From Library Journal
Living alone in a Boston apartment after his wife's death, 78-year-old millionaire beer magnate August Kleinman reviews the defining moments of his life: escape from Nazi Germany as a child, marriage to an Italian Catholic, and the reckless decision to start his own business. But mostly his thoughts turn to World War II and a tragic encounter he had with a young Japanese soldier. For the past 50 years, Kleinman has kept the soldier's letters and drawings and decides to return the keepsakes to the surviving family members in Japan personally. More of a character study than a history lesson, Canin's latest novel (after For Kings and Planets) mentions major postwar events only in passing, instead focusing on family relationships and the simple satisfactions of domesticity. In deference to the values of the World War II generation, the prose style is self-consciously old-fashioned, without a trace of irony or narrative duplicity. This is a well-crafted and frequently affecting novel that only misses the mark in its familiarity. We have heard this story countless times before. Still, Canin's many fans will not be disappointed. Recommended for most fiction collections.
- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
In Canin's fourth novel, he tells the story of 78-year-old German immigrant August Kleinman. Having recently lost his beloved wife and sensing that the end is near, August flashes back to key moments in his past, struggling to see the patterns that have shaped his life. He escaped Nazi Germany when he was just a boy, and his mother's courage and counsel ("Take the advice of no one") always stayed with him. He fought in World War II, married his high-school sweetheart, had three children, and made a fortune by starting his own brewery. August misses his wife terribly and frets about what to do with his money, but the key moment he returns to again and again is a frightening confrontation he had with a young Japanese soldier in a cave. He ultimately decides to go to Japan, where he intends to make reparations to the family of the young soldier. Canin struggles mightily here to reach for the resonance of fable, but his story remains strangely flat, plagued by problems with pacing and an awkward flashback structure. There are some beautiful passages here, most notably in the wry exchanges between August and his daughter-in-law. But it's baffling and somewhat disheartening to see such an accomplished short-story writer insist on struggling with the longer form. Still, Canin has been coasting on the acclaim and popularity of his first book, the short-story collection Emperor of the Air (1988), for a long time now, and his fans keep coming back for more. There's no doubt they will be asking for his latest book. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“The most wise and beautiful novel of 2001.”—London Daily Telegraph
“Carry Me Across the Water reconfirms Canin’s stature as one of the best fiction writers of his generation.” —The Miami Herald
“A daring and heartbreaking success.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“It’s [a] testament to Canin’s mastery that he’s able to encompass the largest possible themes—life and death, war and peace, mortality and transcendence—with such elliptical precision. . . . The novel represents such a powerfully transformative experience—for protagonist and reader alike.”—Chicago Sun-Times
“A hypnotic, intricately structured, elegiac novel.” —L.A. Weekly
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
?Take the advice of no one,? August Kleinman?s mother says to him while August is still a young boy in Germany, and with these words to guide him, he escapes Nazi Germany and goes on to build a fortune, a family, and life on his own terms in America. At the defining moments that reveal character and shape fate ? a shocking encounter with a Japanese soldier in a cave during World War II, the audacious decision to start a brewery in Pittsburgh and a violent reaction against threats to its independent success, a vacation in Barbados, during which his beloved wife mysteriously wanders off, the birth of his grandson ? August?s instincts are determinative in a way that illuminates how lives unfold at the deepest levels. This is a brilliant, suspenseful, surprising novel by one of America?s finest writers. Publisher?s Weekly called Ethan Canin?s For Kings and Planets ?Masterful ? a classic parable of the human condition,? and the same can be said about Carry Me Across the Water.
About the Author
Ethan Canin is the author of For Kings and Planets, The Palace Thief, Blue River, and Emperor of Air. He is a graduate of Harvard Medical School and on the faculty of the University of Iowa’s Workshop. He lives in California and Iowa.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
March 19th, 1945 (Monday? Sunday?)
Aguni-jima, East China Sea
My Most Divine Umi—
You cannot imagine how I long for you.
