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| A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition | 
 enlarge | Author: Norman Maclean
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Category: Book
List Price: $12.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (120 reviews)
Sales Rank: 9152
Format: Special Edition
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 239
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 0226500667
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780226500669
ASIN: 0226500667
Publication Date: October 1, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Just as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century. Originally published in 1976, A River Runs through It and Other Stories now celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary, marked by this new edition that includes a foreword by Annie Proulx.
Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the first decades of the twentieth century. As a young man he worked many summers in logging camps and for the United States Forest Service. The two novellas and short story in this collection are based on his own experiences?the experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality, and so he leaves a careful record of what it was like to work in the woods when it was still a world of horse and hand and foot, without power saws, "cats," or four-wheel drives. Populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, and set in the small towns and surrounding trout streams and mountains of western Montana, the stories concern themselves with the complexities of fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, and a father.
By turns raunchy, poignant, caustic, and elegiac, these are superb tales which express, in Maclean's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by." A first offering from a 70-year-old writer, the basis of a top-grossing movie, and the first original fiction published by the University of Chicago Press, A River Runs through It and Other Stories has sold more than a million copies. As Proulx writes in her foreword to this new edition, "In 1990 Norman Maclean died in body, but for hundreds of thousands of readers he will live as long as fish swim and books are made."
"Altogether beautiful in the power of its feeling. . . . As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway."?Alfred Kazin, Chicago Tribune Book World
"It is an enchanted tale. . . . I have read the story three times now, and each time it seems fuller."? Roger Sale, New York Review of Books
"Maclean's book?acerbic, laconic, deadpan?rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren. I love its sound."?James R. Frakes, New York Times Book Review
"The title novella is the prize. . . . Something unique and marvelous: a story that is at once an evocation of nature's miracles and realities and a probing of human mysteries. Wise, witty, wonderful, Maclean spins his tales, casts his flies, fishes the rivers and the woods for what he remembers from his youth in the Rockies."?Publishers Weekly
"Ostensibly a 'fishing story,' 'A River Runs through It' is really an autobiographical elegy that captivates readers who have never held a fly rod in their hand. In it the art of casting a fly becomes a ritual of grace, a metaphor for man's attempt to move into nature."?Andrew Rosenheim, The Independent
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| Customer Reviews: Read 115 more reviews...
 Haunting September 17, 2008
First off, I haven't seen the movie, so this will not be a comparison piece. Norman Maclean's novella is an inspirational story, definitely poignant and touching as so many others before me have stated. This work melds nature, heritage, human emotions, and even metaphysics like none I've ever encountered. In its poetic and deeply probing style, A River Runs Through It compares favorably with the work of Robert Penn Warren, my favorite author.
I cannot think of another novel that is as satisfying in both literal and conceptual dimensions. On one hand, this is a story of a family told in a fly-fishing setting. On the other hand, this is a study of the nature of existence and human consciousness. Just as an aside, maclean's memory of the intricacies of fly-fishing and the events of 50 years prior is simply astounding. Even if he's filling in the details with literary license, it doesn't diminish his astonishing gift.
I have gleaned from this novel the concept that true knowledge eludes us, what we are left with is "a lifetime of questions." This is only one of many questions handled deftly by the author. This is a classic never to be forgotten; I wish I could give it more stars.
 Book vs. Movie: A Comparison September 15, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am invariably disappointed by movies "based on" a book if I've read the book first. After seeing A River Runs Through It (Columbia Pictures, 1992) recently, I felt compelled to read the book by Norman Maclean upon which movie is based. Even for a clueless fly-fishing rookie like me, the book is charming in a bucolic and unpretentious sort of way. Moreover, the screenplay deliciously - and accurately - reflects the panache and elan of the print version. Prodigious chunks of the screenplay are lifted verbatim from this disarmingly simple novella of just over 100 pages, with a few minor differences.
Some Differences:
The chronology of events is slightly different. Norman's wife Jessie appears much sooner in the book than in the movie. In fact, Norman and Jessie are married by page 9 and Norman meets his insufferable brother-in-law, Neal, at the train on page 29 well after Jessie becomes Mrs. Norman Maclean. In the movie this incident occurs before Norman and Jessie are married.
