Treindromen

Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul
~ William Blake, from "Auguries of Innocence"

A novella scarcely 100 pages on half-sized leaves, finished in little more than an hour, Train Dreams hauls boxcars of story that could fully load the most epic of tomes. Train Dreams is an epic

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yet terse tome tracking the eccentric lifetime of Robert Grainier from rustic outpost to wilderness depot. The cadence of Train Dreams over precipitous trestles and into tunnels keeps time to the timelessness of Grainier's memories and not the predictability of clocks, so that we know Grainier the railroad builder before we know him as an orphan; know the happy short-lived family man after the long-time hermit. We see the caboose quite often before the engine. Grainier's jobs seem to converge and become the singular preoccupations in his life, be it freight carrier or logger, salvager or log cabin architect, and memories (or were they dreams?) lingered in Grainier's consciousness. Despite its brevity, Train Dreams is no bullion cube of a book. It's chateaubriand. It communicates more not because of but in spite of conveying less. So maybe it is the microscopic mass of William Blake's "grain of sand" -- so what? Watch Denis Johnson make of it a world.

Credit Denis Johnson's nonchalant style, his miniaturist's skills (he is also a poet, and it shows), who wrought each day of Grainier's life to make them count. Made each day count the way the best poetry makes each phoneme count. Frugal, but not poor man's prose. Granted, Johnson chose but a baker's dozen or so of Grainier's days to illuminate, but he chose the most poignant of his days. Milestone days or crossroad days when Grainier, a wanderer of the northwest, understandably let his losses determine course. Hard cargo he carried, not easily turned. Grief haunted him, but he remained busy in his solitude (not discounting his nightly howling ritual with packs of wolves) deep in the lonesome woods, and it helped him maintain some levity, some sanity, commiserating his existence with those wild though faithful hounds. Being preoccupied by his memories indistinguishable from his dreams, Grainier pretended not to notice the omnipresent heartache of the past gnawing on him. Train Dreams, thankfully, avoids the tragic melodrama of a made-for-TV train wreck because it's as tranquil as it is painful, and it does not blow smoke off even an inch of sentimental rails.

There's one day in Train Dreams that's stuck with me the most. The day in 1917 when Robert Grainier, after nearly helping hurl a thieving "Chinaman" off a railroad bridge fifty feet above the Moyea River in Idaho's panhandle, walked two miles out of his way on his commute home from hard labor, to buy a bottle of Hood's Sarsaparilla for his wife, Gladys, whom he'd not seen in weeks. She was home in their idyllic meadow cabin nursing their four-month-old, Kate. Idyllic, that is, until Grainier's baby girl "did not seem to recognize him." As that ominous day lapsed seamlessly into years, and the random conflagrations of fate seared a bewildering estrangement between daughter and father that was the fault of neither, enter the unexpected forepaws of a fable and hind feet of a myth, that, thanks to Denis Johnson's imaginative gifts, crept aboard Train Dreams and helped it levitate off the tracks.

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Evocation of a time and place so strong, it's hard to forget. I can still smell the ash. This is a crystal clear little piece of sparse poetic prose that packs a punch first, and lingers afterwards.

It shows us the life of a lonely man; a man who is forced to be lonely by circumstance, but then

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makes it a part of himself - his strength. There's a strong sense of his lifelong pain dulled and lived with. But it is not a sad book. It's not even bleak. It's full of character and individuality. It's also well seasoned with the kind of 'yarns' one meets with in the wide open spaces, like the one about the man who gets shot by his own dog. But nothing gratuitous. All paced and arranged with a perfect sense of poetic timing.

It's the quality of the prose that makes this little book so good. There's nothing overtly fancy in it. It's simple and sparse. But its overall effect is powerful and beautiful. This is a true novella; it has all its dimensions exactly right. I'm left wanting to read more like it - but you know what? I don't think there is anything else like it.

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When Thoreau wrote “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them”, he might well have been thinking of someone like Robert Grainier. As the protagonist of Denis Johnson’s brilliant novella, Grainier is a simple, unassuming man living in the American

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Northwest during the early part of the 20th century at a time when the country is transitioning from its agrarian past to its industrialized future. Indeed, the events that define his life stand as an effective metaphor for the dramatic changes taking place all around him.

