The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
By David Wroblewski
HarperCollins, 2008, 566 pp., $25.95
Glimpse the world’s soul. Know death in the midst of living. See tragedy ennoble as in Hamlet.
This is Shakespeare’s plot line, after all, this narrative of Edgar Sawtelle. Oh, don’t mistake the literary art as artifice or as an American imitation or as a literary homage.
David Wroblewski, the first-time author, seizes the most famous drama in world literature for its pattern of eternal meaning. He has a myth to weave, a universal truth told in story form.
So a classic story mold reinforces what you might mistake as ordinary, even as a tale about dogs and their people.
You understand Hamlet better for seeing Edgar Sawtelle rise, discern his place in the mystery of life, avenge his father and suffer his own fall along with everyone around him even as the things that count – that really count – continue on their perpetual way.
Edgar was born in 1958 to a couple who raised and trained an idyllic breed of dogs on their northern Wisconsin farm as Edgar’s grandfather had done before. The house and a barn fitted out as kennel form a living stage. It produces the family story of companionship with each other and with nature. But the farm also is womb for an uncle’s unnatural evil.
A mythic journey of self understanding must take place before Edgar resolves the conflict.
While he’s away we lose the Ophelia character in a manner to break every dog lover’s heart.
Anna Quindlen last year wrote a sad book about pets — Good Dog. Stay. John Grogan wrote Marley & Me, soon to be a movie, based on his newspaper column about his funny, foolish, faithful pet.
Those are animal stories.
The dogs in Edgar Sawtelle’s life are different. They drive the constant, considerable action. They communicate in their canine fashion, because they were born mute like Edgar. In the womb, a seer explains, God told Edgar a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know. So the young man signs. And he acquires wisdom deep inside.
With Edgar we all learn dogs are not the beasts in this story. You wonder what God told them.
Insight and even vision — literally — aren't the brilliance of this narrative. The story, always the story, carries us a remarkable 566 pages.
The natural elements in those north woods plot the way through explanations of things we didn’t know we wanted to know. Breeding and training and even of how to play canasta and the characters buffeted by action in and out of their control and the descriptive details, yes, the wonderful details — those all make this book.
I tell journalists to read novels to learn narrative style. This is the book for them.
Yet The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is not journalism or a Shakespearean knock-off or ordinary fiction.
The thought crosses the mind of Edgar’s mother Trudy: When we accept life, we take contradiction with it.
You wonder if even Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude understood the tragic idea held in this legend, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
By David Wroblewski
HarperCollins, 2008, 566 pp., $25.95
Glimpse the world’s soul. Know death in the midst of living. See tragedy ennoble as in Hamlet.
This is Shakespeare’s plot line, after all, this narrative of Edgar Sawtelle. Oh, don’t mistake the literary art as artifice or as an American imitation or as a literary homage.
David Wroblewski, the first-time author, seizes the most famous drama in world literature for its pattern of eternal meaning. He has a myth to weave, a universal truth told in story form.
So a classic story mold reinforces what you might mistake as ordinary, even as a tale about dogs and their people.
You understand Hamlet better for seeing Edgar Sawtelle rise, discern his place in the mystery of life, avenge his father and suffer his own fall along with everyone around him even as the things that count – that really count – continue on their perpetual way.
Edgar was born in 1958 to a couple who raised and trained an idyllic breed of dogs on their northern Wisconsin farm as Edgar’s grandfather had done before. The house and a barn fitted out as kennel form a living stage. It produces the family story of companionship with each other and with nature. But the farm also is womb for an uncle’s unnatural evil.
A mythic journey of self understanding must take place before Edgar resolves the conflict.
While he’s away we lose the Ophelia character in a manner to break every dog lover’s heart.
Anna Quindlen last year wrote a sad book about pets — Good Dog. Stay. John Grogan wrote Marley & Me, soon to be a movie, based on his newspaper column about his funny, foolish, faithful pet.
Those are animal stories.
The dogs in Edgar Sawtelle’s life are different. They drive the constant, considerable action. They communicate in their canine fashion, because they were born mute like Edgar. In the womb, a seer explains, God told Edgar a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know. So the young man signs. And he acquires wisdom deep inside.
With Edgar we all learn dogs are not the beasts in this story. You wonder what God told them.
Insight and even vision — literally — aren't the brilliance of this narrative. The story, always the story, carries us a remarkable 566 pages.
The natural elements in those north woods plot the way through explanations of things we didn’t know we wanted to know. Breeding and training and even of how to play canasta and the characters buffeted by action in and out of their control and the descriptive details, yes, the wonderful details — those all make this book.
I tell journalists to read novels to learn narrative style. This is the book for them.
Yet The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is not journalism or a Shakespearean knock-off or ordinary fiction.
The thought crosses the mind of Edgar’s mother Trudy: When we accept life, we take contradiction with it.
You wonder if even Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude understood the tragic idea held in this legend, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
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