Also, Norman's mother is a more full-bodied, three-dimensional character who makes chokecherry jelly for her boys and, along with Paul, was "the central attraction" of every family reunion (p. 78). Also receiving more attention in the book is the fishing fiasco with Neal, and how Neal got fried to a crisp under a hot Montana sun. In the movie, Paul's pursuit and ultimate triumphant landing of the "unbelievable" fish occurs toward the end of the film. In the book, it's Norman who catches the big fish in the Big Blackfoot River, and he does so early on - before page 22.
Additional minor differences include:
- The timeline is slightly altered from book to movie. The opening lines in which an elderly Norman recalls his father's advice to write down his stories occurs far back in the book, which opens with, "In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing...."
- No mention is made of Norman attending Dartmouth or being offered a university professorship in Chicago in the book - plot devices invented for the movie.
- Norman's courtship of Jessie, a major movement within the movie, doesn't appear in the book, where the couple is already married the first time we meet Jessie.
- In the movie, both brothers seem evenly matched in their fly-fishing skills. In the boo,, Paul is "a master," his skills far superior to Norman's (see pp. 42 and 43).
- Norman's offer to "help" Paul, made while he's driving an intoxicated Paul and his girlfriend home from a night on the town in the movie, is clumsily offered while the brothers are fishing in the print version.
- Rev. Maclean's "you can love completely without complete understanding" is a comment made to Norman in the book (p. 103), not part of a church sermon, as it appears in the movie.
- Maclean's wry wit and sandpaper humor are completely lost in the movie, probably due to its thematic focus and time constraints. In print, both are as fresh and flavorful as a stream-to-skillet Rainbow trout.
Similarities:
- Rev. Maclean's teaching techniques for casting are directly from the book, metronome and all (pages 2-4)
- Paul vs. father in the Battle of the Oatmeal (p. 7)
- Paul's "shadow casting" technique (p. 21)
- Norman's clipped conversation with the Irish desk sergeant after Paul's been jailed for a drunken fist-fight (pp. 23-25) is an abbreviated but verbatim version of what appears in the book.
- Black Jack's Bar appears on page 30 and Old rawhide" puts in her swarthy appearance on page 31.
- Norman's brother-in-law, Neal, spins fab fibs at the bar about tracking and trailing otters on page 33. (However, Neal doesn't spend the night with Old Rawhide after picking her up at the bar, as implied in the movie. Instead, he wakes up at his mother's with a hellacious hangover and a couple of annoyed brothers-in law who are raring to go fishing - and tolerate the family picnic that follows.
- Neal stores his flies in a fly box; Paul uses his hat band)
- "Three things we're never late for" in Montana include church, work and fishing, a line delivered by Brad Pitt in the movie as Paul, appears on page 34 in the book.
- Rev. Maclean's comment about Paul's decision to change the spelling of the family name appears (ages 80 and 81)
- "Three more years before I can think like a fish" - Brad Pitt as Paul in the movie; p. 101 in the book.
- Rev. Maclean's musings about how to help someone who won't take help are recited by Tom Skerritt in the movie almost verbatim. (See p. 81)
- Events surrounding Paul's death, narrated by Robert Redford in the move, are word-for-word from the book (pp. 102 - 104). In print context, Rev. Maclean's subsequent question about "which hand" of Paul's had the broken bones makes more sense in the book because the author spend more time discussing casting technique and hand strength than the movie had time to develop.
Maclean provides additional details about intricacies of fly-fishing and casting that allow the uninitiated to better understand and more fully appreciate fly fishing as an art form. Readers are "hooked" without being drowned beneath mind-numbing minutia or tangled webs of technicalities. Maclean occasionally waxes lyrical with poetic descriptions such as :
"It was a beautiful stretch of water, either to a fisherman or a photographer, although each would have focused his equipment at a different point. It was a barely submerged waterfall. The reef of rock was about two feet under the water, so the whole river rose into one wave, shook itself into spray, then fell back on itself and turned blue. After it recovered from the shock, it came back to see how it had fallen." (pp.16, 17)...