When I think of my real life (or shall I say my past life? For this, now, is my real life) so much of it vanishes -- Sounzan, the mountain, even my beloved parents — and all that remains of my time on earth are the days that I have spent with you. And two of these days you know nothing about! Are you aware that I spent the Saturday before my departure with you? No, how could you know?
You and Kakuzo, with little Teiji in his basket, walked that morning to the inlet of turtles, and Kakuzo carried a gift melon, no doubt offered in honor of Teiji’s birth. You shared it, then brought Teiji to the water and dipped his tiny feet. I believe I saw in Kakuzo, as he stood at the edge of the shore stones, a hesitancy to touch the baby: is it possible? I know such details, my love, because I was in the cherry trees watching you.
My life I give to the two of you.
From my hiding place, I watched Teiji closely. He is quite still — a sign in a baby, I believe, of the artist’s vision. I believe he is watching everything: the folds of cotton at the rim of his basket, the pale Sounzan sky, the mountain painting itself on the quiet of Lake Ashi. He is watching and recording, and one day he will astonish you. Perhaps he will draw a grove of cherries and, in it, hidden by leaves and branches, a heart that is plundered, watching you. Or perhaps he will attempt to draw the mountain itself, inverted in the lake, perfection as it exists and therefore the stumblestone of all who would attempt its capture. Allow me, if I might, to hope.
And then there was Tuesday morning, the morning I reported to my regiment, when on the way to the Odawara train I passed by Kakuzo’s shop. I do not know what I was planning to do. Our beautiful Sounzan was still in darkness, and I had thoughts of entering the shop and telling Kakuzo the truth; but when I came to the window, there he was inside, sewing a mat, and before I had the chance to enter, I saw that you were there also, next to him, on the floor on a tatami watching the baby, and I believe that what I saw in your face was sorrow.
I will believe that what you were thinking about, Umi, was what had occurred between us.
This is my conviction. Perhaps I am mistaken, and in that case the fate that surely awaits me here is the better of the two that are possible. Yet as I rode the train that morning away from Sounzan, I could not help but believe that your melancholy was because you too desired the miracle for which I myself had once hoped, the miracle for which now, as I face the prospect of never seeing you again, I cannot help but hope once again.
Here on Aguni, I have constructed a passable rendition of the world. The island, and my life where I have hidden myself, I will describe to you in another letter. Perhaps it is different from how you imagine: after dark, I venture into the open for food and water, wary at every step. The soldiers are still about, even at night, but at least the snakes, which can drop upon a man from the tree limbs, are in their torpor then. And I am able, miraculously, and thanks to the efforts of carrying such items at great pains into the jungle, to read the poems of Basho and to study the prints of Gaho and Hogai, as well as to continue my own development in oils, a few of which I have carried here with me as well (thinned with kerosene, which is in adequate supply). This indeed is wondrous for me: not just to be able to work — and there are no distractions at all, here, my divine Umi — but to spend my days with these three great teachers of our heritage. Perhaps I will one day be able to tell you what I have learned of the eye and the romance it carries on, quietly and in a most halting manner, with the veiled beauty of the world.
And if they find me here — forgive me, but I know the efforts of our emperor have begun to sour — if they find me here, I plan to show them the Hogai. For this, I must hope that it is a man of sympathy who is the first to enter. For how can the beauty of those paintings not bring peace to such a heart, as it has to mine?
Umi, I know that it is likely you will never see this letter, yet I write in the hope that you yourself might have written a similar one, perhaps, to me; though I am aware, as well, that I most probably will never see that one either.
Yet I remain,
in most exquisite devotion—
There is no signature. August Kleinman has a copy of this letter in his condominium in Boston, framed in box-jointed mahogany and calligraphed in a very fine, small hand, one of the few items he brought with him from the house in Newton when he moved. Next to it are two good-sized Francis Bacons and a dark Morandi, and, on the mantel, a porcelain cup containing several dull gold teeth and an alabaster brooch. Above the cup hangs another mahogany frame, from which the original letter, in Japanese, has been removed and in which only the pale rectangles of unfaded backing remain, rimmed by yellow, where for thirty years the rice paper had blocked the assaults of the sun.
