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A Thousand Acres
Escrito por Jane Smiley
Narrado por C. J. Critt
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Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Jane Smiley’s spellbinding novel also headed best-seller lists for many months. A Thousand Acres is the powerful, mythic story of an American farm family and the land that nourishes and consumes its members. Three daughters and their husbands are pulled into a tangle of love, jealousy, and fear when their father, Larry Cook, grows too old to manage the family’s fertile thousand acre farm. As each couple struggles with their own tragedies and challenges, they know their father is judging them in light of the weighty inheritance that hovers within their reach. The Cook family, and the farm community around them, are part of a mosaic that is as enduring as the fences and fields of the broad midwestern landscape. But this endurance exacts an immense price from them in return. You will find that this nationally-acclaimed, breathtaking story, in a stirring narration by C.J. Critt, is an unforgettable listening experience.
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a escucharInformación sobre el libro
A Thousand Acres
Escrito por Jane Smiley
Narrado por C. J. Critt
Descripción
Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Jane Smiley’s spellbinding novel also headed best-seller lists for many months. A Thousand Acres is the powerful, mythic story of an American farm family and the land that nourishes and consumes its members. Three daughters and their husbands are pulled into a tangle of love, jealousy, and fear when their father, Larry Cook, grows too old to manage the family’s fertile thousand acre farm. As each couple struggles with their own tragedies and challenges, they know their father is judging them in light of the weighty inheritance that hovers within their reach. The Cook family, and the farm community around them, are part of a mosaic that is as enduring as the fences and fields of the broad midwestern landscape. But this endurance exacts an immense price from them in return. You will find that this nationally-acclaimed, breathtaking story, in a stirring narration by C.J. Critt, is an unforgettable listening experience.
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This Pulitzer Prize winning modern twist on King Lear, set in Kansas farm country, is truly affecting and very well written. I read it quite a while ago but it's stayed with me. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 for the adult themes which might offend some.
This book is almost 30 years old now but it seems current. Maybe because the essential story is as old as time; certainly Shakespeare when he wrote King Lear (on which this book is based) was reformatting some ancient tale because that's how he wrote all of his plays. Issues of trust/distrust between generations will probably show up even when humans have ventured to the stars.The story is told by Ginny, oldest daughter of Larry, and is set on and around their prosperous farm in Iowa. The title refers to the amount of land Larry has accumulated after inheriting about 640 acres from his father. Larry is the father of three girls, Ginny, Rose and Caroline. Ginny and Rose are married and they and their husbands live on the farm and everyone helps run it. Larry is a good farmer and there is no debt on the land. The girls' mother died when Ginny was twelve, Rose was ten and Caroline was only six. Ginny and Rose raised Caroline and carried out all the functions (and I do mean all) of their mother. Ginny never aspired to leave the farm and while Rose went away for a few years at college she came back after she married. However, Ginny and Rose made sure that Caroline got away and now Caroline is a lawyer in Des Moines. When the neighbour, Harold, bought a new expensive tractor Larry was green with envy. He decided that he was going to put the land into a corporation with the girls as the principal shareholders. When Caroline expressed doubts about the scheme Larry disinherited her. The corporation could get bank financing to make improvements and Ginny's husband, Ty, was anxious to improve their hog operation. This met with Larry's approval until it didn't. Senility started to set in and he made accusations against Ginny and Rose and then set out to walk home in a driving rainstorm. After that Larry with support from Caroline started a court case to dissolve the corporation. From then on everything deteriorated. The marriages of Ginny and Rose imploded and then Rose's husband killed himself. Work on the new hog barns had to be stopped until the court case was decided. Ginny lost trust not just in her father but her husband and her sisters and even neighbours and her pastor. This is a tragedy for all involved. As the daughter of a farmer I understand how attached a farm family is to their land. Although I did not aspire to farm I base my existence on knowing intimately all the 360 acres that I grew up on. To lose that would shake my foundation and that is what Ginny and everyone else in this story experienced. Truly a great tale.
I have dear friends who are farmers and while the setting is spot on (buildings, crops, roads, weather), I had a difficult time with the characters. The reason this family is so dysfunctional? What Daddy did to his daughters? The importance of continuing to increase the amount of acres that a family farm can handle?How everyone thinks they know each other's business?I don't know and I didn't care.
A very vivid and well-written book showcasing a rural farming community in Iowa. I did not really want to give it four stars as I could have faced this better as history or sociology than as fiction. I hope it was well researched and based in truth as the picture given showed abuse of all kinds as normal and supported by the community through the isolation of each family. The wider community certainly existed but serving only to assist the already powerful and suppress the human rights of all other individuals.
