Angle of Repose

Reviews

“Angle of Repose is a novel about Time, as much as anything—about people who live through time, who believe in both a past and a future…It reveals how even the most rebellious crusades of our time follow paths that our great-grandfathers’ feet beat dusty.”

“[A] long, intricate, deeply rewarding novel…For all [its] breadth and sweep, Angle of Repose achieves an effect of intimacy, hence of immediacy, and, though much of the material is ‘historical,’ an effect of discovery also, of experience newly minted rather than a pageant-like re-creation…Wallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.”

“Mark Bramhall…leads us into the saga of intertwined generations. His pacing, his characterizations, and his convincing emotional repertoire embed us in this 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner that is in no way dated…a fine reading of a superb book.”

“Narrator Mark Bramhall adroitly manipulates an array of voices in this 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner. Wheelchair-bound Lyman Ward scours the letters, novels, and illustrations of his grandmother, genteel Susan Burling Ward, to re-create her life with her pioneer husband, Oliver Ward, in the ‘crude’ American West of the 1880s. Bramhall moves effortlessly between Lyman’s own troubled life—he incessantly interrupts his characters to ramble about his failed marriage—and his grandmother’s poignant writings. Even with this production’s hefty length, Bramhall’s character interpretations, along with the author’s rich, poetic descriptions of the Western frontier, remain fully engaging.”

“If I were to walk into a room to meet the narrator, Mark Bramhall, I would expect to find a courageous, feisty disabled man in a wheel chair. His voice is strong and sure. He has conveyed to his listeners the gift of turning himself into Lyman Ward, the man determined to uncover, discover or recover the lives of his grandparents and settle them and him finally into an angle of rest and repose. With a slight alteration in tone and manner he easily becomes Susan or the scattered Haight-Ashbury hippie, Shelly. When I first read it, it was about the present and the past; now it is about a distant and not so distant past. If anything, this is better than I remembered, maybe because I am old enough to understand.”

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