When August Kleinman was eighteen years old, a particularly florid eighteen — ruby-faced, wiry-armed, bursting with appetites that were so new to him as to seem the appetites of someone else entirely — he was invited to the Fordham University field house by his friend Mickey White, to watch the Fordham Rams practice football. Mickey White had made the varsity team. He and August had grown up together on Beach 28th Street near Seagirt Boulevard in Wavecrest, a Jewish alley of peeling bungalows a quarter-mile from the Atlantic Ocean on the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, and had been friends since the fifth grade, when August had arrived in New York. Mickey was at Fordham because his hair was red and his name might have been Irish, though he and August had attended not only the same high school but the same synagogue as well. Mickey was a year older than August and two years ahead of him in school. August was a junior at Far Rockaway High on the day he crossed the East River on the Long Island Rail Road, then caught the subway north to the Fordham campus in Rose Hill. In his hand he carried a square-folded copy of the New York Post and in his pocket a bootlegger’s flask of diluted Scotch whiskey, which he had poured off from his stepfather’s dusty cabinet. At Penn Station he had added a little water for caution. He wasn’t even sure he would drink it, yet he wanted something in case his courage failed him. For some time now, courage had occupied his thoughts.
As he sat in the flickering sway of the tunnel shadows, he studied the scores in the Post. That Mickey White had made the Fordham squad was news all over Wavecrest, and though August was only intermittently interested in sports, he was obliged to pay close attention to the team. Mickey White, as it turned out, mattered very little in the success or failure of the Rams. He was a second-string defensive back and a third-string receiver — he rarely made it into a game — but in the collection of bungalows between Seagirt Boulevard and the Atlantic Ocean, he remained a figure of veneration among the children, as well as one of curiosity among their immigrant parents; August, as Mickey’s friend, took it upon himself to become the neighborhood expert in his endeavors. Fordham in those days was a national powerhouse. Their games were on the radio every week, and they had been nearly unbeatable while Mickey and August were in elementary school. The Seven Blocks of Granite had graduated now, but Fordham was still felt to have a good shot at the Sugar Bowl. In the first game of the new season they had beaten Holy Cross by three touchdowns and a field goal, and in the fourth quarter of that game August had heard Mickey White’s name announced over the radio, substituting on defense once the lead had become insurmountable. This was 1940.
August himself had never played tackle football, and as he walked down the ramp in Rose Hill that autumn morning between brick stanchions to the Fordham field, demarked by a crumbling cork track, the sounds of thudding bodies frightened him. He could hear the wallop of leather and a chorus of stamps and thuds as though not men but horses were engaged below him on the green. He paused to compose himself. Then he came around the corner onto the track, where across the grass the team, in fabulous red-and-white jerseys, was running through drills of open-field tackling. Two lines faced each other across fifteen yards of trampled turf, and one at a time the end player would loose himself, fake and cut toward the opposing squad, and be brought down by a man on defense.
How August, a refugee from Europe and a stranger to the game, came to participate in that drill was a matter that would ring in his memory even after he had grown old. He stood watching the team, at first frightened by the violence, then drawn to it. He was not a timid boy, yet his boldness, such as it was, had always been in the service of self-preservation. This is what his short life had taught him. Now, when he noticed the door to the locker room standing open, he walked in. How could he have done so? A sense of the tempting world stood just beyond him, had stood there for some time now, a glinting panorama of possibility that clutched him whenever the train turned on 54th Avenue and hurtled, clacking and swaying, toward the East River. And always, to counter it, was the sense of his mother as well, his mother in her patched-up sweaters, his mother with all her warnings, rinsing the kosher plates at the sink. Inside the locker room now, he stood behind the immense metal door — a door that seemed big enough for cattle to pass through — preparing a look of bafflement in case one was needed. But nobody approached him. He pinched a drink from the flask and, though at first its fiery taste only alarmed him...
