David Vann Książki

Pogrążony w depresji Jim przyjeżdża do Kalifornii z Alaski, próbując podsumować swoje życie i nawiązać lepsze relacje z dziećmi oraz bratem. Chce pożegnać się z demonami przeszłości i odnaleźć siebie. Historia staje się jeszcze bardziej mroczna, gdy uświadamiamy sobie, że syn Jima, David, jest autorem tej opowieści. Ani zimna Alaska, ani gorąca Kalifornia nie są dla Jima bezpiecznymi przystaniami. To szczera narracja o beznadziei, niepokoju oraz trudnych relacjach rodzinnych, a także o ciągłym poszukiwaniu bliskości. Czytelnik staje przed wyzwaniem konfrontacji z własnym Ja i metaforycznym Halibutem. Książka zyskała uznanie w Dyskusyjnym Klubie Książki w Chrzanowie, gdzie była omawiana przez fanów autora. To pełna czułości wiwisekcja duszy człowieka, który pragnie zrozumieć siebie, ale cierpi z powodu braku zrozumienia ze strony innych. Jim dostrzega, dlaczego bliscy chcą go zatrzymać, ale jednocześnie czuje ogromny dystans między sobą a nimi. Ta historia ukazuje, że ten dystans ma swoje mroczne źródło, nad którym nikt nie ma kontroli. David Vann w bezkompromisowy sposób bada granicę życia i śmierci.

National Bestseller  In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter....

This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men. Vann strips away the softer parts of Medea's character as ruthlessly as Medea slits throats ... The centrepiece of Bright Air Black is the butchering of Pelias, a long and magnificently gruesome scene, described in stomach-churning detail ... Vann leaves us with the troubling paradox that murderous Medea is also a devoted mother ... Vann evokes this visceral, sensual, brutal world of warring city states, capricious gods and fragile human agency in a fractured prose style, reminiscent of ancient Greek drama and poetry. Short poetic phrases pile up, fall away, stop short. Powerful internal rhythms build and subside, like the waves the Argonauts sail over ... The time and the place may be very different from his previous novels, but Bright Air Black shares the same central structure of a searing family drama set against a backdrop of untamed nature ... At the heart of this ambitious, dazzling, disturbing and memorable novel lies the uneasy juxtaposing of the wild and the civilised, and the complex, shifting relationship between the two. Rebecca Abrams Financial Times

'Startlingly brilliant' Spectator 'A triumph' Daily Mail Aged nine, Caitlin spends almost every afternoon at the local aquarium while her mother works overtime at her construction job. Caitlin's whole world is her school, her mother, occasionally her mother's boyfriends, and the fish at the aquarium. She has no friends at school, apart from Shalini, who is making a paper mache Hindu reindeer with her, and no other family. But Caitlin has made a friend at the aquarium; an old man who seems to know something about Caitlin, something she doesn't even know about herself.

When the construction of their dream cabin on an isolated Alaskan island is interrupted by an early Arctic winter, Gary and Irene find their marriage unraveling as they become stranded with their daughter, Rhoda, who watches helplessly as her parents drift further apart.

Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, commits suicide on the deck of his boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood. Finally, Roy lays his father's ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a gruelling, exhilarating revenge.

Twenty-two-year-old Galen is a New Age believer on a warpath towards transcendence. He lives with his emotionally dependent mother in a secluded house, surviving on old family money that his Aunt Helen and cousin Jennifer are determined to get their hands on. Galen doesn’t know who his father is, his abusive grandfather is dead, and his grandmother is losing her memory. When the family takes a trip to an old cabin in the Sierras, tensions crescendo. Caught in a compromising position, Galen will discover the shocking truth of just how far he will go to attain what it is he craves.

In David Vann’s searing novel Goat Mountain, an 11-year-old boy at his family’s annual deer hunt is eager to make his first kill. His father discovers a poacher on the land, a 640-acre ranch in Northern California, and shows him to the boy through the scope of his rifle. With this simple gesture, tragedy erupts, shattering lives irrevocably. In prose devastating and beautiful in its precision, David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions—what we owe for what we’ve done. David Vann is the award-winning author of Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth.

Une île sauvage du sud de l'Alaska, accessible uniquement par bateau ou par hydravion, tout en forêts humides et montagnes escarpées.C'est dans ce décor que Jim décide d'emmener son fils de treize ans pour y vivre dans une cabane isolée, une année durant. Après une succession d'échecs personnels, il voit là l'occasion de prendre un nouveau départ et de renouer avec ce garçon qu'il connaît si mal. Mais la rigueur de cette vie et les défaillances du père ne tardent pas à transformer ce séjour en cauchemar, et la situation devient vite incontrôlable.Jusqu'au drame violent et imprévisible qui scellera leur destin. Couronné par le prix Médicis étranger en 2010, Sukkwan Island est un livre inoubliable qui nous entraîne au coeur des ténèbres de l'âme humaine.