering and identity make it one to read more than once, at different stages in life.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Beautiful, haunting, desolate - and somehow disappointing too...
I had never heard of Wallace Stegner before, which I am duly ashamed of, considering I'm an English Literature and American Studies graduate. Read more
Published 4 months ago by C. Ball
"For lack of a keystone...,
...the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life." Stegner summation of his novel's themes contains this essential sentence. Read more
Published 17 months ago by John P. Jones III
Memorable and rewarding writing.
Quite a memorable read, although it did feel like a bit of a slog where it lagged in some of the middle chapters. Read more
Published 18 months ago by Paul Harris
Potent Language of Landscape
Stegner weaves together two basic narrative lines: that of a 58-year-old man with a degenerative bone disease and the narrative line of his grandmother who grew up in the... Read more
Published on 24 April 2008 by Mr. SD Halliday
An excellently written book that touches the heart of every
Stegner is a master at bringing the essence of the important qualities of the well-lived life to the forefront. Read more
Published on 19 Aug 1999
Good story, but something's missing
The most interesting part of the book for me was Lyman Ward. I did not feel pity for him, but found his thoughts on "contemporary" 1970 society vs. Read more
Published on 12 Aug 1999
Best book I've read this decade
As with all of the (rare)great things I've read or seen, once i finished Angle of Repose, I wished I had never read it so that I could read it again. Read more
Published on 30 July 1999
We have rarely read a more thought provoking novel.
This was one of the most thought provoking novels that we have ever read. Stegner captured the thoughts and emotions of his characters with an economy of words that is the mark of... Read more
Published on 30 July 1999
It was compelling, sad I thought, but then found hope
It is a great novel, with a melancholy tone, but so beautiful. It has breadth of time and space in the family story and American story. Read more
Published on 15 July 1999
A decent novel, but nothing to write home about.
Sorry, but I was disappointed, having read all the glowing reviews and expecting something much more. Read more
Published on 14 July 1999
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