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Loading... Deliverance (1970)by James Dickey
  
Favourite Books (565) Southern Fiction (60) » 17 more Five star books (286) Fiction For Men (24) Page Turners (82) 1970s Thrillers (3) Published in 1970 (27) 501 Must-Read Books (472) No current Talk conversations about this book.   villemezbrown | Apr 19, 2024 |   )1  MickeyMole | Oct 2, 2023 | Deliverance by James Dickey (1970; 1994 ed.) 278 pages. SETTING: The Cahulawassee River in Northern Georgia. I really enjoyed this story. It was suspenseful and a bit of a psychological thriller…in the book, but not so much in the movie. Ed, the most level headed of the four friends (played by Jon Voight in the movie), is narrating the story, and you find yourself inside his head a lot. There was just so much to the story than the movie could ever portray. And God forbid you ever find yourself in a life and death situation with Bobby, the most pathetic excuse of a man and friend there ever was, according to the book. I disliked him about as much as his “friends” did. But then, later in the story, I felt sorry for him for what he had to go through with the hill people. Talk about the ultimate humiliation for any man. Read the book first! The Cahulawassee River is about to be dammed up and turned into a lake. Four friends decide they want to run the rapids in canoes before it’s forever changed. But, it’s up in Georgia’s hill country with hill people. You know what that means! Their little weekend adventure turns into a nightmare when the four men are separated and two of them are approached on the bank of the river by two filthy, toothless men from these hills, then starts the struggle for survival to just get through the river and come out at the other end alive. BOOK-TO-MOVIE Deliverance (1972), starring Burt Reynolds as Lewis, the know-it-all survivalist; Jon Voight, as Ed, the most level headed friend and narrator in the book; Ned Beatty, as Bobby, the most pathetic excuse of a man and friend there ever was…according to the book; and Ronny Cox, as Drew, the guitar playing friend killed on the river. Although the movie followed along the lines of the book, the characters stupid “fake” accents really threw the movie off. I felt it just didn’t build the characters properly as in the book. (  ) MissysBookshelf | Aug 27, 2023 | ) blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 | ) mykl-s | Jun 4, 2023 |
 It was an unsettling book that arrived, as if on cue, at an unsettled time. In its primitive violence readers caught echoes of Vietnam, the Sharon Tate murders, even of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In its elegiac lament for a disappearing river, the book chimed along with America’s budding environmental movement.  Dickey's novel gives the impression of calculation, of cunning, the senses are subordinate to the brain. True, many of the moments are actualized but they do not fall together in a convincing whole. The plotting is too obvious; the obvious is the enemy of illusion. And the novel lives, takes its life, from illusion. In writing "Deliverance," James Dickey obviously made up his mind to tell a story. And on the theory that a story is an entertaining lie, he has produced a double-clutching whopper.  Dickey's prose style is muscular, tactile, pungent, luminous, raw, a marvelous instrument, as in the best of his poems, for evoking the towering presence of trees and rivers, earth and sky, as well as the sinuous movements of men under stress. It falters, and here and there ludicrously, when psychological amplification must accompany physical processes; the characters, though naturalistically drawn, seem fitful and dim, the figures of dream or nightmare.  The story is absorbing, even when you are not quite persuaded Dickey has told the truth. He is effective and he is deft, with the fine hand of an archer. God knows what he might accomplish when he gets used to the form. Has the adaptationHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
The setting is the Georgia wilderness, where the states most remote white-water river awaits. In the thundering froth of that river, in its echoing stone canyons, four men on a canoe trip discover a freedom and exhilaration beyond compare. And then, in a moment of horror, the adventure turns into a struggle for survival as one man becomes a human hunter who is offered his own harrowing deliverance. 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: (3.9)
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