David Wroblewski

I'm not going to do this novel justice, but I'll do my best.

I read this book when it first came out twelve (!) years ago. It had two strikes against it at the time, and one plus. The two strikes were that it was absolutely not a book I would normally read. A family that raises dogs? A mute protagonist? Based on Hamlet? Hell no, count me out. And count me out twice as hard, because it was an Oprah's Book Club selection (I'd read a couple of her other choices and despised them both).

The one show more plus (which is a dubious one at best) was that Stephen King liked it. Dubious plus, because a lot of the stuff he likes ain't that good either.

Regardless, for whatever reason (maybe it was deeply discounted? I can't remember now), I bought it, I read it, and I absolutely loved it.

Loved it more than any other book I'd ever read.

In the twelve years since, I've learned to adore Shakespeare, so that Hamlet thing doesn't bother me at all now. And I'd been recommending it in the past three years at the bookstore I work at. But, if I was being honest, I couldn't remember a lot about the book anymore.

And then I got talking to someone who's since turned into (in the words of Jim Croce) "my best old ex-friend" who will never read this, because I've defriended them everywhere. Anyway, we'd planned a read of it, but then they got stupid and I got fed up. The re-read on my end was put on hold.

And then, it was autumn, and it just seemed right to read it again.

And that's the Story of Tobin Elliott coming to the re-read of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I will say I was nervous to pick this up again. Would I like it as much?

I shouldn't have worried. This book tugs at my heart like no other book ever has. Wroblewski's writing is beautiful to read, with sublime word choices creating wonderfully real imagery in my mind. The book is so grounded in perfect observations of the world that Edgar's world (and Almondine, his faithful dog) is as real as our own.

Which works perfectly when the author introduces some slight supernatural elements. They become as real and believable as all the rest.

Throughout the reading of this book, I laughed at the silliness of the dog's antics at times. I teared up at the tragic events. But I've done that with books before. King's [b:The Green Mile|11566|The Green Mile|Stephen King|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1373903563l/11566._SY75_.jpg|15599] crushed me on three separate occasions toward the end of that particular story.

But here, for the first time, Wroblewski held a new power over me. With a simple sentence, he would reveal something, and I would groan with the knowledge of what that observation would bring to the characters. With a few words, he would make me gasp in revelation, or fear, or agony. Characters don't just die in this book, you know these characters, so their passing is a grief-stricken event for the reader. You feel their passing. You hurt for those left behind to mourn their passing.

Others have stated that there's no story here. Respectfully, they're wrong. There's two stories. There's the passing of a boy into manhood, a child who loses his father, and learns to take on the weights of the world, and to try to do what's right.

But the other story is about the Sawtelle dogs. We learn about them in the first half through Almondine, but we get to know them in the second half, and to realize their fate at the end.

And Wroblewski does it with large nods to both the aforementioned Hamlet, but also (and I'd somehow forgotten this) through Kipling's The Jungle Book. Not just paying lip service to either story, but incorporating important elements from each into his own story and bending them to his service, brilliantly.

This is the closest I think I'll ever come to reading an absolutely perfect novel. Twelve years ago, I declared this my absolute favourite book of all time. Today, I will hold that declaration up as truth. It still stands.

This is my favourite book.

Ever. show less

Edgar, a boy who can hear but not speak, lives with his mother, Trudy, his father, Gar, and his dog, Almondine, on a farm in rural Wisconsin. The story takes place mostly in the 1970’s when Edgar is a teen, with flashbacks to earlier times. Edgar’s family has bred and sold Sawtelle dogs, a fictional breed, for generations. These dogs are notable for their training, temperament, and intelligence. Edgar leads a happy life on the farm until his Uncle Claude arrives to stay with them while show more he gets his life back on track. Conflicts between Gar and Claude, which originate in their childhood years but are never fully explained, escalate until an episode occurs that forever changes the course of their lives.

Wroblewski’s writing is elegant, with numerous descriptive passages. He loosely employs elements from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which notifies the reader to expect tragedy, and includes supernatural phenomena. It is a slow-burn that requires patience to get to the heart of the story. The author is quite skilled at portraying the relationships between humans and dogs, and even writes a few chapters from a dog’s perspective. This story is a thought-provoking tale of life’s unfairness, canine-human connections, loyalty, communication, fate, and nature. It could have used a bit more insight into the characters’ motivations and it includes a few lengthy topics that appear to be only tangentially related to the main storyline. It will appeal to readers that appreciate tragedies and don’t mind unresolved plot points. This novel is the author’s debut and it will be interesting to see what he tackles next. show less

This book.

Damn.

It has a lot to live up to. Of all the books in the world that I've read up to now, its predecessor, THE STORY OF EDGAR SAWTELLE is a book that, for something like 16 years, I have labeled as my favourite novel of all time. The weird thing? I can't put my finger on exactly why. Maybe it's the characters. Maybe it's the story. Maybe it's the dogs. Maybe it's the gorgeous writing.

But it's my favourite book. So, FAMILIARIS has a lot of work to do.

And honestly, while there's no show more real plot beyond it being, in the first half, THE STORY OF JOHN SAWTELLE, it's truly enjoyable. It meanders here. It meanders there. It brings you to a certain point, then stops, jumps locations and characters, and starts all over again. The villains that show up are dispatched quickly and mostly off-stage. There's no slow build of tension as any reasonable book has, but there's tension throughout. Characters come and go. Some come back, some don't.

Then, in the second half, it kind of does all that again, but with Gar and Claude, John's sons. So, for a while, it becomes THE STORY OF GAR AND CLAUDE SAWTELLE. I will say I had a harder time with this section, primarily because of the business one of the sons was engaged in. I found it hard to believe he'd do this, raised in the Sawtelle home.

So, there's a good two to three hundred pages that I would rate more a 3.5 stars, rather than five.

And then, toward the end, it becomes THE DIARY OF JOHN SAWTELLE, which was both frustrating and illuminating.

But through it all, there was fear, and laughter, and anger, and frustration, and hope, and inspiration, and despair, and hate, and heartbreak.

Ultimately, this is a book about lives. About setting out to do something magical and, sometimes pulling it off, sometimes not.

This shouldn't work as a novel. But it does.

It does not supplant my ranking of EDGAR SAWTELLE as the best book I've ever read, but I'd say its a worthy successor to it, and an interesting prequel to that novel.

I can only hope we don't have to wait until 2040 for the next Wroblewski work. show less

One of the best books I’ve read this year, a real highlight, and yet I’d hesitate to recommend it because it broke my heart a little bit. It was glorious, touching, made of more than a little magic and replete with history, but ultimately The Story of Edgar Sawtelle wanted to be a tragedy, and the reader just had to let it. I was shaking when I put this book down.

Edgar – mute, yet gifted with words, gifted in other ways too, helps his parents run the family breeding kennels; Sawtelle show more dogs are special, sold as trained yearlings rather than pups, they have a spirit and understanding unmatched by pedigree breeds. When his uncle comes to live with them, the story becomes unavoidably Shakespearean, yet suffused with canine charm and deep with that small-town US family history that so many writers try and fail to express. To say that the characters are ‘lifelike’ is to belittle the author’s accomplishments… I’ve encountered no one who could make the personalities of individual humans, let along dogs, leap off the page; Almondine, Edgar’s companion from birth, has simply one of the most heart-engagingly drawn souls I’ve ever read.

Definitely worth reading, but allow for recovery time. show less