Sometimes a Great Notion

I find this book truly challenging to review. The story is rather long and somewhat convoluted, demanding your full attention. Published in 1963, the audible version I listened to was created much later. In the audible version, it's clear that it was performed rather than simply read. I suspect that if I were reading the printed version, I would have struggled to distinguish the multiple voices, as there were no clear paragraph divisions. The characters' thoughts were routinely interwoven throughout the book. However, the audible version did an amazingly successful job of distinguishing the voices, so you always know exactly who is speaking or mostly who is thinking. Sometimes it was two people interacting, providing insights into the events from multiple perspectives.

This book is largely set in Oregon, a territory that is relatively unknown to me, having lived my entire life east of the Mississippi. I've visited Oregon briefly and have relatives there, but I have no regular contact with them. The book is about a family that works in the lumbering industry, with a great deal of tension with the local community. There is also internal strife within the family, as the lumberjack brother and the eastern academic brother come to Oregon to help with the family business, but really to settle a long-held grudge. He comes with the intention of vengeance. He falls in love with his brother's wife, and she with him. After a series of dramatic events, he goes off with his brother on perhaps one last logging adventure, while the wife heads east on her own, with an unknown future but a new commitment to be her own person.

There is considerable dramatic tension, both from the action and the internal dynamics. The book ends exactly where it starts, as you finally have enough knowledge to understand what the opening scene was really about. The construction of the book is impressive in its ability to tell a story, but certainly not in a strictly chronological order. Telling a story linearly from A to Z is so old-fashioned. Life may happen that way, but a good novel, as this one ably proves, does not. And it ends with no clarity about the future of the main characters or any of the characters, for that matter!

The brothers have a fistfight, essentially over who has the rights to this woman. Then the brothers seem to go their separate ways, but the vengeful brother from the east comes back to work directly with his brother to achieve one final, successful, improbable logging mission. And the woman leaves one brother but does not run off with the other, who has inexplicably joined up with his brother whom he had just beaten in the vengeance match. She heads off on a bus heading east into a new future, while the brothers set off as teammates into an uncertain future. Blood is thicker than water? Or something like that.

If you ever want to read a book where the weather is like one of the most important characters, this might be the book for you. Of course, even if you've never been to Oregon, you know that it rains there every day. But when I was in Portland for several days, I don't remember it ever raining. In this book, however, it rains all the time, and the weather is a factor in so many ways. The home of the main family in the book is on the other side of the river from the rest of the world, apparently. It's on a little spit of land that juts out into the river, and anytime someone comes, they have to park on the other side and honk their horn, and someone will come over in a little motorboat to get them and take them back to the house. This placement of the house and the family on the other side of the river from everyone else is not only a physical separation but also a clear representation of the family's position in the community. Between the house, the river, and the weather, the people had to struggle mightily to fit their troubles and dramas into the many pages. And they had to go a little bit overboard, you might think, in order to do that. And go overboard they did. If I thought about it, that would probably be my major critique of the book. They weren't quite caricatures, but they barely seemed like plausible real people either. And the battle between the Oregonian family and the eastern brother come home was intense, even when it was mostly internalized.

Rain Rain Go Away.

This is a truly wet novel that is set during the rainy season in Oregon. As you flip through its pages, you might even get pruned fingers, but it's a lovely experience. The writing is simply beautiful. I found myself constantly thinking of turning down corners to mark passages, only to turn the next page and discover something even more exquisitely written.

At first glance, this can seem like a man's story as it revolves around loggers, brothers, sons, and fathers. However, I'm not a man, and yet I was completely captivated from the middle to the end. (You do have to be patient in the beginning as it takes some time to set the stage, but once it is, it's all worth it.) I'm really struggling to find a way to tell you about it without spoiling the surprise. I knew absolutely nothing about this book when it was given to me. I hadn't read any reviews, and I think that's the best way to approach this novel. Let it surprise you.

I will say this much. The ending is a bit unsatisfying, but it has occupied my mind ever since I turned the last page. "What now?" I keep wondering. I want to hop on the boat with the boys and on the bus with the girl and see where these characters end up. Perhaps, in a strange way, that's the best ending of all.

So, go ahead and read it.

I must admit that the premise for this novel – a strike in the logging industry during the 1960s – didn’t exactly set my heart aflutter with excitement. However, I loved Kesey’s writing so much in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that I really wanted to give this one a chance. That turned out to be an excellent decision.

