Safe from the Sea (edition 2010)

"Olaf nodded up at the sky. 'He taught me some things about navigating. Just basic stuff, but I was hooked. He said that a true seaman could sail around the world without anything more than a watch and a sextant and the sky to guide him. I didn't even know what a sextant was, just figured you knew where to go if you were in charge of one of those boats. I never reckoned there was any science to it. Wolf taught me how to take sun sights, how to chart our course, how to estimate our position using dead reckoning when the sky was cloudy and the shore out of sight.' He paused, cleared his throat. 'Now it's just a bunch of satellites telling you where you are and where to go. Back then it was still something beautiful to steer a ship." (pg. 62)

Noah Torr's relationship with his father Olaf has always been a tricky one to navigate. In this novel, Olaf's a crusty, weathered former sailor who is somewhat of a local legend along the remote northern Minnesota shoreline where he lives, haunted by his surviving a devastasting 1967 shipwreck that killed all 27 of his 30-member crew.

It's a story that Olaf has been reluctant to tell, but now that he's dying and his son Noah has returned home (ostensibly to "help him prepare the cabin for winter"), he unburdens himself of the secrets and guilt that he has carried for nearly four decades since the accident. In the process, father and son begin the rocky process of trying to understand and accept one another before its too late.

Yeah, the troubled-father-and-son-making-amends-on-one's-deathbed story has been done before, but it's a theme universal enough that it doesn't flounder in Peter Geye's hands as an author. For starters, Geye apparently knows his stuff (or has done a tremendous amount of research) regarding several key areas of the book. The descriptions of the northern Minnesota coast and its waters, as well as of boats and shipping and the shipping industry, are incredibly well done - not to mention the characters' hardy Norwegian heritage and Noah and his wife's Natalie's infertility struggles. I'd be surprised if much of this did not originate from Geye's own life - which is more than perfectly fine, particularly since Safe from the Sea is Geye's debut novel.

Moreso than the story and the writing (which seemed to me to be perfunctory and matter of fact, but is perhaps designed to be such to reflect the characters' personalities), Safe from the Sea is a story with a strong sense of place. As the reader, you absolutely feel as if you are right there in the fierce winter storm with the ill-fated sailors, even if you (like me) have barely set foot on a boat. Like Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time (which I didn't care for much at all), you physically feel cold reading this novel.

(Our air-conditioner broke a few hours after I finished this and the temperature was a toasty 83 degrees inside our house. This would have been the perfect book to read under such conditions, believe you me.)

Safe from the Sea is one that many bloggers love, many calling it "stunning" and "gorgeous." I'm in the minority here and am not going quite that far (it's not going to be one of my absolute favorites of the year, as it is for many of my blogging peers), but it was a satisfying enough read for me, one that I appreciated, and definitely one that will make me seek out Peter Geye's work in the future.
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Noah Torr is summoned by his dying father to said father’s cabin in the woods near Duluth Wisconsin. Olaf was an officer on the great freighters that ply mighty Lake Superior and in 1967 was one of only three survivors when his ship went down – comparisons to the Edmund Fitzgerald were, of course, inevitable in my mind. Noah is bitterly resentful of his father’s drinking problem and his ‘absence’ from his young life.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find this the “tautly written gem” that Joseph Boyden, one of my favourite authors, found. Geye has a powerful story to tell – of the night the ship sank and of the rifts and healings between father and son – but the book has more of a commercial, rather than literary, flavour.

I didn’t really connect to any of the characters—and was especially annoyed by Noah’s wife who gives him grief for being with his dying father, because she’s ovulating and wants him home to try for a baby. I mean, c’mon, his father’s dying and you’ll ovulate next month, won’t you? I was going to rate this a “4”, but decided while I was writing this on 3½ stars.

Read this if: you’re interested in a harrowing tale of how it just might be on a freighter that is sinking in stormy waters. ( )

This debut book was an interesting variation of the Prodigal Son story. In this case, the father mentally left his family after he survived the shipwreck of the Ragnarok, a huge ore boat on Lake Superior. He spent most of the next twenty years on the lake and in the seedy bars of port towns trying to forget what happened. It was only when he was dying that he called his estranged son Noah in Boston and asked him to come home.

This book was as mesmerizing and moody as the cover picture showing the rocky coastline and the dark sky with light breaking out in the far horizon. It's the story of a dying man's memories where he unloads his burden of guilt for something that wasn't his fault. There is something for everyone in this book: beautiful writing, a shipwreck, love stories between husband and wife and father and son. Peter Geye did an excellent job describing the beauty and danger of Lake Superior and the crustiness and courage of the men who sail upon her. My grandfather was a Norwegian immigrant who worked on ore boats all his life in this country and my uncle was a ship's captain on the Great Lakes so I grew up hearing stories similar to this. I'm looking forward to more books by this new author. Highly recommended. ( )

Noah returns home from Boston to care for his ailing father in his northwoods Minnesota lake cabin. Their relationship has been strained for years, ever since the Lake Superior shipwreck that has been a defining before and after event in all of their lives. Olaf has never told the full story of the wreck and it is told here as a story within a story.

This will be one of my favorite books of the year – another wonderful gem. It is a story of reconciliation, love, and understanding, with a gripping survival narrative thrown in. The setting is well described and the characters drawn with heartfelt warmth. The descriptions of Great Lakes ore shipping was fascinating. (I couldn't help, sometimes, humming The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.)

This is the author’s debut novel and he's just published another. I can't wait to read it. ( )

Well written about an aging father and a somewhat estranged son. Pretty good, set in the Great Lakes. ( )