In so doing Smiley’s novel tells stories of humans and their relationships with individual horses such as the aged and abused race horse Mr.
Set in the world of contemporary US thoroughbred horse racing and rooted in its author’s long personal involvement in horse culture, Horse Heaven attempts to represent no less than the entirety of American horse culture with its trainers and jockeys, small owners and businessmen, gamblers and animal communicators. T., raced in France and rescued in Texas, who is discovered to have some unusual and amazing talents.Īnd then there is the Jack Russell terrier, Eileen, a dog with real convictions - and the will to implement them.This chapter addresses the role of the animal in Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven (2000), an extensive novel with multiple story lines and a large gallery of human and nonhuman characters. There are the geldings - Justa Bob, the plain brown horse who always wins by a nose, a lovable claimer who passes from owner to owner on a heart-wrenching journey down from the winner's circle and the beautiful Mr. Farley, a good trainer in a bad slump Buddy, a ruthless trainer who can't seem to lose even though he knows that his personal salvation depends upon it Roberto, an apprentice jockey who has "the hands" but is growing too big for his dream career with every passing day Leo the gambler and his earnest son, Jesse, who understands everything about his father's "system" except why it doesn't work Elizabeth, the sixty-two-year-old theorist of sex and animal communication, and her best friend, Joy, the mare manager at the ranch at the center of the universe-all are woven together by the horses that pass among them: two colts and two fillies who begin with the promise of talent and breeding, and now might or might not achieve stardom. This time, I mean it," and something does. Twenty-year-old Tiffany Morse, stuck in her job at Wal-Mart, prays, "Please make something happen here. Haunting, exquisite Rosalind Maybrick, wife of a billionaire owner, one day can't quite decide what it is she wants, and discovers too late that her whole life is transformed.
It's not true," says a character in Jane Smiley's funny, passionate, and brilliant new novel of horse racing, "that anything can happen at the racetrack," but many astonishing and affecting things do - and in Horse Heaven, we find them woven into a marvelous tapestry of joy and love, chicanery, folly, greed, and derring-do.
0 kommentar(er)