The crux of this novel, to me, was the complicated relationships that we have with one another and the deep rooted hurt that lives quietly within us. Our parents, our siblings, our spouses. What is it like to feel intense hatred for someone and be cursed to incurably love them at the same time? What do you do? If you’ve ever had a less than perfect relationship with a family member, if you’ve ever experienced the sting of betrayal from a parent, if you’ve ever left home and returned a stranger unable to relate to your kin or if you’ve spent your life trying to escape only to come full circle… you will relate to Leland Stamper.

Kesey’s writing blows me away. The novel is dense and scattered, and the language is rich and beautiful. The narrative switches between different character’s points of view constantly and several times within one page. It took some getting used to but once I acclimatized, I liked it. Kesey seamlessly illustrated the way every moment is seen through different eyes and interpreted differently. A conversation, a decision, the smallest gesture - nothing is absolute. Everything we think we know is just a result of our perception.

This novel is deceptively intricate and contains keenly observed power struggles between brothers, between white collar and blue collar, between workers and bosses, between husbands and wives, between dreams and cold hard reality and a twist on a good ole fashioned Oedipus complex thrown in for good measure. It’s about the consequences of our decisions and the way one moment can change the rest of one’s life. It’s about absolution and letting go. It’s about love.

This book is heartbreaking, engrossing and very underrated. It makes you think about the complex web of relationships that we are all a part of and the impact that our actions can have on those around us. It’s a must-read for anyone who loves great literature and wants to explore the human condition.

A great novel that focuses on a logging family in Oregon. It is filled with a diverse range of interesting characters, including the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The story is, in parts, quite complicated. However, Kesey appears to have a deep understanding of the intricacies of that time and the people within it. There are characters that readers will come to love, while others they might wish to attach to a log and send floating down the river.

Owning a logging business during this period is extremely difficult. Times are tough, with strikes occurring and a significant amount of work that needs to be completed. There is also the ever-present threat of violence and those seeking revenge. The novel vividly描绘s the challenges and turmoil that this logging family faces, making it a captivating read.

There I was, all set to commence my year by delving into the reading of a lengthy novel penned by an author whom I presumed to be older and wiser than myself. So, picture my astonishment and annoyance when, after conducting some arduous research, I unearthed the fact that Ken Kesey completed "Sometimes a Great Notion" (1964) before he reached the age of 30. This implies that he was younger and wiser than I am, a combination that I'm not overly fond of. I tell you, the nerve of this man.

To compound the insult, by 1964, Kesey had already written and published "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962). And while "Notion", his second novel, can't precisely be labeled as obscure (I truly don't believe a story that was adapted into a movie featuring Paul Newman, Lee Remick, and Henry Fonda can be regarded as such), there's no mystery, as soon as you begin reading, as to why it's not as mainstream as "Cuckoo's Nest". It spans over 600 pages; its chapters are long; its descriptive passages are at times dense (yet we're not in the realm of Joyce or Faulkner either); and the style is experimental and deliberately choppy. There are numerous ellipses within these pages, and a plethora of phrases in italics to signify thought. The perspective can shift unexpectedly, within the same paragraph, from third-person to first-person, and then sometimes to an entirely different first-person. Even the ostensibly third-person narrator - who occasionally zooms out from focusing on the main characters to inform us about the weather in the fictional Oregon coastal town of Wakonda, the happenings at the Snag (the local bar), the spiritual explorations of a character named Indian Jenny, or the gastrointestinal discomfort of Union-head Floyd Evenwrite - often sounds like an Oregon lumberjack himself, complete with dialect.