Despite its many positive reviews, I do not think this is Smiley's best. She misses the sense of engagement and community that is much more for people of these Iowa farms than just a nice setting for a remake of King Lear. The dilemmas ring true, but the solutions seem contrived. No Iowa farm family sends a kid off to boarding school, no matter what the home life is like. Also, no Iowa farm family lives in such splendid isolation from neighbors and extended family. An entertaining book, but much of it utterly fantastic.
A literary tour de force and a gripping story.
This book was really hard for me to get into.I ended giving it 3 stars because there were many parts that I could sink my teeth into. Sadly that was only a small percentage of the novel. While I thought the plot was good i just kept yawning.While the book may not have been my cup of tea I think the movie I would enjoy so I'm gonna try that.
A family saga, taken from the pages of Shakespeare, contains Larry Cook as patriarch, farmer and owner of 1,000 corn luscious acres, and his daughters Ginny, Rose and Caroline. Living and tending this land, surrounded by family and friends, sounds ideal. Yet, as with every perfect picture, this one has tiny fissures that become crevices once Larry decides to divide the land between his daughters. Caroline, the youngest, walks away from the deal but remains in the background. The older two manage the land with their husbands and despite their cool feelings toward each other run it quite well. With old age, Larry becomes paranoid and wants his land back. Hey wait, you've heard this story before, haven't you? Well, sure, it's King Lear but Smiley brings the old story up to date and sheds light on a world unbeknownst to many, the ins and outs, ups and downs of farming. She raises awareness of farming methods that in 1979 were just beginning to become a concern.The reader meanders through this story as if traveling a country road but be watchful, the author, occasionally, throws you a curve ball which makes you stop, back up and travel that sentence again thinking, "What?! Did she just say what I thought she said?!Highly recommend you pluck this one off the shelf soon.
I tried really hard because this was supposed to be a great book that everybody loved, but I was bored. I hated all the characters and by page 207 nothing had actually happened yet, so I put it down.
You know a book is good when immediately after finishing it you grab the source material (King Lear) to extend your pleasure from it just a little longer. I hadn't previously read King Lear, and this re imagining was absolutely spellbinding to me. Shakespeare's high drama plot benefits from this novel's extra scope for character development. Family relationships are nothing if not complicated, and each character relates to the others with a blend of love and resentment that drives the novel. The farm setting was the perfect modern equivalent to a kingdom- the father is passing down both freedoms and responsibilities, making for a challenging inheritance. Loved the narrator and the limitation of only seeing her perspective. It made it feel more like an experience than a story.Read if you are interested in family dynamics, farm life, personal motivations. If we were friends, I would have pressed it into your hands with a crazed look in my eye as soon as I finished so I could have someone to obsess about it with.
This 1992 Pulitzer winner is the story of Larry Cook and his daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. Larry is a successful farmer with a 1000 acre farm that he intends to divide equally among his three daughters and their spouses. When the youngest daughter Caroline, has a problem with her father's plan, she is cut out of his will.The story is told from Ginny's viewpoint, who at times feels as though all she does is cook, clean, and take care of everyone else. The one thing that she longs for, she can't seem to have, and she shares a very difficult relationship with her father and sisters. There are also some very deep rooted supressed memories that come to light, that make for a very emotional story.A Thousand Acres is touted as a "reimagining" of King Lear which the reader is able to pick up on immediately.Overall, this was an ok read for me.
This was a tremendous read with incredible characters and a vivid sense of place. Coming from a country background I've seen first-hand how the question of farm inheritance (who? when? how?) can be so difficult to navigate smoothly, between sibling jealousies and parental inabilities to let go of the reins. It's a fantastic plot base for a novel, and Smiley handles so deftly the repeated misunderstandings and horrific family skeletons in the closet that gradually seep under the doors of the families involved like filthy rising water, soaking into every aspect of their daily lives until everything is rotten.Much too great a book for me to ever have a hope of doing it justice in a review, so I'll leave it there.4.5 stars - gripping and much deserved of it's Pulitzer award.
very disturbing topic, most of the characters not very likable, well written
Wow!! The drama and impact of this story increases more and more the further you go. The family dynamics of both the Cook family and their nearest neighbors, the Clarks, start off seemingly so smooth and normal and unravel so completely.Plenty to think about so more may come...
Read for my first book club.
This novel of life on a farm in the plains is unforgettable for me. It seems like they have very plain, farmy lives until secrets start to come out.
