- Paperback: 128 pages
- Publisher: HarperPerennial; 1st HarperPerennial Ed edition (May 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0060975520
- ISBN-13: 978-0060975524
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.7 x 1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,173,016 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you like good and honest writing I recommend this book, it's amazing. I recently went on one of Tom's dangerous writing courses which I also highly recommend. This book will blow your mind, read it, go on.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Lovely!
23 Jun 2001
Format:Paperback
Jacob Joseph Weber is 13 years old, and his eyes are seeing things in ways he's never seen them before.
In 125 pages, Spanbauer tells the story of Jake's journey from boyhood to manhood in a time and place where being a man seems to mean making all the right mistakes. Jake sees truth in places his father no longer can, but in the process of opening his own eyes, he may be helping his father see, as well. See the cruelty of his assumptions, the reality behind the illusions that are all around.
"It was all an illusion, like Mr. Energy, that magician at the Blackfoot State Fair, said. Everything was an illusion according to him. I used to get scared at night just thinking about it: what if everything -- everything that was familiar to me, everything I knew -- was an illusion and what I was really doing was hanging in thin air, like the earth was hanging in thin air, like I could see the moon hanging up there in the sky, a round ball just out there with nothing solid to hold it in place." (p. 13)
This is Spanbauer's first novel and is a lovely introduction to his writing, his mind, and his style. It's a quick read without some of the difficulties of "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon," but still an elegant look at a moment in a boy's life when he shrugs off the cloak of childhood and does what comes next.
Rumor around Portland has it that this book will be re-issued later this year.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Where Tom began
15 Oct 2008
Format:Paperback
I first read Spanbauer's MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE WITH THE MOON 10 years ago and fell in love with him, especially his unique voice. Recently, to prepare to take his famous "Dangerous Writing" workshop, I ordered FARAWAY PLACES, his first novel, really a novella, reissued in a gorgeous edition. The story explores themes of racism, rural poverty, identity, and family-imposed secrets and shame. Like all four of his novels, the central character is an outsider in plain site, in this case, an Idaho farm near Pocatello... which is similar to all of Tom's novels, except THE MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE...
There are echoes of Steinbeck in the elegiac relationship to a changing rural landscape, the reverence for nature. Characters are sharply drawn, and Tom crafts sentences like sacred objects.
This first novel only begins to hint at the scale of Spanbauer's narrative ambitions, realized successively in the three novels that follow, all of which are more complex, more panoramic in scope. But thematically and stylistically, this is where it begins.
Highly recommended. In the context of the contemporary struggle over race in American life, this brings us back to the brutal reality of our history, which is pretty strong medicine, as well.
There are echoes of Steinbeck in the elegiac relationship to a changing rural landscape, the reverence for nature. Characters are sharply drawn, and Tom crafts sentences like sacred objects.
This first novel only begins to hint at the scale of Spanbauer's narrative ambitions, realized successively in the three novels that follow, all of which are more complex, more panoramic in scope. But thematically and stylistically, this is where it begins.
Highly recommended. In the context of the contemporary struggle over race in American life, this brings us back to the brutal reality of our history, which is pretty strong medicine, as well.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A Moving Coming Of Age Novel
22 Aug 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
In Tom Spanbauer's short first novel, the narrator is Jacob Joseph Weber who is thirteen and enters junior high about half way through the story. He and his parents live on a farm in Wind River, Idaho, a farm that the evil Harold Endicott , holder of the mortgage on their land, forecloses on in October of the year (early 1950's?)after the Chinook ("the name for the strangae wind blowing") struck in February. The Weber family's life is grim as they are fettered by both poverty and the shackles of a severe Catholic Church; they are not nearly as bad off, however, as "that woman Sugar Babe," an Indian woman and the black man who lives with her.
While Spanbauer notifies the reader early on, through the voice of Jacob, as to the multiple tragedies that happen, the narrator, as you would expect from a youngster recalling such events, skips from here to there until his story is finally told.
Jacob is a youngster grappling with his budding sexuality-- he nightly "yellows" his shorts and of course has to confess his sins to "Monsignor Canby about every occasion." His transgressions, however, are miniscule compared to the violence and evil, even murder, that he confronts at such an early age.
One of my favorite passages is Jacob's account of his family's going to the state fair when every year his parents picked that day to be mad at each other--"be mad and stay mad. . . What got different when my mother and my father were mad at each other was the world; everything and everybody else was a little off--a touch cantankerous, and full of bother. . . Everybody drove like they were from Utah." Surely every child has experienced something similar when his parents are angry with each other.
FARAWAY PLACES-- the title comes from a Perry Como song-- is extremely well-written with not one wasted word, a harbinger of what is to come from this fine writer.
While Spanbauer notifies the reader early on, through the voice of Jacob, as to the multiple tragedies that happen, the narrator, as you would expect from a youngster recalling such events, skips from here to there until his story is finally told.
Jacob is a youngster grappling with his budding sexuality-- he nightly "yellows" his shorts and of course has to confess his sins to "Monsignor Canby about every occasion." His transgressions, however, are miniscule compared to the violence and evil, even murder, that he confronts at such an early age.
One of my favorite passages is Jacob's account of his family's going to the state fair when every year his parents picked that day to be mad at each other--"be mad and stay mad. . . What got different when my mother and my father were mad at each other was the world; everything and everybody else was a little off--a touch cantankerous, and full of bother. . . Everybody drove like they were from Utah." Surely every child has experienced something similar when his parents are angry with each other.
FARAWAY PLACES-- the title comes from a Perry Como song-- is extremely well-written with not one wasted word, a harbinger of what is to come from this fine writer.
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