Darlington's FallDarlington's Fall
a Novel in Verse
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Book, 2002
Current format, Book, 2002, 1st ed, Available .Book, 2002
Current format, Book, 2002, 1st ed, Available . Offered in 0 more formatsThe hero of this one-of-a-kind novel is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero. We meet him in the year 1895--a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp. And we follow this idealistic, appealing man for nearly forty years: into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling marria≥ across the Pacific, where on a tiny, rainy island he suffers a nightmarish accident; through the deaths of friends and family and into a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman. Darlington's Fallis ultimately a love story. It is written in verse that--vivid, accessible, and lush--imparts an intensity to the story and its luminous gallery of characters: Russel's rich, taciturn, up-right, guilt-driven father; Miss Kraus, his formidable housekeeper; Ernst Schrock, his maddening, gluttonous ment∨ and Pauline Beaudette, the beautiful, ill-starred girl who becomes his wife. Leithauser's embracingly compassionate outlook invites us into their world--into a past so sharply realized it feels like the present. InDarlington's Fall, Brad Leithauser offers an ingeniously plotted story and the virtues long associated with his elegant stanzas: wit, music, and a keen eye for the natural world. His independent careers as novelist and poet come together brilliantly here, producing something rare and wonderful in the landscape of contemporary American writing: a book that bends borders, a happy marriage of poetry and fiction.
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- New York : Alfred A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2002.
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