Name: Legend of a Suicide
ISBN: 9780141043784

David Vann

Roy is still young when his father kills himself. Throughout his life Roy returns to the moment. He lays his father's ghost to rest, but not before he exacts a gruelling revenge.

Legend of a Suicide

I actually really enjoy this book, though I have had one person who read it on my recommendation not be as enthusiastic. I read this as part of my college Literature and Psychoanalysis class. I highly recommend people read The Guardian review on this book by Alex Linklater either before or after. The review ends with these lines: "But you also need to remain ignorant of the fictional surprise he has in store, so that it can hit you with the full force of new knowledge. Nothing quite like this book has been written before." I also cannot spoil this surprise, but found it... an incredibly creative and realistic way of how we are in relation to trauma. How often have I done in my imagination what David Vann does in this book?

Kevin Juneos Mei Le

Nelson Zagalo

A minha análise: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...

"In "Ichthyology," a young boy watches his father spiral from divorce to suicide. The story is told obliquely, often through the boy's observations of his tropical fish, yet also reveals his father's last desperate moves, including quitting dentistry for commercial fishing in the Bering Sea. "Rhoda" goes back to the beginning of the father's second marriage and the boy's fascination with his stepmother, who has one partially closed eye. This eye becomes a metaphor for the adult world the boy can't yet see into, including sexuality and despair, which feel like the key initiating elements of the father's eventual suicide. "A Legend of Good Men" tells the story of the boy's life with his mother after his father's death through the series of men she dates." "In "Sukkwan Island," an extraordinary novella, the father invites the boy homesteading for a year on a remote island in the southeastern Alaskan wilderness. As the situation spins out of control, the son witnesses his father's despair and takes matters into his own hands. In "Ketchikan," the boy is now thirty years old, searching for the origin of ruin. He tracks down Gloria, the woman his father first cheated with, and is left with the sense of "a world held in place, as it turned out, by nothing at all." Set in Fairbanks, where the author's father actually killed himself, "The Higher Blue" provides an epilogue to the collection."--BOOK JACKET.