However, this experimental quality does not detract from - and I would argue enhances - the novel's core strengths. One of which is that Kesey simply has a remarkable story to tell. A story in which he takes seriously both his characters' inner lives - thoughts, dreams, fantasies, the minute-by-minute experience of work, and of being in nature - as well as the shared outside world of work unions, strikes, the local economy, public sentiment as revealed through the mumblings and mutterings at the Snag, and the indifference to all human endeavor of the river that flows through town.
Another of the novel's strengths lies in its sense of place. We experience the weather (always raining), the birds, the landscape, and the way people of this time and place truly converse. Granted, I have never visited the Pacific Northwest (which I've often thought of as consisting of only two states - Oregon and Washington - but which Wikipedia now informs me can be more expansively conceived to include British Columbia, Idaho, and, some would contend, even northern California and western Montana; for all intents and purposes in this novel, however, we're really just discussing the "wet" part of Oregon, west of the Cascades), but this book made me feel as if I were there.
But it's also a remarkable novel of character. It's not an especially intellectual or high-concept story. And by that, I don't mean to imply that Kesey was a simpleton - clearly he wasn't - but he is more interested in telling a story and drawing you into the rhythms of his characters' lives than in intellect or in advancing political or social arguments. Sure, there are ideas at play - there's the tension between individualism and collectivism, as well as between a traditional conception of American life and the conceptions of the 60s generation that was just emerging as Kesey was writing - but it also feels somewhat artificial to discuss the novel in these terms. I believe that's because, like Dostoevsky, Kesey remains focused on his characters - he's not interested in their ideas and views of the world in the abstract, but in how those views manifest, either in cooperation or conflict with others. In other words, this is a drama first, while the polemic is...nowhere to be seen.
I won't delve too deeply into the characters or the mechanics of the plot, but suffice it to say that the novel centers on the Stampers, an Oregon family of...ah...gyppo loggers (Wikipedia tells me this is the correct term, but I'm open to correction - please don't send the PC police). Basically, it means that they're not part of the logging union and they do their own thing. You've got Henry, the overbearing patriarch with a touch of Fyodor Karamazov, who rambles on about what logging was like in the good old days; there's his son, Hank, who is individualistic, self-reliant, a real man's man; Hank's wife, Viv, who left Colorado to live with the Stampers in Oregon; cousin Joe Ben, a naive yet somewhat saintly figure; and Leland, Hank's younger half-brother (although my friend Mark speculates that Leland may actually be Hank's son), a neurotic college student living on the east coast, ostensibly spending all his time studying.
One of the major conflicts in the book is set in motion when most of the small logging town of Wakonda goes on strike against Wakonda Pacific; the Stampers strike a deal (no pun intended) to supply the timber to WP anyway, gradually alienating the family from the rest of the town. Kesey jumps from the Snag, to the local movie theater, to Indian Jenny, who occasionally earns money from prostitution, and we thereby get to witness the economic and personal consequences of the Stampers' strike-breaking for the entire town. The only person who's happy about any of it is Teddy, the Snag's oddly passive-aggressive bartender/owner. Meanwhile, the Stampers need all the assistance they can obtain in order to fulfill their contract with WP, so Hank gets word to Leland back east, asking "the kid" if he has the time to come and help with the axe-swinging, tree-felling, and generally hellish forest-centered labor - which sets up the novel's other major conflict: the rivalry between the two half-brothers that Hank doesn't even perceive as a rivalry, at least not initially.
In one of my favorite scenes, athlete's foot-plagued (at least whenever he spends time in the wetness of the Pacific Northwest) union rep Jon Draeger heads out to the Stamper home to attempt to talk some sense into Hank, as he sees it. This scene doesn't occur in the book until around page 360, but it seems I wasn't the only one captivated by it, because it's also the scene with which the movie opens. In line with my feelings about the book, I don't like this scene because I necessarily think one character is right and the other is wrong, but because of the way the dialogue sings; how vividly I can hear Draeger's voice and imagine Hank trembling with anger and incredulity, especially in his repetition of that word, "loyalty":

" What are we to tell the people in town?" Draeger asked again.
"Why, I don't care what you tell them. I don't see--"
"Are you aware, Hank, that Wakonda Pacific is owned by a firm in San Francisco? Are you aware that last year a net of nine hundred and fifty thousand dollars left your community?"
"I don't see what skin that is--"
"These are your friends, Hank. Your associates and neighbors. Floyd tells me that you served in Korea." Draeger's voice was placid... "Do you ever think that the same loyalty that your country expected of you overseas could be expected of you here at home? Loyalty to friends and neighbors when they are being threatened by a foreign foe? Loyalty to--?"
"Loyalty, for the chrissake...loyalty?"
"That's right, Hank. I think you know what I'm talking about." The soothing patience of the voice was almost mesmerizing. "I'm speaking of the basic loyalty, the true patriotism, the selfless, open-hearted, humane concern that you always find welling up from some place within you - a concern you might have almost forgotten - when you see a fellow human being in need of your help..."
"Listen...listen to me, Mister." Hank's voice was taut. He pushed past Evenwrite and held his lantern close to Draeger's neat-featured face. "I'm just as concerned as the next guy, just as loyal. If we was to get into it with Russia I'd fight for us right down to the wire. And if Oregon was to get into it with California I'd fight for Oregon. But if somebody - Biggy Newtown or the Woodsworker's Union or anybody - gets into it with me, then I'm for me! When the chips are down, I'm my own patriot. I don't give a goddam the other guy is my own brother wavin' the American flag and singing the friggin' Star Spangled Banner!"