Below him was the multitudinous river, and, where the rock had parted it around him big-grained vapor rose. The mini-molecules of water left in the wake of his line made momentary loops of gossamer, disappearing so rapidly in the rising big-grained vapor that they had to be retained in memory to be visualized as loops. The spray emanating form him was finer-grained still and enclosed him in a halo himself. ... The images of himself and his line kept disappearing into the rising vapors of the river, which continually circled to the tops of the cliffs where, after becoming a wreath in the wind, they became rays of the sun. (p. 20)
The Story
Occasionally coarse, the story itself is gently nuanced with "four count rhythms," "roll casting," the difference between a "brook" and a "creek" or a "number four or six fly," and "setting the hook." The story moves along at a gracious pace, dignified without dragging. The text evinces a deep - albeit clumsy - bond of mutual affection and admiration between brothers. Maclean's love of his Montana roots, his knowledge of the land, its people, scenery, culture, history, and fly-fishing - are keenly weft throughout the warp and woof of this narrative. It's also clear that Norman "knew" his brother without fully understanding him.
Characterization
As in the movie, the main characters in the print version of A River Runs Through It are cleanly drawn and genuine. Drawing readers into the story like moths to a flame, each character has his or her own special kind of luminosity. These people are gracious and yet sharp, gentle but not simple. They are linked but not necessarily connected. The Maclean family is at once close and yet distant, as if they've breathed in some mysterious quality of spaciousness from the Montana skies. Mother, father, and elder brother all know that Paul is in some kind of trouble, yet feel helpless to help him.
The theme of "help" pops up throughout the book like an overnight mushroom. Norman's struggle to understand and help his brother is more emphatic in the book than in the movie (pp. 37, 38, 81). But what kind of help and how to give it are questions no one can fully answer. This is summed up sagely by Rev Maclean:
"You are too young to help anybody and I am too old, he said. `By help I don't mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.
"Help," he said, "is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly." (p. 81)
Worthwhile Read?
A River Runs Through It is a satisfying story that's been faithfully represented on the big screen. In both you can hear the river roar, smell the beer, feel the baking afternoon sun or the cool splash of water on a hot, thirsty day as you watch a fish rise and grab an expertly tied "general," feel him jerk the line and run with it.
As for the book, is Norman Maclean Shakespeare? Nope. Does he need to be? Naw. Will A River Runs Through It make the NY Times bestseller list? Doubtful. Is this story worth the read? Yep. In fact, A River Runs Through It almost makes me want to "get the horse collar off my neck," wade into the Big Blackfoot and learn how to cast myself. Almost.
A great book turned into a good movie July 20, 2008
A River Runs Through It is a wonderful story of life in Montana, well, really life in general. In addition to a great story, this book contains some of the best uses of the English language in the 20th century. Highly recommended.
Wonderful June 30, 2008
An excellent piece of literary work. From the time I received it, I couldn't set it down.
 Not good, not bad November 13, 2007
4 out of 11 found this review helpful
A River Runs Through It deals with tragedy, loss, and other such deep themes, but it's impossible for the reader to distant himself from the realization that much of the tragedy and loss inflicted on the family being explored is, in one way or another, the fault of the family members. While this does not automatically make the situations any less meaningful, it does chip away at the feeling that these tragedies were undeserved or unforseen.
The patriarch of the family is a stubborn, unyielding man who teaches his children by example to ruin another's fishing spot if he has better luck than you that day. His unyielding belief in the Biblical interpretation of a young earth and the scientific evidence of an old one is resolved by a stern splitting of the difference, by averaging the ages and coming up with a "medium aged" earth theory that he lectures to his sons. And when, as little children, they refuse to eat their veggies, the father shouts until he turns red, forces the child to stay at the table until the veggies are eaten, and then gives up in defeat when the child outlasts him.
Is it any wonder, then, when his youngest child grows up to be a free-spirited, gambling, immature man who simply cannot be talked out of his self-destructive tendencies? No one ever reasoned with him growing up - he was taught, by example, from day one that the most stubborn, unyielding person always wins. He was taught to never consider the needs and desires of others as anything but subbordinate to his own. It is difficult for me, therefore, to feel much pity for the bereaved family when the young man finally self-destructs - didn't they see this coming, every moment of every day? Didn't they train the child, every day, for years to reach this eventual moment?
Yes, the story is poignant. Yes, it is beautiful and touching. Yes, it should be read. But it should be read, I think, as a cautionary tale more than as a compassionate one.
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