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David Guterson
The Other
Hardcover, 272 pages, €18,95 and € 20,85
Publisher: Knopf
Two teenage boys, one from an exclusive private school, the other from a
public school, meet at a high school track event and become friends. Set
in Seattle in the 1970s, David Guterson’s new book is wonderfully
evocative of a particular time and place in American history. The two
boys spend their free time hiking through the mist-shrouded (and in
their case marijuana-shrouded) Cascade mountains, discussing poetry and
gnosticism. John William, the heir to a great Seattle fortune, is
brilliant but troubled, and driven to increasingly extreme forms of
self-deprivation by the need to prove himself and distance himself from
his wealthy, unloving parents. His friend Niel, less damaged and more
realistic, compromises in the end: he marries, has children and teaches
at a Seattle school. But he never entirely abandons his friend,
continuing to hike into the woods with supplies when John William turns
his back on the world and decides to become a hermit. David Guterson’s
beautiful, understated prose explores the themes of friendship and the
inevitable pain of the need to give up certain principles in the
transition to adult life. Readers familiar with this area of the US will
savour the melancholy descriptions of the rain-soaked forests of the
Pacific Northwest in David Guterson’s best book so far.
Order this
book
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David Guterson author of
Snow Falling on Cedars
The movie |
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