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The House of Breath
 
 
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The House of Breath (Paperback)

by William Goyen (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Serpent's Tail (1 Jun 1990)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1852421940
  • ISBN-13: 978-1852421946
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12 x 1.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 424,286 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #1 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > G > Goyen, William

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Product Description

Review

A re-issue of William Goyen's 1949 novel - his best-known - a brilliant display of the quirky poetic power of this Southern imaginative realist who worked out of his native venue - a small East Texas town of the '20's. (Kirkus Reviews)

Product Description

Originally published in 1950, William Goyen's first novel is an elegy to childhood, memory, loss and love, celebrating boyhood in a small town in Texas.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A true masterwork of American literature, 2 July 2001
By T. BRANNEY (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
'The House Of Breath' reads like a sacred text, as he/she turns the pages the reader feels like they are blowing the dust from a casket of long hidden jewels.

Narrated by a man returning, after a prolonged absence, to his long-abandoned family home in Charity (a small, river-bound Texas town) the book invokes the ghosts of the past to tell the tales of desire, loss & melancholy that make up the (largely secret) history of that family.

Weaving a dizzy spell over all is the richly evoked river delta landscape. Goyen uses the most mesmerizing, lush descriptive prose to magically and brilliantly conjour up a sense of time and place. The overall effect is like living through a waking dream. You choose to read slowly to soak up the atmosphere and prolong the poetic experience:

"(the river) was ornamented with big drowsy snapturtles sitting like figurines on rocks; had little jeweled perch in it and sliding cottenmouth water moccasins. It crawled, croaking with bullfrogs and ticking and sucking and clucking and shining..."

Comparable to Cormac McCarthy at his most lyrical (i.e "Suttree"), fans of Calvino, John Banville & Flannery O'Connor, should swoon over this book.
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