Across the Endless River

I was very disappointed in this book. The life of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau must have been fascinating from the very moment he was born. The characters were stilted and did not demonstrate emotional depth. I almost stopped reading but kept on going with the hope that the writing would improve. ( )

The concept is an interesting one - the story of a famous person most of us have never heard of. Historical fiction...but for my taste, perhaps too historical and not enough fiction.

I couldn't do it....I got about half way through and wondered why I was wasting my time and quit reading. Perhaps for extreme history buffs, it has enough to hold your interest - or maybe I quit right before the fascinating part...but I doubt it. ( )

I wanted to love this book. I loved The Piano Shop on the West Bank. And I loved the idea of this book. But honestly, I just never finished it. I kept picking it up and reading a few pages, then setting it down to do something else, then picking it up again and realizing I had no idea what I'd read earlier.

I feel bad about that because it's not badly written at all. I just didn't get drawn into the story. And I kept finding reasons to read something else instead.

I think I'll give this copy to a friend and see if they have better luck with it.

If I had picked this book up at a book store and read the first few pages describing the birth of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, I would have quickly replaced it on the shelf and moved on. This is too bad, because the book changes and there’s some nice stuff here.

If you haven’t caught it in another review, this is a fictional account of Charbonneau’s rather fascinating life. He was the son of Sacajawea and French trader Toussaint Charbonneau. He was born during the Lewis & Clark expedition, carried across the mountains, to the Pacific and back as an infant. Charbonneau then grew up in two separate societies, going to school in St. Louis under the custody of William Clark and spending his off time with the Mandan Indians. Then, in 1823, at the age of 18 he was hired by Duke Friedrich Paul Wilhelm of Württemberg, a naturalist and obsessive collector, to travel to Europe and help catalogue the Duke’s North American artifacts and specimens. He spent six years in Europe, traveling extensively and learning German & Spanish on top of the English, French and Mandan he already spoke.

Someone looking for an account of Lewis and Clark will be disappointed; it takes maybe 20 pages. I found this confusing until I realized the maybe subtle game Carhart is playing. Late in the book Charbonneau is working on cataloguing the Duke’s collection when some sensitive artifacts upset him. He stops working on the collection and instead goes around the Duke’s mansion selecting various sacred and everyday objects and begins cataloguing these instead. At this point in the book we’ve joined the Charbonneau on several travels throughout Europe, all to visit and attend various functions of nobility. We’ve met various figures of nobility in various positions. And, we’ve even watched a ritualistic “hunt.” Carhart has turned the Duke’s study around on itself and instead of giving us a study of Native Americans he’s given us a fictional study of the post-Napoleon Europe.

This is a neat trick that works toward Carhart’s apparent strengths as an author. He excels when writing a story at a distance, and when summarizing or describing. I can’t exactly explain it, but I found myself hypnotized, really lost in his descriptions. Unfortunately, he struggles when he gets close up – like in that opening scene is. He can’t quite bring his characters to life; instead they are stilted, some stereotypical. And his scenes can be clunky.

Overall this was OK, fun at times, interesting. But, it’s not resounding success. ( )

This novel focuses on the life of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, who was the son of a French fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, and Sacagawea, the Indian woman who served as a guide for the famed Lewis and Clark expedition. Baptiste was born early in 1805, and subsequently carried on his mother's back for the entire journey across the country. He is an intriguing character whom I knew very little about, caught between two worlds--the Paris that was his father's home, and the Native American wilderness that was his mother's home. Unfortunately, I found this book somewhat dull a great deal of the time. Carhart describes both worlds beautifully, but the pacing is often slow and I had to push myself to keep reading at times. While the period and history was interesting, I felt like the narrative itself needed more of the focus. ( )