A gritty and clever look at life on the far edge of the United States…
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
A meditative study of a man’s life spent outdoors during the birth of the modern world.
But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.
In 1917 the railway’s momentum moved men like Robert Grainier into the northwest wilderness. Civilization craved wood. Train cars were fed spruce, the felled kings of the mountain forests. Work kept men in constant motion. Grainier weaved his way across the Cascade Mountains from the lush climate on the west side, back to the more arid life between Spokane and Bonner’s Ferry. Life was hard, rich, and satisfying for a time. When fire brought catastrophe, seclusion was his primal impulse.
Johnson took the simple life of a working man and painted it with the dream quality of memory; his rhythmic sentences paired with periodic keen observations was bewitching. Train Dreams offered an entrance into a liminal space with thousand-year-old trees and an old man who slept in the yard when the summer was too hot to sleep inside four hand-hewn walls.
Will Patton’s sonorous voice fortified the audio version of this novella.
Geographical Link: Washington, Idaho | Publisher: Audiobook: Macmilllan Audio; Hardback: Farrar, Straus and Giroux | Published: 2002
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