LEGEND OF A SUICIDE
David Vann
Penguin
Dark. Funny. Perspicacious. Weird. Legend of a Suicide is all of these. Set in Alaska’s defining landscape, where the often-bleak lives of a father and son backtrack in disparate sad ways, there’s an unexpected turn.
Know that these are five very short stories and one novella, with the same characters, written as a novel, or the incongruities and complexities will throw you.
Vann’s own father committed suicide and in this searing honest way of expunging the ghosts, Vann reveals much detail that, autobiographical or fictional, must have been painful for his mother.
The power of the prose is as sweeping as the terrain. I understand why it is already being called an American classic. - Shirley de Kock Gueller