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Loading... The Shadow Catcher: A Novel (edition 2007)by Marianne Wiggins
Work InformationThe Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  juniperSun | Jun 15, 2023 |    )1  brenzi | Aug 22, 2022 |  ) Eye_Gee | May 8, 2017 | ) jphamilton | Jul 27, 2014 | I loved the story of Edward Curtis but felt that the author did not go into enough detail for me. I was frustrated at the way she seemed to summarise a lot of it and gloss over a lot that, I felt, was important to this part of the story. This story should have been a book in itself and I would have loved to read it. On the other side, the current story of Marianne Wiggins was over done. It had an interesting baseline, the loss of her father and the mistaken/stolen identity of her father. I thought she rambled on too much about what was going around in her mind which did not add anything to the story the book was trying to tell. I was also left with so many unanswered questions, why Curtis Edwards stole the identity, who was Clarita and how was she related to Edward Curtis and Clara and so many more. Still a fairly interesting read and it will make a good book group discussion but not one that I would say everyone should rush out and read. 3 out of 5 for me. (  ) Saucy1831 | Jun 18, 2013 |
"Truth, image, and their disguises have long engaged Wiggins, and in this, her eighth novel, she takes as her subject the elusive Curtis, the Seattle-based chronicler of Native American life, who between 1907 and 1930 published twenty volumes of images in his “North American Indian” series, which was dedicated to documenting Indian folkways “before they disappeared.” The Shadow Catcher begins en abyme as the story of a novelist named Marianne Wiggins attempting to sell the film rights to a historical fiction she has written about Curtis. But in the nesting-doll telling of his story, it is not the Indians but Curtis who is always disappearing, first as a child, spending months away from his Minnesota home with his scheming father, and later as a husband and father himself. (“Those adventuring types,” one character says about the photographer, “I’ve always been suspicious. What are they running from?”) What Curtis is running from is never completely clear in The Shadow Catcher, even if it is the question at the heart of the character Marianne’s manuscript, but the person left behind is his bride, Clara." AwardsDistinctions
THE SHADOW CATCHER dramatically inhabits the space where past and present intersect, seamlessly interweaving narratives from two different eras: the first fraught passion between turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and his muse-wife, Clara; and a twenty-first-century journey of redemption. Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: "It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element." Yet, contrary to Curtis's esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne's own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust. Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues - photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet - to recover those moments that went unrecorded, "to hear the words only the silent ones can speak." No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.81)
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Wikipedia in English
1
She kept coming back to the phrase "the sound my nation makes." This was an aspect I'd never identified before but also have known the power inherent in a trains' whistle. It was a unifying thread to the separated life stories: Curtis and his parents/siblings, his wife Clara and her brother, the author and her dead father, the stranger in the hospital his Shadow and the Colonel.
This novel was so much more than just lives. Wiggins shared concepts about music, art, perspective, and myths that made me think.
Now that I've finished, I want to research Curtis' life myself to see where (or if) Wiggins went beyond reality. (