Orphaned at a young age—shipped to the wilderness on a train, in fact—Grainier spends his life as an itinerant laborer, working at various times on a railroad crew, in a logging outfit, and as a cart driver. For most of his life, he lives by himself in the woods, having few friends and grieving the tragic loss of a wife and child. His days are mundane and his nights are haunted by dreams of nature, his departed loved ones, and, yes, trains. When he passes away some 50 years after the events that begin the story, he leaves the world as decent and honest, but otherwise unremarkable, man.

I found the writing in this book to be nothing short of exquisite. The author’s spare and direct prose captures perfectly the mood and feel of a time and place that have all but disappeared from our memory. While not wholly sad, this powerful work definitely has an elegiac tone to it that conveys at once the feeling of celebration and mourning. That Johnson has been able to pack so much insight and nuance into barely more than 100 pages is truly a striking achievement. (Actually, ‘Train Dreams’ originally appeared in a volume of short stories, although the version I read was a stand-alone work published ten years later.) This is one that I suspect I will be re-reading often in the years to come.

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"I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there weren't no shade."

1917, America's Northwest, amidst the unforgiving

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nature of working in the woods -- felling trees, building bridges, laying railroads.

Robert Graineer, a man without known parents or home, untroubled by the shifts of the history and the big world, honest and dignified, as brought up by his uncle and aunt. He is poor, and when out at work he is sustained by his profound love for his wife and infant daughter.

It is a short book but Johnson plays a trick on you, it magically fits in it more than such a modest volume can strictly contain.

For me this book was a triumph of style over plot. But I might have been tripped by overblown expectations from the reviews, it is sometimes best for a book if people just arrive at it, unguided and blank.

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I expected to like this book more. I do love the language of the book, and the flow of it, as it moves from episode to episode of a life, revealing the heart of it more than dwelling on details or chronology. And, to be truthful, I don't know whether my dissatisfactions with it are with the book,

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or with the the main character of the book. He seems to drift, this character. He happens into an action, and I do not have much sense of his feelings about this action, or, he does not do something that I am hoping for or expecting, and I don't understand the emotion or the reason behind that. To be fair, he detours 2 miles coming home to get his wife a bottle of Sassapilla, an endearing gesture. He tries to keep his wife talking just to hear the sound of her voice. And enough of their relationship is told to convey the sweetness of it. It is just that when there is great loss in the book, I want to feel more of the devastation and not just a drifting out of something that was dear, and, when there is a chance of something to regain, I want him to fight for it.

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Proving that powerful writing does not require an abundance of technical flourishes and exuberant verbosity, Denis Johnson's masterful novella tells its tale with a language so precisely honed the reader feels an immediate kinship with Robert Grainier, the early 20th century woodsman whose life of

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considerable loss we experience. Born in 1886 in either Utah or Canada, Grainier never knew his birth family. Hiring on first with logging outfits in Washington state, then with the railroads, he has never shirked from honest, hard labor. Finally meeting a woman of whom he feels worthy, he marries in his early 30s and has a daughter, only to suffer unspeakable tragedy.

Retreating from society to his self-built cabin in the woods, Robert is our guide through the early 20th century as technogical marvels outpaced the capacity to adapt to them. He has driven wagons with teams of horses, built and rode the rails, motored in early automobiles and even flown in a biplane. That this novella (first published in the Paris Review in 2002) tells of alienation juxtaposed with advanced technology which purportedly makes communication and travel easier, the parallels to the early 21st century never cease to amaze; with all of the gadgetry and telecommunications devices at our disposal, are we any less isolated than the part-time hermit living at the edges of his time and place? The effect is a temporal displacement that lesser writers could not pull off.

Beautifully composed, gorgeously literate, full of wondrous yet precise description, Train Dreams transports its readers across time to experience the heartache of one man and his place in a country which does its best to strip him of all that is worth living. Scenes of natural wonder, heartbreaking tenderness and phantasmagorical echoes compete to create a landscape of the human heart. Highly recommended to read annually as a reminder of our place in the grand scheme of things.

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“It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.”

Robert Granier was born in the 1880s and the story trails alongside him, through the early part of the last century, as he toils through various day labor jobs, working

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on railroad tracks and bridges, attempting to raise a family and hack out a life in the rough and tumble landscape of the American west. Johnson’s prose is strong and evocative, capturing a nearly mystical time in our history, with perfect and stark detail. A spare, beautifully written novella. One not to be missed.

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A small gem!

Robert Granier, a hapless orphan, spends his life as a humble laborer in the panhandle of Idaho. He meets his wife at church and they homestead a barren acre bringing it and a child to life. Tragedy strikes and he never recovers.

this book will remind the reader of a Wallace Stegner

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story or Steinbeck novella. A timeless story of the American experience.