I knew nothing about the plot of King Lear but as this novel is based on it, I did hurry off and google it. Crikey, what a convoluted story! I was glad this was easier to follow, though it did add an interesting element to my reading of it - trying to figure out who was being represented by which of the characters.It's a long, dense book. There is a tendency for dramatic events - and there are quite a few - to be described in advance in quite bland simple terms, only for the following chapters to go over them in forensic detail. It was exciting enough to keep me reading, but there were times, wading through another paragraph of navel gazing psychoanalysis, when I wondered if it had to be quite so long winded.It's highly instructive as to the ways of the farming communities of North America - not something I'm much of an expert on, and I was glad of the education.
This book was read for an in-person discussion. When I first picked up the book, I had not expected the story to be so dark. There was a lot of negative life issues in the story, so I had to take breaks while reading it. I did not like how the author wrapped up all the story lines in the end, but I understand why she did. I will give this author another chance in the future
Story of King Lear retold in the American mid-West. One of those books that leaves you wondering what the difference is between really good fanfiction, and things that win the Pulitzer Prize. It seems stupid to complain that a King Lear retelling is a bit bleak, but, well, it is.This book is mostly about the stories of the women, told from the perspective of the eldest of the three daughters. So it is full of themes of 'women's stories' - miscarriages, breast cancer, living with childhood abuse, mothering and taking mothering roles, marriages and affairs. It's much more show than tell, with a tense current of emotions where Things Happen, and the reader thinks 'huh? Oh, of course'If what you're looking for is a retelling of King Lear, sympathetic to R&G and filled with the stories of the women's side of things, full of uncomfortable atmosphere and ponderings on how families shape who we are this is probably exactly the book you're looking for.
In this literary reaction to King Lear, successful farmer Larry Cook suddenly decides to leave his farm of a thousand acres to his three daughters. Rose and Ginny are all for it, but Caroline isn't so sure, prompting Larry to cut her out altogether. As Rose and Ginny and their husbands struggle to make the farm prosper, the neighbor's prodigal son returns, Larry's behavior gets more erratic and family secrets start cracking the seams of their carefully constructed lives.I haven't read King Lear, but it's really not necessary to read first as A Thousand Acres stands on its own just as well. After all the events of the story, Ginny reflects on what happened - what went wrong - after her father's fateful decision. Because we're in a tight first person narrative, there are so many unknowns and unanswerable questions: What made Larry act as he did? Caroline? Can we ever know or understand another person? The first half of the story is a slow setting the stage, the plotting deliberate, and the writing descriptive. The characters are deeply unhappy. If I didn't have to read it for book club, I probably wouldn't have finished; it made for a difficult read but a great discussion.
Painful to read, but also compelling and written with an obvious respect for and knowledge of farm life.
Not long ago, I read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which for all its virtues, retold with a bit too much fidelity the essential plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The effect of that conformity to a story that most readers know well was to undercut the novel's surprises and drama. It also impelled the characters to behave in ways that sometimes turned a blind eye to psychological explanation and common sense, because ultimately the author had to reckon with his source material.
With that in mind, I began A Thousand Acres with a small amount of trepidation. Using the plot and characters of King Lear as inspiration, this tale of a Midwestern patriarch's attempt to confer ownership of the family farm on this three daughters could have stuck close to the Shakespearean story and suffered from some of the same faults. But instead Jane Smiley took the situation and some of the tragedy of the tale, then rotated the point of view to one of the daughters and layered on characterizations that set these particular characters, not their literary forebears, on their own particular tragic paths.
Smiley also makes her setting more than a mythic background. She explores both the pleasures and pains of farm life, and she exposes some aspects of the underside of small-town life. Her feminine perspective gives an important slant on these topics, taking the viewpoint of someone forced into a secondary role in a burdensome life she did not choose. She also provides a clear-eyed, elegiac view of the fate of the family farm at a time when corporate agribusiness was putting an end to a way of life.
With that in mind, I began A Thousand Acres with a small amount of trepidation. Using the plot and characters of King Lear as inspiration, this tale of a Midwestern patriarch's attempt to confer ownership of the family farm on this three daughters could have stuck close to the Shakespearean story and suffered from some of the same faults. But instead Jane Smiley took the situation and some of the tragedy of the tale, then rotated the point of view to one of the daughters and layered on characterizations that set these particular characters, not their literary forebears, on their own particular tragic paths.
Smiley also makes her setting more than a mythic background. She explores both the pleasures and pains of farm life, and she exposes some aspects of the underside of small-town life. Her feminine perspective gives an important slant on these topics, taking the viewpoint of someone forced into a secondary role in a burdensome life she did not choose. She also provides a clear-eyed, elegiac view of the fate of the family farm at a time when corporate agribusiness was putting an end to a way of life.
