Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner

Category: Adults, Historical Fiction, Literature, Novel
Language: English
Keywords: Classics Literary

Written by Wallace Stegner
Read by Mark Bramhall
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Length: 22 hrs and 13 mins

Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel—the magnificent story of four generations in the life of an American family.

Crippled Lyman Ward researches and looks back on the pioneering life of his grandparents, in particular the life of his genteel eastern educated Grandmother, as they try to forge a new life and find civilization in the new untamed west.

He is forced to reflect on his own circumstances when looking back on his grandmothers ultimately tragic relationship with her husbands assistant, Frank Sergeant.

This is an epic book that effortlessly takes you into the beating pulse of the wild west and into the lives that had to endure it.

“Angle of Repose” explores many themes, not least the comparisons between the inhibited Victorian Grandmother and the “liberated” Shelley who acts as Lyman’s secretary, typing out his recorded transcripts.

Who exactly was/is the trailblazer?

Did his grandmothers moral inhibitions and values make her any less susceptible to the human condition and frailties as the modern liberated woman?

Perhaps just their reactions and hypocrisies are different.

That Susan ward kept to her values is something Stegner admired; is perhaps something we should all mourn as now lost.

This is one of those books that you’d give an extra star to if you could.

Its like reading Saul Bellow or Patrick White or any of the greats at the top of their game.

A magnificent book.