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Serena: A Novel (P.S.) Kindle Edition
The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire. Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains—but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattle-snakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Together this lord and lady of the woodlands ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor. Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her. Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel as the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.
Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateSeptember 23, 2008
- File size890 KB
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Amazon.com Review
Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed.
The Gift of Silence: An Essay by Ron Rash
When readers ask how I came to be a writer, I usually mention several influences: my parents’ teaching by example the importance of reading; a grandfather who, though illiterate, was a wonderful storyteller; and, as I grew older, an awareness that my region had produced an inordinate number of excellent writers and that I might find a place in that tradition. Nevertheless, I believe what most made me a writer was my early difficulty with language.
My mother tells me that certain words were impossible for me to pronounce, especially those with j’s and g’s. Those hard consonants were like tripwires in my mouth, causing me to stumble over words such as “jungle” and “generous.” My parents hoped I would grow out of this problem, but by the time I was five, I’d made no improvement. There was no speech therapist in the county, but one did drive in from the closest city once a week.
That once a week was a Saturday morning at the local high school. For an hour the therapist worked with me. I don’t remember much of what we did in those sessions, except that several times she held my hands to her face as she pronounced a word. I do remember how large and empty the classroom seemed with just the two of us in it, and how small I felt sitting in a desk made for teenagers.
I improved, enough so that by summer’s end the therapist said I needed no further sessions. I still had trouble with certain words (one that bedevils me even today is “gesture”), but not enough that when I entered first grade my classmates and teacher appeared to notice. Nevertheless, certain habits of silence had taken hold. It was not just self-consciousness. Even before my sessions with the speech therapist, I had convinced myself that if I listened attentively enough to others my own tongue would be able to mimic their words. So I listened more than I spoke. I became comfortable with silence, and, not surprisingly, spent a lot of time alone wandering nearby woods and creeks. I entertained myself with stories I made up, transporting myself into different places, different selves. I was in training to be a writer, though of course at that time I had yet to write more than my name.
Yet my most vivid memory of that summer is not the Saturday morning sessions at the high school but one night at my grandmother’s farmhouse. After dinner, my parents, grandmother and several other older relatives gathered on the front porch. I sat on the steps as the night slowly enveloped us, listening intently as their tongues set free words I could not master. Then it appeared. A bright-green moth big as an adult’s hand fluttered over my head and onto the porch, drawn by the light filtering through the screen door. The grown-ups quit talking as it brushed against the screen, circled overhead, and disappeared back into the night. It was a luna moth, I learned later, but in my mind that night it became indelibly connected to the way I viewed language--something magical that I grasped at but that was just out of reach.
In first grade, I began learning that loops and lines made from lead and ink could be as communicative as sound. Now, almost five decades later, language, spoken or written, is no longer out of reach, but it remains just as magical as that bright-green moth. What writer would wish it otherwise.
From The New Yorker
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
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From the Back Cover
About the Author
Né en 1953, Ron Rash a écrit trois recueils de poèmes, trois recueils de nouvelles, et deux autres romans, dont un pour enfants, tous lauréats de plusieurs prix littéraires. Il est actuellement professeur émérite au département d’Études culturelles appalachiennes de la Western California University. Il se revendique comme écrivain du Sud.
From The Washington Post
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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Product details
- ASIN : B001FA0UTA
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; Reprint edition (September 23, 2008)
- Publication date : September 23, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 890 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 383 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #242,484 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #235 in Add Audiobook for $3.99 or Less
- #1,425 in U.S. Historical Fiction
- #1,497 in Historical Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Ron Rash is the author of the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel, Serena, in addition to three other prizewinning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight; three collections of poems; and four collections of stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chrmistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. Twice the recipient of the O.Henry Prize, he teaches at Western Carolina University.
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The book progresses as the couple builds a logging empire, razing the land all around them to stumps and polluting the environment. This is told in the back-drop of the Great Depression and FDR's starting up of National Parks. Naturally, the Pembertons are opposed to parks and they buy up all the land they can to log while buying off all the people they can to turn the outcomes in their favor. Those in their way, they kill or have killed. There is no compassion forthcoming from these two.
Many others die due to the horrible conditions in the logging camp. As soon as someone is injured they are fired and replaced. If they die, the next person waiting for a job gets hired. There is no compensation and certainly no compassion. Everyone is expendable to the Pembertons.
Even in love there is a visage of portending evil. Serena wants Pemberton to be satisfied in life with only her - the two of them together against the world. She describes their lovemaking as 'annihilation'. This is symbolic of the two of them needing only one another and the rest of the world being expendable if they do not fit into Serena and Pembertan's plans. Unfortunately, Serena can not produce an heir and she begins to worry whether Pemberton is secretly helping his illegitimate son and his mother.
Serena goes around on her white Arabian horse with an Eagle trained to kill rattlesnakes and other enemies. As she begins to suspect that Pemberton might have some interests that are not solely her, the balance of love and power begin to shift.
I found this a powerful book, beautifully written with wonderfully developed characterization. The sense of time and place is superb. I highly recommend this book.
As for the bits that don't work so well. There's splattering of mysticism thrown into the plot and it doesn't work as well as other bits of the book. It felt a bit forced and smacked of the whole mountain people having mystical powers stereotype. The book also drags early on and doesn't pick up until about half way through. Then there's the ending itself, while harrowing and, and to its credit it ties up the main plot line, it leaves a couple of the characters fates up in the air.
Despite some flaws "Serena" is a good read that will get exciting about half way through. I could have done without the mysticism and it would have been nice to see what happened to some of the characters afterwards, but these points are negligible to say the least. I debated giving this book three or four stars (primarily because amazon won't let you do half stars), but settled on four mostly because of the writing, characters, and the exciting ending.
Rash's novel is an intriguing exploration of human nature, love, ambition and loyalty. Serena and George's intensely passionate love affair begins to bleed into their work lives and in an attempt to completely possess one another they begin to destroy everything and everyone around them.
Despite its interesting themes and characters this book lacked something that's hard to articulate. Rash creates beautiful literal and metaphorical imagery but also writes in a cold and detached manner. He doesn't seem invested in his characters or story which makes it hard for the reader to become invested in the book.
Despite this, I think this book is worth recommending because Serena is such a fascinating character and is the most ruthless and uncompromising female protagonist the reader will have ever come across. She is a heady mix of beauty, violence and power.
Top reviews from other countries
Ich bin noch nicht ganz mit dem Buch durch (ca die Hälfte)- kann es aber kaum aus der Hand legen. Obwohl ich lieber in deutsch, als englisch lese, merkt man das der Autor eine sehr angenehme und plastische Erzählsprache verwendet. Es fällt einem leicht in die 20ger Jahre in North Carolina gedanklich einzutauchen, in den George und Serena Pemperton ihr Holzfällerimperium aufbauen und scheinbar vor nichts zurückschrecken, was ihren Weg stört. Mit Serena baut Ron Rash eine brilliante und ehrgeizige aber auch berechnend und mysteriöse Hauptfigur auf, deren Geschichte man einfach bis zum Ende erfahren will.In anderen Kritiken wird die Novelle mit Macbeth-artigen Motiven beschrieben, was treffend erscheint.
J'ai conseillé ce roman à des amis et je suis curieuse de voir le film qui va en être tiré. J'espère ne pas être déçue.