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The terse style fits this account of a spare early 20th-century life on the The hard men, the tough women, very hard physical work but not very much comfort and relationships can make you happy.

I can see the comparisons to Cormac McCarthy. Reminds me also of Alice Munro's recent collection that she

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strung together from what little she knew of her ancestors in Scotland, Canada and the US. But there's this whisp of the supernatural too: for example, the imagined Chinaman and the wolf girl that could be the daughter Robert thought lost in the prairie fire that killed his wife. The myths and otherworldly explanations from from Kootenai Bob, a Native American--the Native American,I should say--that is always a very peripheral figure. As I recall from a long ago class in regional Am lit, that's a characteristic of the Midwestern frontier genre, where settlers (often immigrants) are attempting to homestead, conquer the land: Native Americans are there, but usually on the periphery. They aren't dangerous or threatening usually. They're often farming, logging, fishing or doing whatever the settlers are but they tend to be especially good at it, better survivors.

The nearness of death by disease, fever or natural disaster. Freak deaths or accidents, like the man shot by his dog--humor running through,too--but of course nothing like hospitals or even real physicians nearby. There is also the proximity of evil people like the uncle who sexually abused his niece, whose father then killed her. That man will tell you that tale.

There's a brief exchange that sums up Robert's life and that of many other male settlers. Robert is helping a recent widow move far away to a town and her relatives, along with a rougher type that has the hots for her. She might be thinking Robert is a better prospect but

"you men are worn down pretty early in life. Are you going to marry again?"
"No."
"No. You just don't want to work any harder than you do now. Do you?"
"No, I do not."
A bit later she says. "I wanted to see if your own impression of you matched up with mine is all, Robert."
"Well, then."

Now she may well be only referring to physical wear and tear but we know that Robert also doesn't want to risk losing another wife or child. He grieves for years and years. He isn't the only one hiding wounds

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I think most of us agreed that the book was deceptively simple and straightforward. As we talked about it we delved deeper into the character of Granier and of the times he lived in, and we found a lot of meat for discussion.

This is a very short novel in the mold of one of Annie Proulx's short stories, or of Cormac McCarthy. The is idea is to show us a life so stark, so unpredictably violent, so nearly wordless, so steeped and vinegared in the old oak of some mythic North America, that it seems at once timeless and

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present. McCarthy, Proulx, and authors like Johnson hope to telescope time, so that the nearly starving, perpetually filthy, illiterate descendants of the first Europeans who tromped across America are somehow still here, still about in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, leading hardscrabble lives of quiet desperation and noble simplicity. This kind of writing is hopelessly naïve about what politics is and what history was, and it is blinkered about present-day North America. The style Johnson is emulating is meant to be stark and spare and harsh and bloody and real and honest and scraped clean of the academic mess that international modernism and postmodernism have slobbered onto it: but that's a fiction too. I wonder if in fifty years writing like this will finally appear for what it is: a last desperate bid to think back into a state outside of history and culture by cranking up the voltage, by writing more directly and cruelly and romantically and dreamily than even the imaginary original drovers and cattlemen and rustlers and hermits ever imagined.

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Much hyped novella title "Train Dreams" by literary pop star Denis Johnson fails in its attempt to reach the lows and highs of the typical Cormac McCarthy offering. Of course, through the years, I have read much worse work than Johnson's, but why bother with it? McCarthy for years has had his jaw

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firmly planted on the genre and there is little use in others sinking their teeth in next to his. They will only get hurt in the long run, but after they have made their dimes and bought new suits, and reviewers from the New Yorker make them out to be a writer they aren't. I am so tired of the pop-made artist these days. Instead, I recommend you read a book, any book, by Cormac McCarthy and then go try Denis Johnson and find out why his failure is imminently assured.

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I couldn’t bring myself to spend £12.99 on the hardback of this novella, but now it is out in paperback I snapped it up as I’d heard great things about it – and wilderness novels always seem to appeal to me.

Train Dreams tells the life story of Robert Grainier, who as a child arrives in Idaho

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on the train in the 1880s to live with his uncle having lost his parents – we never learn how. Robert becomes a hard worker, on the railroads and in the forests in the northern tip of the state close to the Canadian border. He marries relatively late, in his thirties, and after his wife and child are presumed dead in forest fire, lives on his own for the rest of his days into his eighties.

