Recapitulation - Softcover

Stegner, Wallace

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140266739 ISBN 13: 9780140266733

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1997

Synopsis

The moving sequel to the bestselling Big Rock Candy Mountain.

Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City not for his aunt's funeral, but to encounter after forty-five years the place he fled in bitterness. A successful statesman and diplomat, Mason had buried his awkward and lonely childhood, sealed himself off from the thrills and torments of adolescence to become a figure who commanded international respect.

But the realities of the present recede in the face of the ghosts of his past. As he makes the perfunctory arrangements for the funeral, we enter with him on an intensely personal and painful inner pilgrimage: we meet the father who darkened his childhood, the mother whose support was both redeeming and embarrassing, the friend who drew him into the respectable world of which he so craved to be a part, and the woman he nearly married. In this profoundly moving book Stegner has drawn an intimate portrait of a man understanding how his life has been shaped by experiences seemingly remote and inconsequential.

About this title

About the Author:

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) was the author of, among other novels, All the Little Live Things (winner of a Commonwealth Club Gold Medal), Angle of Repose (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and The Spectator Bird (winner of the National Book Award). His nonfiction includes The Sound of Mountain Water, The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. Three of his short stories won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements.

Review:

"Wonderful . . . one comes out aware of universal human feelings that have nothing to do with time."
—The Christian Science Monitor

"This is Stegner's The Sound and the Fury. Like the Faulkner novel, Recapitulation is abook about time and its multiplicity of meanings in human experience, about the history of a family and its decline . . ."
—Jackson J. Benson, author of Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0140266739
• ISBN 13: 9780140266733
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288