Ginny and Rose are sisters, both married, and living and helping on the family farm. When their father suggests signing a contract to hand the land over to the two of them, plus a third sister, who has moved away to become a lawyer, Ginny learns much about her family and herself. I don't want to give too much away in the synopsis, but I thought a TON of stuff happened in this book. I found it very interesting and things (surprising things) kept happening one after the other! At first, I thought that I might have a bit more of an interest because I grew up in a farming community - and maybe that helped a bit, but once the story gets going, I think so much more is going on, that you don't have to have that background to get interested in the book. Really good book, and very well written, I thought.
Pulitzer Prize winner. Smiley manages to take 1,000 acres of farmland, stirs them up with three siblings born to a father who ravages his children, and produces a thorough and complicated look at complex lives. The writing sings at times, and the book is worthy of all the honors it gets. That said, I can say I liked it, but can't say I loved it.
A grand family tragedy, based loosely on the King Lear story but transposed to farming country in 1970s Iowa. The two central sisters were wonderful characters, sympathetic but flawed and with complex feelings and motivations. Some of the other characters were less well drawn, and the occasional plot point felt a bit arbitrary (until I realised the Lear connection anyway). The book takes on big, important themes and is heartbreakingly sad.
Great book; I initially read the book when it came out, and upon re-reading it, I realized how good a boook it is. A great family story! I continue to be a Jane Smiley fan!
[A Thousand Acres] starts out as a vignette of a modern farm family - husbands and father successfully working the land, daughters leading the kind of hard-working farm wife existence so admired by their neighbors. The picturesque existence quickly unravels as tensions buried (and not so) are uncovered, a prodigal son returns to the neighborhood, a key family member succumbs to madness as another fights cancer and a third finds life hard to reconcile with past dreams. The story is a masterful deconstruction of the life of a family, a farm, a community, and the threads that hold them together. Its awards are well deserved, its characters memorable. Recommended.
As many reviewers have said: this story starts slow. But I felt that every word was necessary for the incisive portrait Smiley painted of each of the characters. She captures the inner workings of close-mouthed, emotionally repressed farm people so perfectly you feel like you are inside of their skins. There is a subtle genius in the telling of the mundane details of farm life and the way the narrator uses it to hide from her own feelings.
This is a retelling of King Lear, so I was familiar with the basic plot, but I was still anxious to see what would happen next when events started spiraling out of control. I was grouchy every time I had to put it down and couldn’t wait to get back to the story. I look forward to seeing the Jessica Lange movie that was made in the 90s.
This is a retelling of King Lear, so I was familiar with the basic plot, but I was still anxious to see what would happen next when events started spiraling out of control. I was grouchy every time I had to put it down and couldn’t wait to get back to the story. I look forward to seeing the Jessica Lange movie that was made in the 90s.
I was always aware, I think, of the water in the soil, the way it travels from particle to particle, molecules adhering, clustering, evaporating, heating, cooling, freezing, rising upward to the surface and fogging the cool air or sinking downward, dissolving this nutrient and that, quick in everything it does, endlessly working and flowing, a river sometimes, a lake sometimes. When I was very young, I imagined it ready at any time to rise and cover the earth again, except for the tile lines. Prairie settlers always saw a sea or an ocean of grass, could never think of any other metaphor, since most of them had lately seen the Atlantic. The Davises did find a shimmering sheet punctuated by cattails and sweet flag. The grass is gone, now, and the marshes, “the big wet prairie,” but the sea is still beneath our feet, and we walk on it.Jane Smiley translated the timeless elements of Shakespeare's King Lear to a Midwestern farm family. In many respects, Smiley's adaptation improves on Shakespeare's Lear. Larry Cook owns one of the most productive farms in Iowa's Zebulon County – one thousand acres resulting from the consolidation of several adjoining acreages. The widower Cook farms with the assistance of two sons-in-law, the husbands of two of his three daughters. Cook's sudden decision to incorporate the farm and cede control to his daughters and sons-in-law is the first in a chain of events that leads to tragedy. The return of draft dodger Jess Clark, prodigal son of Cook's neighbor, Harold Clark, becomes a catalyst for growing feelings of discontent in Cook's eldest daughter, Ginny, the first-person narrator. As sisters Ginny and Rose and their husbands extend themselves beyond their means, the family rift grows, and their neighbors in the small farming community choose sides.The Midwest farm crisis was an inspired choice as the modern setting for this tragedy. This was a period when many multi-generation family farms were lost to corporations. Many smaller tragedies took place throughout the Midwest during this time period. Smiley's novel carries an authenticity that will resonate with readers with ties to the Midwest and its farmers. Highly recommended.
