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Book Reviewed by:
Joe Hoeffner
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A career defining tour-de-force from New York Times bestselling, award-winning and "formidably gifted" (Chicago Tribune) author of Peace Like a River Leif Enger.
A storyteller "of great humanity and huge heart" (Minneapolis Star Tribune), Leif Enger debuted in the literary world with Peace Like a River which sold over a million copies and captured readers' hearts around the globe. Now comes a new milestone in this boldly imaginative author's accomplished, resonant body of work.
Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.
I Cheerfully Refuse epitomizes the "musical, sometimes magical and deeply satisfying kind of storytelling" (Los Angeles Times) for which Leif Enger is cherished. A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, this latest novel is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.
Excerpt
I Cheerfully Refuse
HERE AT THE BEGINNING it must be said the End was on everyone's mind.
For example look at my friend Labrino who showed up one gusty spring night. It was moonless and cold, wind droning in the eaves, waves on Superior standing up high and ramming into the seawall. Lark and I lived two blocks off the water and you could feel those waves in the floorboards. Labrino had to bang on the door like a lunatic just to get my attention.
Still, it was good he knocked at all. There were times Labrino was so melancholy he couldn't bring himself to raise his knuckles, and then he might stand motionless on the back step until one of us noticed he was there. It was unnerving enough in the daytime, but once it happened when I couldn't sleep and was prowling the kitchen for leftovers. Three in the morning—just when you want to see a slumping hairy silhouette right outside your house. When the shock wore off I opened the door and told him not to do that anymore.
But this ...
Rainy's journey is filled with striking, memorable details and setpieces, captured with imagination and verve by Enger: a sinister character who owns a cross made of "two automatic rifles," a forsaken island whose populace paints murals of their dead, and a harrowing stealth mission to circumvent a tyrannical toll booth operator. I Cheerfully Refuse, as its title suggests, is a book intended as a missive against the status quo, which is to say a missive against hopelessness. More cynical readers may find Enger's pleas against despair as effective as a "Hang In There" poster on a cubicle wall. But he writes with such sincere affection for this setting and these characters that it's hard to begrudge him for his sentimentality. After all, if a reader wants detached pessimism, they can find it virtually everywhere else...continued
Full Review
(595 words)
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
Josh Ritter, singer and author of The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All
A heart-racing ballad of escape, shot-through with villainy and dignity, humor and music. Like Mark Twain, Enger gives us a full accounting of the human soul, scene by scene, wave by wave. Violet Kupersmith, author of Build Your House Around My Body
A book that reads like music, both battle hymn and love song for our world. A true epic—heartbreaking, terrifyingly prophetic, but above all, radically hopeful.
"The setting is a character in itself" is a moth-eaten critical insight about any book (or film, or TV show), but I Cheerfully Refuse stops just short of literally making Lake Superior a character. As the protagonist Rainy sails across the largest of the Great Lakes, he describes it as "a three-hundred-mile fetch of malevolent spirit," praises it for saving him and accuses it of betraying him, and compares it to "her sister the North Atlantic and her cousins the hurricanes." Even if he never set sail, Rainy's life in his hometown of Icebridge is shaped by its proximity to the lake, just as it would be if he lived in Lightner, Winton, Brighton, or any of the other villages he visits over the course of the novel.
Rainy often uses the word ...
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