As the novel opens, Grainier is working on a railroad bridge across a gorge, and lends a hand to colleagues who are planning to throw a supposedly thieving Chinaman off the bridge. The Chinaman escaped, but Grainier feels cursed by having taken part in the shameful exploit…

"Walking home in the falling dark, Grainier almost met the Chinaman everywhere. Chinaman in the road. Chinaman in the woods. Chinaman walking softly, dangling his hands on arms like ropes. Chinaman dancing up out of the creek like a spider…
Now Grainier stood by the table in the single-room cabin and worried. The Chinaman, he was sure, had cursed them powerfully while they dragged him along, and any bad thing might come of it. Though astonished now at the frenzy of the afternoon, baffled by the violence, and how it had carried him away like a seed in a wind, young Grainier still wished they’d gone head and killed that Chinaman before he’d cursed them."

He feels the Chinaman’s curse is responsible for the presumed death of his wife and daughter when a terrible forest fire burns everything in the whole valley where their homestead was built. He will eventually return there and rebuild the cabin, living a near hermit life with just his dog for company for half of each year, working the other months. Once his ageing joints are no longer any good for logging work, he becomes a haulier for hire with horses and wagon. He makes enough to get by, but it is a hard life.

I’m not generally comfortable with short stories, which often feel as if they’re over before they’ve started for me. However, I am happy with the novella / short novel form which has enough length to tell a good story, but in keeping it short makes every sentence count. This is the case with Train Dreams. Johnson manages to compress eighty years into not many more pages, but also to encompass all that was important in Grainier’s life within that constraint, always with the railroad somewhere in the distance or in his dreams. We appreciate Grainier’s sheer hard work and pioneer spirit, we’re sad with him for the loss of his wife and child, and feel his loneliness when he returns to his backwoods cabin where he is left to commune with nature.

Grainier’s life in the cabin brings to mind another book rich with the pioneer spirit – Eowyn Ivey’s wonderful novel The Snow Child. There is more than that point of similarity, but I won’t expound for fear of spoiling, suffice to say that magic plays no part in Grainier’s life, except in his dreams and grief.

What is amazing about this short novel is that, despite its condensed nature, like Doctor Who’s TARDIS, it is bigger on the inside. Every sentence does indeed count. Its beginning featuring the episode with the Chinaman may not initially endear you to Grainier, but his strength of character will get you as you read on. This was my first experience of reading Denis Johnson, I’m sure it won’t be my last. (9/10)

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Robert Grainier is a type of Everyman. His story begins in 1917 and through his eyes we observe many of the events of his life and the underside of history. Through this, the reader can experience what certain events were like in the early to mid twentiety century.

Grainier is there when the Spokane

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International Railway was building its lines. They employeed many Chinese people and Grainier assists a number of men when they decide to throw a Chinaman off a bridge. The man's offense, stealing from the company store.

The man escapes by jumping into the water below and while Grainier is walking home, he seems to see the Chinaman everywhere. In one place "...dancing up and out of the creek like a spider."

We see flashbacks of Grainier's earlier life and at one point we see the scene when an injured man by the side of a road, asks him to give him some water and when he dies, to tell the sheriff the name of the person who injured him and left him to die.

As in many books dealing with the development of areas of the country, he describes tragedies that go along with successes. One day Grainier was coming home after being away to earn money. A fire was consuming the entire area, causing people to flee in every direction. What happens to his family has a profound effect on the rest of his life.

This novells was an enjoyable read and gave me pause to consider the hardships that others endured to get us where we are today.

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Train Dreams by Denis Johnson is a novella that packs quite a punch. It is the life story of Robert Grainier, an American railroad laborer and captures both a specific time in American history and paints a vivid description of this small corner of the United States where it is set. The time period

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is the early 20th century and the place is the northern panhandle of Idaho. The building of the railroad and the trains that travelled through are the stepping stones that this story is built upon.

Robert comes to northern Idaho on the train in 1886, a foundling sent to be raised by his aunt and uncle. He works on the railroad and even after marriage, he travels the railroad seeking work. He arrives home after an absence of some months in 1920, only to find that a huge fire has consumed the valley and his home destroyed. He finds no trace of his wife or small daughter. He eventually rebuilds his cabin and remains on the property until his death in 1968. By the end of his life, he had never travelled very far from his home and what travelling he did, was done by train.

