Idaho | Ruskovich, Emily

Kurze Beschreibung
Ann and Wade have carved out a living for themselves from a rugged landscape, but they are bound together by more than love. Through the perspectives of Ann, Wade and Wade's first wife Jenny, now in prison for murder and in exquisite, razor-sharp prose, we learn of the shocking act that originally brought Ann and Wade together, and which reverberates through the lives of every character in Idaho.

Lange Beschreibung
LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER  A stunning debut novel about love and forgiveness, about the violence of memory and the equal violence of its loss from O. Henry Prize winning author Emily Ruskovich

WINNER OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOK AWARD WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BUZZFEED

Ann and Wade have carved out a life for themselves from a rugged landscape in northern Idaho, where they are bound together by more than love. With her husband s memory fading, Ann attempts to piece together the truth of what happened to Wade s first wife, Jenny, and to their daughters. In a story written in exquisite prose and told from multiple perspectives including Ann, Wade, and Jenny, now in prison we gradually learn of the mysterious and shocking act that fractured Wade and Jenny's lives, of the love and compassion that brought Ann and Wade together, and of the memories that reverberate through the lives of every character in Idaho.

In a wild emotional and physical landscape, Wade s past becomes the center of Ann s imagination, as Ann becomes determined to understand the family she never knew and to take responsibility for them, reassembling their lives, and her own.

FINALIST FOR: International Dylan Thomas Prize Edgar First Novel Award Young Lions Fiction Award

You know you re in masterly hands here. [Emily] Ruskovich s language is itself a consolation, as she subtly posits the troubling thought that only decency can save us. . . . Ruskovich s novel will remind many readers of the great Idaho novel, Marilynne Robinson s Housekeeping. . . .  [A] wrenching and beautiful book. The New York Times Book Review (Editors Choice)

Sensuous, exquisitely crafted. The Wall Street Journal

The first thing you should know about Idaho, the shatteringly original debut by O. Henry Prize winner Emily Ruskovich, is that it upturns everything you think you know about story. . . . You could read Idaho just for the sheer beauty of the prose, the expert way Ruskovich makes everything strange and yet absolutely familiar. San Francisco Chronicle

Mesmerizing . . . [an] eerie story about what the heart is capable of fathoming and what the hand is capable of executing. Marie Claire

Idaho is a wonderful debut. Ruskovich knows how to build a page-turner from the opening paragraph. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

Rezensierung
You know you re in masterly hands here. [Emily] Ruskovich s language is itself a consolation, as she subtly posits the troubling thought that only decency can save us. . . . Ruskovich s novel will remind many readers of the great Idaho novel, Marilynne Robinson s Housekeeping. . . .  [A] wrenching and beautiful book. The New York Times Book Review

Sensuous, exquisitely crafted. The Wall Street Journal

The first thing you should know about Idaho, the shatteringly original debut by O. Henry Prize winner Emily Ruskovich, is that it upturns everything you think you know about story. . . . You could read Idaho just for the sheer beauty of the prose, the expert way Ruskovich makes everything strange and yet absolutely familiar. . . . She startles with images so fresh, they make you see the world anew. . . . Idaho s brilliance is in its ability to not tie up the threads of narrative, and still be consummately rewarding. The novel reminds us that some things we just cannot know in life but we can imagine them, we can feel them and, perhaps, that can be enough to heal us. San Francisco Chronicle

Mesmerizing . . . [an] eerie story about what the heart is capable of fathoming and what the hand is capable of executing. Marie Claire

Idaho is a wonderful debut. Ruskovich knows how to build a page-turner from the opening paragraph. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

Ruskovich s debut is haunting, a portrait of an unusual family and a state that becomes a foreboding figure in her vivid depiction. The Huffington Post

Poetic and razor sharp, Idaho is a mystery in more ways than one. . . . Ruskovich s prose is lyrical but keen, a poem that never gets lost in its own rhythm . . . with a Marilynne Robinson-like emphasis on the private, painfully human contemplation going on inside the characters brains. The result is writing as bruisingly beautiful as the Idaho landscape in which the story takes place. A.V. Club

