Crossing to Safety (Modern Library) (Modern Library Classics)

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I think what he’s saying is that something as seemingly mundane as the friendship of two couples can be as riveting and universal as tragic choices or spectacular heroics. Her hair was drawn back in a bun, as if to clear her face for expression, and everything in the face smiled—lips, teeth, cheeks, eyes. Indeed, for many years I had the following quote from it on my work whiteboard: “Civilisations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”. When we first meet Charity and Sid at the beginning in the small mid-western town, they have two young children with one on the way.

We are reminded of this a little later in the novel when the four, with their children off their hands, spend a sabbatical year in Italy, lapping up art and culture. Let me say upfront that on reading the first 60 pages of Crossing to Safety I already knew it had the potential to be one of my favourite books of the year, and I’m sticking with this thought. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. Habla de pactos y alianzas, de conciliaciones y adaptaciones, de comprensión y paciencia, pero, sobre todo, de un amor que prevalece gracias al respeto y la admiración que todos se tienen y al enriquecimiento que tales relaciones supone para sus propias vidas por encima de cualquier defecto, dolor o circunstancia adversa.Cuatro personas que llegaron a vivir en un paraíso como dos Evas y dos Adanes y en el que no faltó ni la serpiente ni la expulsión. I think there’s more of a gender balance here than in Stoner – all four of the main characters (Sally, Larry, Charity and Sid) are in the foreground! The worst sin described is Charity's tendancy to be a bit pushy and Sid's tendancy to be a bit weak. Soon after their arrival in Wisconsin and desperately short of money, the Morgans meet another young couple at a similar stage in their lives – Sid Lang, another young member of the English Department, and his vibrant, beautiful and headstrong wife, Charity. The love between Larry and Sally is much gentler, and sustains them both despite their losses and deprivations.

I hoped I would have more to say about this encompassing read, but I have the feeling I've already said enough. After that shipwreck afternoon [when the two couples had a boating accident in the lake on the Wisconsin campus] we loved them both, sometimes in spite of themselves and ourselves. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half-invention, and right now I realise that there is much about Sid and Charity Lang that I either invented or got secondhand. And like Larry, I've realized the strains that an environment of conformed thought places upon the creative mind, the lack of knowledge about the field, and the necessity of fellowships like Stegner's. The story tells of several decades of friendship between two married couples describing the ups and downs of their careers, the births of their children and some significant illnesses.The four of them meet in their twenties, become fast friends, though from very different backgrounds, and bump up against each other on and off for the rest of their lives. Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Students such as Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey and Raymond Carver speak to that. But most of all – what this gaseous cloud of literary filter did for me - was to confirm that good and bad make the whole; that friends, husbands, children and oh yes! They are lovely people and you like them and all that – but they’re also a compromise to the circumstances of life.

But I remember even better the hour afterward in our basement, hot buttered rum and Sally’s cinnamon rolls still warm from the oven.I spent several hours reading and re-reading this poem today, and wondering why I never sat with it before, to digest and devour it, but only admired it in passing, with Frost always being such a favorite poet of mine. La novela es la insuperable respuesta a una pregunta que el propio autor se hace: “¿Cómo hacer un libro que cualquiera quiera leer a partir de unas vidas tan apacibles como éstas? En lugar seguro” es una reflexión sobre la escritura y el arte, una exaltación de la cultura y la naturaleza, un precioso canto a la amistad, al poder de la voluntad, al trabajo. Charity, naturally, dissents, arguing that “of course you could make great art out of happiness and goodness”.

And if get started about Wallace’s prose, I’m afraid you all might think I’m just crazy and obviously exaggerating.

Midway, he does a clever fake breaking of the 4th wall and I liked analogies he used (especially "the pilgrim versus the pickpocket"). Every story is told from someone’s perspective, Larry seems to be saying, don’t trust this to be the only version. When he profiled characters (as was the case in about 90% of this book), depth was a foregone conclusion. It is one of the great secrets kept between couples…The hunt for love is always on, and in some tragic, truthful, stunning way it forever eludes us. Most of the settings, captured splendidly by the author, are either in the mid-west or at a lake in northern Vermont that is surrounded by lush forests, streams, and mountains.