Families are prisons; hometowns less so, but still. Our relatives bind us with their expectations and demands, offering up kinship and support in return. For some, the tradeoff is more than worth it, isn't even a tradeoff at all. But for others, it can be intolerable, a social contract signed at our birth, and one we can't wait to break.
Hometowns are different, yet can be just as stifling. Instead of familial demands, there are community expectations and values. Others' opinions on you are formed far too early, when you aren't fully-formed yourself. Later, when you've changed, you're frustrated by people treating you the same way. All these tendencies are equally present in families, but changing the minds of a handful is easier than converting a hundred.
Rural living has historically suffered from both these problems, with near-homogenous communities meaning that those who stray are shamed into submission or shunned away. Even the hope of severing family ties is quashed, since you still have to see them—and their friends—on a regular basis.
This quandry animates A Thousand Acres, our protagonist Ginny coping with two people who left their community because they didn't, couldn't, belong. One is her sister Caroline, who escaped to the big city (well, Des Moines) as a lawyer, and infuriates the family by minimizing their role in her life. The other is Jess, a prodigal son of a family friend who returns a decade after dodging the draft, full of wild experiences and different ideas. Soon, she feels attracted to Jess, which puts the lie to her story about why she's frustrated with her sister. Ginny isn't angry because Caroline's trying to lead a separate life, but because she's jealous that Caroline realized a dream she could never have.
That's how the grievances start, and how I thought the book would play out while reading the first 150 pages. And then, for lack of a better term, shit gets crazy. The tension built up in the first half of the book begins to explode into shocking violence, and in the hands of any lesser writer, it would seem almost stapled on. But because Smiley handled the first half so aptly, the second half is grounded in those emotional connections, even as they're rapidly shredded and turned into shifting alliances struggling for land and power. At one point, I remarked to my wife that it was more crazy and stressful than anything in A Game of Thrones, and she agreed!
The frustrating thing about discussing this book is that so much rides on the revelations and turns of the second half, but discovering those for yourself is so important, so I don't want to spoil them. Again, any lesser novelist couldn't have handled it, would have let the events of the second half overshadow the first. But Smiley pulls it off, and to reveal her hand early is to do her a disservice. About the only hint I'm willing to give is that it's based on a Shakespeare play, and I would encourage you not to google for the truth.
Hometowns are different, yet can be just as stifling. Instead of familial demands, there are community expectations and values. Others' opinions on you are formed far too early, when you aren't fully-formed yourself. Later, when you've changed, you're frustrated by people treating you the same way. All these tendencies are equally present in families, but changing the minds of a handful is easier than converting a hundred.
Rural living has historically suffered from both these problems, with near-homogenous communities meaning that those who stray are shamed into submission or shunned away. Even the hope of severing family ties is quashed, since you still have to see them—and their friends—on a regular basis.
This quandry animates A Thousand Acres, our protagonist Ginny coping with two people who left their community because they didn't, couldn't, belong. One is her sister Caroline, who escaped to the big city (well, Des Moines) as a lawyer, and infuriates the family by minimizing their role in her life. The other is Jess, a prodigal son of a family friend who returns a decade after dodging the draft, full of wild experiences and different ideas. Soon, she feels attracted to Jess, which puts the lie to her story about why she's frustrated with her sister. Ginny isn't angry because Caroline's trying to lead a separate life, but because she's jealous that Caroline realized a dream she could never have.
That's how the grievances start, and how I thought the book would play out while reading the first 150 pages. And then, for lack of a better term, shit gets crazy. The tension built up in the first half of the book begins to explode into shocking violence, and in the hands of any lesser writer, it would seem almost stapled on. But because Smiley handled the first half so aptly, the second half is grounded in those emotional connections, even as they're rapidly shredded and turned into shifting alliances struggling for land and power. At one point, I remarked to my wife that it was more crazy and stressful than anything in A Game of Thrones, and she agreed!
The frustrating thing about discussing this book is that so much rides on the revelations and turns of the second half, but discovering those for yourself is so important, so I don't want to spoil them. Again, any lesser novelist couldn't have handled it, would have let the events of the second half overshadow the first. But Smiley pulls it off, and to reveal her hand early is to do her a disservice. About the only hint I'm willing to give is that it's based on a Shakespeare play, and I would encourage you not to google for the truth.