Idaho is both a place and an emotional dimension. Haunted, haunting, Ruskovich s novel winds through time, braiding events and their consequences in the most unexpected and moving ways. Andrea Barrett

It s been six years since I first read Emily Ruskovich s breathtaking prose, felt the force of her unsparing imagination, and knew I was in the presence of a singular talent. I ve been waiting for the novel she would write ever since, and now it s here: Idaho begins with a rusted truck and ends up places you couldn t imagine. Its language is an enchantment, its vision brutal and sublime. This book is interested in what can t be repaired and every kind of grace we find in the face of that futility. It caught and held me absolutely. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

Buchausschnitt
2004

They never drove the truck, except once or twice a year to get firewood. It was parked just up the hill in front of the woodshed, where it collected rain in the deep dents on the hood and mosquito larvae in the rainwater. That was the way it was when Wade was married to Jenny, and that s the way it is now that he is married to Ann.

Ann goes up there sometimes to sit in the truck. She waits until Wade is busy, so that he won t notice that she s gone. Today, she comes here under the pretense of getting firewood, dragging a blue sled over the mud and grass and patches of snow. The woodshed isn t far from the house, but it s hidden from view by a stand of ponderosa pines. She feels like she is trespassing, like none of this is hers to see.

The truck is parked on a rare space of flat land, an unlikely shelf carved into the mountainside. In front of the woodshed, around the truck, a few loose bricks lie here and there in the grass and snow. Spindles of mangled wire lean against the trees. Hanging from a long larch limb are two thick ropes that sway opposite each other now, but look as if they might have once been connected by a flat board ­a child s swing.

It is March, sunny and cold. Ann gets into the driver s seat and shuts the door quietly. She pulls the seatbelt across her body, then rolls the window down so that several droplets splatter on her lap. She touches the wet spots with her fingertip, connecting them with lines in her mind to make a picture on her thigh. The picture reminds her of a mouse, or at least a child s drawing of a mouse, with a triangle face and a long, curlicued tail. Nine years ago, when Wade was still married to Jenny and both of his daughters were still alive, a mouse had crawled along the top of the truck s exhaust pipe into the engine compartment, and built its nest on the manifold. She thinks of how strange it is that Wade probably remembers that mouse, remembers the sound of it skittering under the hood, and yet he s forgotten his first wife s name. Or so it seems sometimes. But the mouse ­the mouse is still very much alive in his memory.

A few years after Ann and Wade married, Ann found a pair of deerskin gloves in a toolbox high on a shelf in a closet. They were much nicer than the work gloves Wade usually wore, and seemed to be brand new except for the odor of something burned. That was how she learned about the mouse in the first place. She asked why he kept the gloves stored in their closet instead of using them. Wade told her that he wanted to preserve the smell.

What smell is that?

The smell of a rodent s nest that caught on fire.

The last smell in his daughter s hair.

It was a long time ago now that he said things like that. He stopped talking about the details of his daughter s death once he saw how much Ann held on to them. He probably thinks she s forgotten about the gloves, it s been so many years. But she hasn t. He keeps them in the filing cabinet with his papers, in his office upstairs. She has opened the drawer just enough to see them.

That mouse had probably been in the truck the whole winter, during that last year that Wade was married to Jenny, that last year that May was alive and June was safe. Ann thinks of the mouse going back and forth in the snow between the truck and the barn, hauling mouthfuls of hay or insulation or tufts of stuffing from the dogs beds, making its nest bigger and having babies in it once spring arrived. Some of the babies probably died early on and were absorbed by the nest, their tiny bones like shards of straw themselves. And other mice came, too; you could hear them moving under the hood if you put your ear against it. The little girls liked doing that.

Well, at least Ann imagines they did.

One day in August, the whole family got into the