Some have pointed out that this is a very male-oriented book, which is fair, and perhaps I'm guilty at times of not even being conscious of such things. And it's true, now that I've made myself aware of it, that Joe Ben's wife, Jan, for example, is almost entirely unexplored as a character. Indian Jenny plays a role here that I'm not entirely certain I understand, but for better or worse, the thing I will remember most about her is the strange and inauspicious (?) coincidence that at one point in this book she actually purchases the novel that I'm planning to read next - "The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann - and later throws it out the window of a moving Greyhound bus. Leland's mother is very significant in the story, in a sense, but she's also dead. On the other hand, there's Viv. Kesey leaves us in the dark for quite some time, or nearly in the dark, regarding how she feels about a certain plot development, which creates a great deal of suspense and tension, and so for a while she seems present yet aloof; but it seems to me that in the last hundred pages or so she becomes the soul of the novel, and I ended up feeling more empathy for her, for her experience of the passage of time and her lost opportunities, than for any other character.
Most of my GR friends who have read this book have rated it 5 stars. I also see a few 4-star ratings, and despite my admiration for the book, I think I can understand that rating. After a captivating couple of hundred pages or so of rising action, during which characters and events seemed to hang tantalizingly in the air, events inevitably had to start unfolding - that's the way stories go, I suppose - and perhaps one or two too many events occurred towards the end of this novel, including a pivotal scene that, to me, felt like it could fit too easily into an award-winning tear-jerker.
And yet, this is an imperfect novel that I wouldn't change a word of. You could smooth out its rough edges, you could make it a more palatable entertainment, but I think that would cost it some of its depth and power. I've had it on my shelf for a few years now and finally happened to pick it up at just the right time: a month during which a friend of mine had a health scare, I stopped exercising and spent a lot of time lying down because I convinced myself I had Covid (I didn't), and I generally felt the passage of time and my own mortality with more acuity than usual. The only thing that could have been more appropriate would have been if I had taken a trip to the Pacific Northwest; which if anyone out there is planning to do, by the way, I don't mean to be pushy, but in that case, you really must read this book.
I watched the movie on YouTube a few nights ago, and I'm not capable of evaluating it. It's just too disorienting to see characters I spent six weeks reading about compressed into a movie of 1 hour and 53 minutes. Paul Newman captures Hank's confidence and charisma, even if I didn't envision Hank to be quite so good-looking. The lovely Lee Remick (who, in a strange twist of fate, went on to become the mother of the Antichrist) is great as Viv, and Michael Sarrazin (an actor I wasn't familiar with) as Leland is okay, except for in certain scenes where he looks like he's in his thirties. Henry Fonda plays, well...Henry. So, yeah, things are covered on the acting front, but the characters are - perhaps inevitably - much less nuanced. Henry is more of a red-baiting stereotype in the movie, while Hank and Leland are a bit sanitized - Leland especially isn't nearly as creepy or vindictive - making each of them easier to root for, but also less interesting. This rooting interest that the movie wants us to take is emphasized by the final image of cool defiance, involving a literal middle-finger (to whom, exactly? Unions?), a defiance that I think the novel is ultimately more ambivalent about.

On the fourth cover of "Sometimes a Great Notion" by Ken Kesey, there is a quote from Marco Rossari, taken from the preface, which roughly says: "It's not an easy read, it's not a walk, it's a fucking mountain."

Now.

