Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0375709444, Paperback)
The hero of this one-of-a-kind novel is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero. We meet him in the year 1895—a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp. And we follow this idealistic, appealing man for nearly forty years: into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling marriage; across the Pacific, where on a tiny, rainy island he suffers a nightmarish accident; through the deaths of friends and family and into a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman.
Darlington’s Fall is ultimately a love story. It is written in verse that—vivid, accessible, and lush—imparts an intensity to the story and its luminous gallery of characters: Russel’s rich, taciturn, up-right, guilt-driven father; Miss Kraus, his formidable housekeeper; Ernst Schrock, his maddening, gluttonous mentor; and Pauline Beaudette, the beautiful, ill-starred girl who becomes his wife. Leithauser’s embracingly compassionate outlook invites us into their world—into a past so sharply realized it feels like the present.
In
Darlington’s Fall, Brad Leithauser offers an ingeniously plotted story and the virtues long associated with his elegant stanzas: wit, music, and a keen eye for the natural world. His independent careers as novelist and poet come together brilliantly here, producing something rare and wonderful in the landscape of contemporary American writing: a book that bends borders, a happy marriage of poetry and fiction.
From the Hardcover edition.(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 12 Jan 2010 05:09:56 -0500)
(see all 2 descriptions)
Wikipedia in English
(Though as for that, what gorgeous words they are:
Aurochs and oryx, gorilla and gazelle,
Ouzel and zebra, jaguar and jacamar,
Zebu and emu, lemur, philomel;
Saber-toothed tiger and scarlet tanager,
Golden tamarind, paradise flycatcher;
Langur and lamprey, quoll and quokka,
Thrips and thrush, and foraminifera;
And the prodigal, sprung from winter's forge:
The yet-glowing ember of the rouge-gorge.)
(But as for that, what great plug-ugly words
They are: numbat, meerkat, muskrat, sprat;
Boobies and boobacks, warthogs and wattlebirds;
Milk snake, natterjack, muntjac, jackass; flat-
head catfish, wrasse, and trogan; grunion and pout,
Potoroo, rudistan, and red-necked grunt; black
Crappie, white grub, screwworn, screech owl; snout
Beetle, bettong, dugong, and stickeback;
slug, quahog, dogfish, earwig, pug,
Poby, pig-footed bandicoot, stinkbug.)
Beautiful! Listen to the meter! One of the things that I really loved about the book is that I fell in love with Darlington, and by extension, with the author. And art does that: makes me fall in love with people and places that I might not otherwise notice or care about.
If I have exceeded the limits of copyright by quoting too much, I guess I'll be excised. (