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Sweet Hereafter: A Novel by Russell Banks
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Sweet Hereafter: A Novel

by Russell Banks

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756104,998 (4.01)9
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Showing 1-5 of 9 (next | show all)
not his best. ( )
clydethehero | Mar 24, 2009 |  
Etats-Unis, littérature, roman ( )
silikani | Mar 9, 2008 |  
It's the story of a small town shattered by a bus accident that kills half of the children in the town, but what makes this a great read is the characterization. Each chapter is told from the perspective of someone else affected by the crash, and the voice of each one is so real and so unlike the others. We get such a deeper understanding of the accident and its effects through these different perspectives, and are sympathetic towards characters we might otherwise hate. It's an amazing book. ( )
jtho | Aug 28, 2007 |  
A deeply imagined book takes a flinty-eyed examination of a town and characters involved in the aftermath of a tragedy. Banks maintains a nearlly intoxicating level of sadness, and uncovers the dignity, courage and humanity in even the most flawed characters. If there's a message here, it's that we all share in a tragedy that befalls our community. This was made into a good movie, but do yourself a favor and read the book first. A good cry can be redeeming. ( )
abirdman | Jul 3, 2007 |  
A good book. I used to make my creative writing students read it and would always put it on any list of fiction a writer should read. ( )
wordygirl39 | May 24, 2007 |  
Showing 1-5 of 9 (next | show all)
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Book description

Amazon.com (ISBN 0060923245, Paperback)

Atom Egoyan's Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter is a good movie, remarkably faithful to the spirit of Russell Banks's novel of the same name, but Banks's book is twice as good. With the cool logic of accreting snowflakes, his prose builds a world--a small U.S. town near Canada--and peoples it with four vivid, sensitive souls linked by a school-bus tragedy: the bus driver; the widowed Vietnam vet who was driving behind the bus, waving at his kids, when it went off the road; the perpetually peeved negligence lawyer who tries to shape the victims' heartaches into a winning case; and the beauty-queen cheerleader crippled by the crash, whose testimony will determine everyone's fate.

We experience the story from inside the heads of the four characters in turn--each knowing things the others don't, each misunderstanding the facts in his or her own way. The method resembles Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Gilbert Sorrentino's stunning Aberration of Starlight, but Banks's achievement is most comparable to John Updike's tales of ordinary small-towners preternaturally gifted with slangy eloquence, psychological insights, and alertness to life's tiniest details.

Egoyan's film is haunting but vague--it leaves viewers in the dark regarding several critical plot points. Banks's book is more haunting still, and precise, making every revelation count, with a finale far superior to that of the film. It's also wittier than the too-sober flick: the lawyer dismisses the dome-dwelling hippie parents of one of the crash victims as being "lost in their Zen Little Indians fantasy," which casts a sharp light on them and him, too. He's lost in his calculations of how each parent will fit into the legal system, and the ways in which he fits into the tragedy are lost on him. If only he and the Vietnam-vet dad could read each other's account of their tense first encounter, both of them might get what the other is missing.

Banks's wit is pitiless--it's painful when we discover that the bus driver, who prides herself on interpreting for her stroke-impaired husband, is translating his wise but garbled observations all wrong. The crash turns out not to be the ultimate tragedy: in the cold northern light of its aftermath, we discover that we're all in this alone.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:15 -0400)

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