I'm not a great expert on mountains, but never as in this case has the naturalistic comparison seemed outrageously wrong to me. One often hears of "river novels" in reference to any tome over 500 pages and by God, if what I have in front of me, dirty with the sweat and blood I've spat out to reach the last, blessed page, is not a river - rather than a mountain - I don't know which other novel would deserve such a title. This timeless story, born from the mind of a writer (the same one as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") who in the 1960s lived in a common Californian town and experimented with various types of hallucinogenic substances, has a setting contemporary to that in which it was written, but during the reading I had to stop several times and use my local knowledge to remember that I'm not in some Western of the late 1800s. The described landscape doesn't help: there are no great metropolises, elegant clothes, and social life. There are no long-haired hippies nor recreational drugs. There is the forest. Kilometers and kilometers of forest. There is the river, above all. There are union struggles, county fairs, feuds among loggers, brutal accidents, there is a love for the wild nature of those who arrived in the West truly for the intoxication of conquering the territory (and then realized that at most they could barter some compromise, nothing more) and not to recreate Europe on the other side of the ocean. And yes, you can try to build and "civilize" that piece of the world but, much more probably, it will be the first to change your characteristics.

On the other hand, there is a revolutionary style. Reaching the end of these eight hundred and some pages of a polyphonic novel in which the narrative voices overlap - literally, sometimes even more than once within the same paragraph - is already an achievement in itself, let alone writing it. The characters and their different views of the world and the events narrated are in constant conflict, sometimes they seem to lead nowhere, other times they strike and sink so hard as to leave one breathless.

At the heart of this crazy whirlwind of voices and thoughts is firmly anchored a feverish search for one's place in the world, a journey both physical and cerebral that the protagonist undertakes with blows of an ax, well aware of the fact that if you cut the roots that bind you to the earth, you can only accelerate also your own destruction. There is the river, above all. Which brings life, nourishment, which by transporting the tree trunks towards the mouth and towards the industries brings money and prosperity, but which erodes the banks with its irruption and takes away a piece of land at a time.

Ken Kesey is an incredible author, and I will never be grateful enough to the publishing house Black Coffee for choosing to take on the task of translating and publishing it for the first time in Italy, almost fifty years after its original publication. I took almost a month to finish reading this novel, me who on average reads two books a week, and almost as long to decide to put together four inconclusive thoughts because I know, it's not a book for every day. However, if you ever read it, I will be here cheering for you.

I'm sort of an anti-literature snob. That is to say, I'm intellectually indolent and can't tolerate what I regard as pretentious writing. You know, where the author spends two pages just to say "flowers are pretty" in an effort to make art out of prose.

However, as it turns out, some authors are truly able to make language artistically beautiful, and Ken Kesey happens to be one of them. So, although I was skeptical at the start, by the conclusion of the book, I was glad he used so many words to describe such tiny things because he did it so exquisitely.

Actually, it wasn't until the middle of the book that I could focus on the story rather than the narrative. This is because the narrative takes some getting used to. The narrator is completely unreliable. He constantly shifts perspective, sometimes every few paragraphs, sometimes every paragraph, and sometimes even every sentence between 5 different people within one paragraph. But there's definitely a rhythm to it. He'll bounce rapidly at the beginning and end of a chapter but slow down the bouncing in the middle of the chapter to better establish the scenes.

Once you get accustomed to that, you'll find yourself in the midst of a Greek tragedy (set on the rainy coast of Oregon near Eugene) and be curious about how it's all going to unfold. The character development is outstanding, and I found myself constantly changing my loyalties as more was revealed about the characters and the intents of the various players. And by the end, as everything blew up, I was on the edge of my seat rooting for my favorite character because, by God, I disliked most of the rest of them.

In brief, it's beautiful, epic, tragic art. I highly recommend it.

As I delve deeper into the study of history, I discover that economic concerns have often been a significant source of conflict among individuals and groups, even leading to warfare. This has been evident in my research, dating back at least to the times of Genghis Khan (1162-1227) and the Great Crusades (starting in 1096).

North America is no exception. In the Oregon region, on and near the Pacific coast, the story is the same. Traditionally, natural resources are the first economic assets of a place. Here, the abundance of trees has引发了各种社会冲突. Eventually, not only will interspecies relationships be strained, but also community and family bonds will feel the pressure. And even life itself may be threatened.

This is a strange and wonderful ecological novel. I dare to call it a "masterpiece." I truly believe so. It offers a unique perspective on the complex interplay between humans and the environment, highlighting the consequences of our actions on both. Through vivid descriptions and engaging storytelling, it makes us reflect on our relationship with nature and the importance of sustainable development.