This is a deceptively simple story. It details the life of one man who lives a quiet life, but has suffered a huge tragedy. Set in rural Idaho and Washington, this portrait allows us to feel the depth of emotion that is hovering just under the surface. For such a short book it is packed with events from Grainer’s life and always in the background is the mythology of the railroad which anchors the story and supplies pictures of the slow progression of history. Written in sparse but beautifully descriptive prose, Train Dreams is a small gem of a book.

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Train dreams is a long short story by the American author Denis Johnson. It deals with the sense of great personal loss.

Train dreams begins with a scene in which a Chinese worker is nearly killed, an incident laughed off, but imprinted onto Robert Grainer's mind. The apparent lightness about the

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value of the life of the Chinese immigrant is contrasted sharply with the loss of Robert's wife Gladys and his baby daughter Kate. Throughout the remainder of his life, he keeps mourning their deaths.

Train dreams seems a kind of retro-style prairy novel. While the story is set in the early 20th century, the feel of the story is that of the mid-nineteenth century, when the bulk of the railroads was built, and racial conflicts with especially Chinese immigrants, particularly those working on the railroads was more strongly pronounced.

The novella has some strong moments, such as when Robert discovers the charred remains of his homestead, but subsequent chapters are too short to bear out his grief in psychological depth. The short chapters only indicate the stages of his depression through iconic scenes, such as the idea that Robert might recognize his lost child in a stray wolf-girl.

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This is a book about how Existentialism might feel in America. Every scene, setting and (almost) paragraph operates on the binary opposites of security and insecurity - trees, seemingly emblematic of security, can kill at random. Fire can provide a dwelling space. And on and on it goes. The writing

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and construction are lovely but I didn't actually learn anything new here. I already know that security is something of an illusion.

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Beautifully written novella about a man and his place in time, turn of the 20th century in the American West. It's an art to create imagery and feeling in spare prose and few pages and Johnson does a magnificent job. A good start for my first book of the year, read on my porch in the January sun in

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the northeast.

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This is a very nice novella. It's a quick read, but it really piles on the memorable episodes and characters. It's beautifully written, managing to be spare but full of life and beauty, love and sadness, mystery and humor.

This very short novella is a dreamlike look back at a drifter's life building train tracks, logging, and delivering largely in the Pacific Northwest, largely in the 1920s and 1930s (although some of the episodes are from when he was a child at the turn of the century or as late as the 1960s when he

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died). It transports you right into the world it describes: you can almost hear the clattering of the railroad, smell the sap from the trees and see the wildfires spreading up the mountain. There's not really anything in the way of plot and the other characters are not drawn particularly sharply, but that is not much of a hindrance in a work this length.

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Beautifully written novella of a man's experience of love and loss in the early 20th century west. Not sure I really got it.

Found the book interesting and well written, but cannot say it was worthy of a Pulitzer nomination. I learned something about the timber industry!

Trains typically go directly from one place to another. And while they may pass through some nice countrysides, it is more often than not, a direct route. Unlike trains, Train Dreams, the Pulitzer Price fiction nominee by Denis Johnson, takes a meandering route to get from its begimning to its

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end.

Train Dreams charts the life of Robert Grainier beginning in 1917 when he, along with several other railway workers, almost throws a Chinese laborer off an in-process railroad tressle. It travels forward to a fire that guts the town he resides in, destroying his cabin in the woods. His wife, Gladys, and daughter, Kate, are not seen again. It reverses course and describes his childhood living with his aunt, uncle and cousins, having lost his parents at an early age. It then forges ahead to his later, solitary years.

Train Dreams resembles more a meandering river than the fast moving steel wheels for which Robert worked for a time. This spare novelette, a mere 115 pages, is interesting and literary. You can picture Robert reminiscing, at the end of his long life, about random events. Even though the novel doesn't mention this, you can picture him sitting on his front porch in a rocking chair letting his mind wander, letting thoughts in no particular order enter and exit his memories. In some ways, Train Dreams is quite satisfying in its brevity. In other ways, readers might want more. Which reader will you be?

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A somewhat melancholy novella about a man who is rootless all his life, except for the brief time he shared with his wife and infant daughter until they disappeared in a wildfire during his absence. Never really knowing who his parents were, and never really making connections with others, his life

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revolved around physical work and survival in the woods of the Idaho panhandle. Wolves, dogs, and coyotes were part of his life, and a focal event in the book is the visitation by a wild wolf-child, his daughter, 10 years after her disappearance. Spare and surreal.

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