The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

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 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 show more 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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

i avoided Shakespeare like the plague when i was in school, so all comparisons to Hamet are lost on me. I can only review this novel as an "experience". Partially because I listened to the unabridged version on Audible (excellent reader and recording), and partially because the book is written so beautifully that it literally blossoms before your eyes....sometimes as a tulip, hopeful and braving the uknown, and sometimes as a black vine that confuses, tangles and grows.

I am an animal person, so the beauty of how the author describes the dogs and their training was not lost to me. I will say that my monumental empathy for critters left me breathless at several times while listening to this book....and crying in a few more.

I felt the end show more coming before it did. I cheated and looked up the ending on the internet because I feared I would drive off the road if it took me by surprise (tears)...so in the name of safe driving, i cheated. I'm glad i did.

There are few books written these days that are prose...that key in on the EXACT right words to evoke an emotion in a reader....(see Mark Spragg's Where Rivers Change Directions) David Wroblewski does this beautifully. A must-read for those who can take the realities of life and treasure words and the visions they can evoke. show less

Occasionally, I forget I’m reading. Those rare, happy moments when the story completely transcends the page keep me coming back to the printed word again and again. [The Story of Edgar Sawtelle] captured my imagination in just such a way.

Advance praise for the book, and some early glowing reviews, created a level of hype that often does a book like this a disservice. Inevitably, the reading experience for every reader doesn’t match the hype. So, rather than lavish the book and its writer, David Wroblewski, with too many more superlatives, I just want to mention a couple of things in my encouragement to read this book.

One common thread for many of the negative reviews is a feeling that the ending cheats the reader in some way. My show more defense here is that the book is a re-working of Shakespere’s Hamlet. I am by no means a huge fan of the bard, but I know enough about his tragedies to know a little about what to expect in the last few scenes. And, while my expectations were met, the ending felt absolutely true to the themes of the book. Edgar, before setting himself on Hamlet’s fatal path, considers and decides that there are sometimes grave consequences for choices, even when those choices ring with sincere nobility and genuine goodness.

Another oft voiced complaint centers around Wroblewski’s narratives written from the perspectives of the dogs that are central to the story. In full disclosure, I am a dog person. But I found the short canine narratives compelling. They were balanced, neither over-humanized nor overly simplistic. Did Wroblewski accurately tap into the mind of a dog? Did he attribute too much or too little intelligence to their thought process? How are we to really know? But the short passages felt like an honest and instinctive attempt to describe how dogs relate to the world around them.

The final thing that should recommend this book to you is Wroblewski’s rare talent for language. The prose sings with a beauty that is rare in modern American literature. If anything breaks your reading trance, it will be the urge to pause and re-read, to bask in the talent of a true word-smith.

Five bones!!!!!

Another favorite read for the year. show less

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski received some mixed reviews on LT, but I found it riveting and lyrical. The writing is beautiful and evocative, and the pace of the story, while varied, is just right. The basics of the story--husband and wife Wisconsin dog breeders whose only son is born mute and what happens when the father's sinister brother rejoins the family after being away for many years--are laid out in the first third of the book. You will learn more about dog breeding than perhaps you would like, but it fits the story line and becomes important in understanding the final scenes. You will come to love Edgar and his dogs, and Henry, a societal misfit who helps him at a critical time. You will want to give the show more parents, Trudy and Gar, a rough shake or even a brisk slap to make them understand Edgar, you will sigh when you understand Gar's message to his son and you will despair that Trudy doesn't see through Claude until it is too late.

But to say more would spoil the journey and the story. Suffice it to say that I loved the book and heartily recommend it. A solid four stars from me. show less

I’m having a hard time explaining how I feel about this one. It’s been a long time since a book so completely enraptured me and then utterly broke my heart. For starters, it is so beautifully written and it’s a tribute to the writer’s skill (I still can’t believe this is the author’s first novel), that I became so attached to the characters, especially the dogs. I’ve always been an animal lover and I have a really hard time with anything bad happening to animals in books, (Where the Red Fern Grows, The Yearling.) I’m particularly sensitive to cruelty to dogs and horses for some reason and so there were a few parts that were hard for me to read. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a book about cruelty towards animals, but show more the dogs are main characters in the book and there are some tough scenes. I’ve never read a book that expressed the psychology of a dog in such a vivid way.

Edgar is born mute to devoted parents who own a unique dog breeding and training company in Wisconsin. From the earliest chapters, where we meet Edgar’s parents Trudy and Gar, the story hooked me completely. It’s a slow moving novel, one that you sink into and hardly notice when 100 pages have past. The story is a loose retelling of Hamlet. The local vet, Doctor Papineau is Polonius, his son is the county sheriff and fills the role of Laertes. Edgar’s loyal dog, Almondine, is a twist on Ophelia. Now keep in mind that it’s not an exact retelling and so not all of the characters share the fates of their Hamlet counterparts, but knowing the general story in advance certainly cloaks the entire novel in a layer of portentousness.

The moments where the story was the most closely aligned with Shakespeare’s original tale were actually the sections that I thought didn’t work as well as the rest of the book. Maybe because it took the mystery out of it or maybe because it’s such a strong story in its own right, that adding a supernatural element and relying heavily on the revenge tale took away from the powerful characters Wroblewski created in the Sawtelle family.

It’s strange, the book could absolutely have 200 pages cut from its bulk to move the story along at a faster clip, but at the same time, the quiet moments where very little happened were some of my favorites. When Edgar is with his dogs, training or spending time with them, that’s when I felt the most connected to him as a character. When the plot was rolling forward with its tone of impending doom, headed inevitably towards the Hamlet conclusion, those were my least favorite parts. They felt a bit more forced, like they were violating the actions we had grown to expect from certain characters.

BOTTOM LINE: I couldn’t put it down, even when I was worried about a character or heartbroken over a scene, I still didn’t want to let it go. I almost felt tense while reading certain sections, but then I would relax into the comfortable comradery Edgar had with the dogs. It’s one of the most unique reading experiences I’ve had in a long time and I know I’ll be thinking about Edgar, Almondine, Tinder, Essay and Baboo for a long time. The only reason it didn’t get 5 stars is because I can’t imagine putting myself through reading it again.

“From the look on his face I could see he was one of the lucky ones; one of those people who liked doing what they’re good at. That’s rare.” show less