Caribou Island by David Vann

I don't know if I was influenced by my first David Vann novel Legend of a Suicide but I waited to start Caribou Island until I had a whole day to devote to this book. I remembered having to put down Legend at one point and feeling like I was walking around with a chain wrapped around my leg dragging something heavy behind me. I knew that book was waiting for me at home and I knew I had been foolish to ignore it for more than a few minutes. Legend rewarded me greatly for not leaving it lying fallow for long.

Caribou Island started out with a silent scream. There was a tension like a wire vibrating in the wind, not stopping any part of the world but distracting, there in the background. And, again, I didn't know if I was predetermining a disaster or if Vann was just this clever. There was a great little story happening in Alaska, a place I am familiar with. I spent some time there so I know the colours, the cold, the wet, the moss, the wood. I fit into his fictional world very well. But still there was that damned humming coming from somewhere, not distracting me enough away from the story but always there.

This is a story of ordinary people. They are flawed like all of us. But they are living in a dramatic landscape that serves the purpose of overwhelming their petty foibles – snow that locks them into inaction, storms that keep them still and inactive, summer mosquitoes that distract them from their thoughts of leaving. So they settle for less than they are worthy of. They live lives of incompleteness and dissatisfaction. David Vann is an expressionist in the best way. He describes the landscape, the inhospitable north, and the ordinary, everyday crap better than most. I'm not going to tell you what happens in this book and I don't want to spoil the wonder of reading it for the first time but I have to share a few lines that, I hope, will tempt you.

“She always imagined the opposite: her mother in a fit of passion, distraught at losing her husband to another woman, unable to imagine her life without him. But what if she simply hadn't felt anything anymore, after losing everything? That was a new possibility, something Irene couldn't have guessed. And it felt dangerous. You could end up there without having noticed the transition at all.”

“Without her footsteps, no sound. No wind, no moving water, no bird, no other human. This bright world. The sound of her heart, the sound of her own breath, the sound of her own blood in her temples, those were all she would hear. If she could make those stop, she could hear the whole world.”

I guess I have a Kantian-like hubris because I want everyone to love what I love. I often don't take personal preferences into consideration when it comes to literature. I argue (often alone, in my head) with people who don't enjoy the books that I think are essential to being a human being. So, for this book view I will leave it at this – I loved this book.