Reviews for The Wake of Forgiveness

The average rating for The Wake of Forgiveness based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-08 00:00:00 William Smart fulfilling my 2019 goal to read (at least) one book each month that has been digitally moldering, unread, on my NOOK for years and years and years. sometimes i find i don't have much to say about a book when it comes time for the reviewing of it. and i know no one's holding a gun to my head saying "you must review every book you read!" and there are 100+ books on my "review pending" shelf that i still 100% intend to review and i could just let this one drift into that herd without any real consequences, but regardless of the lack of gun-to-head/penalties for not reviewing, it has become somewhat of a compulsion to dissect the books i read - it helps me fixate them in my brain, to organize my reactions, to understand my own reading preferences, and serve as a kind of closure, so - here we are. i just… didn't love it. and it should be exactly the kind of book i love - all manner of flawed people populating a western-themed family saga full of rough living, misguided decisions, regret and revenge and tragedies, and it opens with one of the most horrifically bloody childbirth scenes i've ever read, which squeamishly thrilled me out of the gate with the what's-to-come, but although this was a beautifully written novel, the actual story left me feeling a little flat. and i'm not sure why. although it covers thirty years of a family's travails, the events are small and can be condensed into: suffering breeds suffering, cruelty and neglect breed cruelty and neglect. or a lesson: don't let horse races determine your future. the characters are unsympathetic, which is to be expected in grit lit/westerns, but i'm someone who wants their antiheroes to be truly antiheroic, not just... commonplace shitty. karel has plenty of cause for complaint about his upbringing and the path his life took, but he doesn't become a 'burn the world down' figure, just a dude who betrays his wife, is lousy to his lover, and yearns for the girl who got away and married his brother. and although it's undeniable that he was wronged as a child and he was doomed from the start, he's largely numb and passive and uncompelling as a character, and it made it difficult for me to hope things would all work out for him in the end. i've been wanting to read machart for a while now, and there's enough stellar writing in this debut to keep me on the line for his later work - i was just hoping for more in the way of character and story. this 'review' is a flop, but - hey - maybe my own later work will be better! come to my blog!

Review # 2 was written on 2010-12-25 00:00:00 Joseph Miegoc This was an impulse buy at Barnes and Noble. I ignored the book at first in favor of looking at the books around it, but then I caught the words "Tim O'Brien" during a cursory glance at a book blurb on the cover. One of my rules in life is to pick up anything with Tim O'Brien's name on it and buy it immediately, no questions asked. To date, this rule has served me well and The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart is no exception. Set in Texas at the dawn of the 20th century, the novel focuses on the Skala family, which consists of an immigrant father and his four motherless sons. Vaclav's wife, Klara, dies while giving birth to their fourth son, Karel, and the book focuses on the physical and emotional marks these men carry as a result of her death. Despite her early death, the shadow of Klara haunts every page. In a cruel and unforgiving landscape, Klara would have served as the buffer between the physical and emotional demands of pioneer life, between the immigrant and his new homeland, between father and son, and between the sons themselves. Without her, these men throw themselves against each other, against the landscape, and against life itself with a brutal tenacity that can only be born of intense pain and loss. After the loss of his wife, Vaclav Skala, an ascetic man by nature, becomes even harder and more unforgiving in his dealings with the world. To spare his fine racing horses the detrimental effects of fieldwork, he instead hitches his four sons to the plow. Their time in the harness has left the boys with a peculiar deformity: they all have twisted necks that symbolize their skewed view of the world inflicted upon them by their father. Of all the boys, none are as warped as Karel. Having never known his mother and carrying the burden of guilt for her death, Karel is nonetheless Vaclav's pride as Karel is a gifted horseback rider whose skills have won his father many a high-stakes gamble. As the novel goes on, the narrative moves back and forth between the story of Karel as a young boy and Karel as a grown man, now alienated from his brothers. The circumstances leading to the severing of the connection with his siblings are revealed as the book goes on and heighten the suspense as the novel moves toward its satisfying resolution. Machart has created a tragedy that is epic in scope and is often reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's best work (in particular, All the Pretty Horses comes to mind). The language is poetic and so frequently captures the heart of the moment or the quality of the landscape with such a perfect turn of phrase that I often went back and re-read certain lines just to savor them. Another point in Machart's favor is that his characters are complex and never watered-down; these are hard, often cruel men, but that doesn't mean they are completely devoid of kindness, poeticism, or intelligence. They are victims of a lifestyle and a landscape that naturally cripples the finest points of humanity to ensure survival in a merciless environment. That any of the characters retain even a shred of their capacity for forgiveness is the ultimate triumph. Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder