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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2005, 224 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2006, 224 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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A brief, lyrical novel with a powerful emotional charge about three wars of the twentieth century and an ever-deepening marriage.
A brief, lyrical novel with a powerful emotional charge, Rules for Old Men Waiting
is about three wars of the twentieth century and an ever-deepening marriage. In
a house on the Cape "older than the Republic," Robert MacIver, a historian who
long ago played rugby for Scotland, creates a list of rules by which to live out
his last days. The most important rule, to "tell a story to its end," spurs the
old Scot on to invent a strange and gripping tale of men in the trenches of the
First World War.
Drawn from a depth of knowledge and imagination, MacIver conjures the
implacable, clear-sighted artist Private Callum; the private's nemesis Sergeant
Braddis, with his pincerlike nails; Lieutenant Simon Dodds, who takes on Braddis;
and Private Charlie Alston, who is ensnared in this story of inhumanity and
betrayal but brings it to a close.
This invented tale of the Great War prompts MacIver's own memories of his role
in World War II and of Vietnam, where his son, David served. Both the stories
and the memories alike are lit by the vivid presence of Margaret, his wife. As
Hearts and Minds director Peter Davis writes, "Pouncey has wrought an
almost inconceivable amount of beauty from pain, loss, and war, and I think he
has been able to do this because every page is imbued with the love story at the
heart of his astonishing novel."
Chapter 1
Rules to Stop the Rot
The house and the old man were well matched, both large framed and failing fast. The house had a better excuse, MacIver thought; he was eighty, but the house was older than the Republic, had been a century old when Thoreau walked the Cape, though he couldn't have seen it tucked away in the nondescript maze of scrub oak. It had been the willful seclusion of the place that had appealed to them when they first saw it—that and the equally hidden pool, about two minutes away through their woods, which must have decided the builder to choose the site. The oaks grew more substantial as they approached the pond, but the casual visitor would not have registered their rising height as the ground fell away down to the water. But when the path did its last little jink through the thicket of spare mossy trunks and last year's leaves, you stood on the edge of something suddenly spacious. A stretch of almost two hundred yards of ...
On the whole the reviewers praise Rules For Old Men Waiting for its depth and lyricism, but some felt that Pouncey over reached himself at times, pushing his points too hard, and that the story lacked drama (essentially it is the story of an old man in an old house with his memories). If you enjoy spare, elegantly written stories that take time to tell then this might well be one for you...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Frank McCourt
A deeply sensual, moving, thrilling novel that calls for a second and third reading, it is that rich. Louis Begley
A tender, beautifully expressed rumination on love and loss by a highly intelligent and marvelously brave old man. Norman Mailer
Mr. Pouncey writes with enough style and elegance to bring envy into the heart of many a good novelist. Shirley Hazzard
This is a wonderful novel of a man's experience, and it touches every chord: a wholeness to which each incident crucially contributes so that wars and loves and losses, and mortality itself, are lived by the reader. The book is charged with the excitement of intelligent existence, and distinguished, above all, by its great humanity. W.S. Merwin
This spare, distilled first novel is an immediate classic, whose multiple facets and perspectives reflect an entire compass of human experience. It is imbued with the recognition of evanescence, and with a startling beauty. Ward Just
A stunning piece of work, beautifully composed and finished. It's very much its own thing, but in its reach, intelligence, and power it recalls Lampedusa's The Leopard and Marai's Embers, along with something of Norman MacLean. Old Men belongs on that same shelf.Peter Pouncey was born in Tsingtao, China of English parents. At the end of World War II, after several dislocations and separations, the family reassembled in England, where he completed his classical education at boarding school and at Oxford University. In 1964 he was offered a job for one year as a classicist, filling in for a professor on sabbatical leave at Fordham University, and has been in America ever since - first at Fordham and then at Columbia University from 1967-1984 (he was dean of the ...
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