Wharton elige una invernal ciudad ficticia de Nueva Inglaterra para contarnos una inquietante historia llena de simbolismo y con muy pocos personajes. Un joven llega a la ciudad y observa a un misterioso hombre que despierta la atención de todo el mundo: Ethan Frome. ¿Cuál es la historia detrás de este enigmático individuo?

La autora vuelve a hacer gala de su talento a la hora de narrar, con una prosa bellísima, unos personajes perfectamente construidos y una gélida atmósfera que va creciendo y cargándose de tensión hasta estallar en la parte final.

Pese a su brevedad consigue condensar una gran variedad de temas y reflexiona sobre el amor imposible, el destino y la eterna encrucijada, siempre tan presente en los protagonistas de Wharton, de cumplir con sus deberes o seguir los dictados de su corazón.

‘Ethan Frome’ es una joya que difícilmente decepciona. Tiene fuerza y da mucho con muy poco. Recomendable leerla del tirón o en un par de sentadas para conectar mejor con su intensidad.

«Quando la porta della camera di Mattie si chiuse, Ethan ricordò che non le aveva nemmeno toccato la mano.»



Esistono matrimoni, come quello di Ethan Frome e Zeena, che nascono per inerzia, per solitudine, oppure per riconoscenza. Il loro equilibrio, poi, è precario, instabile, e ad Ethan e Mattie, la giovane cugina della moglie - ma sono tutti giovani i protagonisti di questa storia che cela in sé l'animo nero dell'amore, anche se la trentacinquenne Zeena ci appare decrepita e priva di vitalità -, bastano un battito di ciglia, una tazza di caffè, oppure un fermaglio d'oro perso nel prato per «scoprire improvvisamente la felicità, come se avessero sorpreso una farfalla nei boschi d'inverno»; questo manda in frantumi tutto quello che fino a quel momento era rimasto in equilibrio, sia pur precario; come un prezioso piatto di ceramica protetto e conservato in cima all'armadio, che nessuna colla riuscirà più a ricomporre.
Bellissimo, sospeso sin dall'inizio e carico di tensione, sin da quando, nelle prime pagine, si preannuncia "l'incidente" che ha cambiato la vita di Ethan Frome. Non è chiaro di quale incidente si tratti, ed io, sino alle ultime pagine ne ho pensato prima uno, poi un altro ancora, ma non quello finale, che mi ha colpita come un pugno nello stomaco. C'è tanta neve, che copre e ovatta suoni e parole, grida e sussurri; e anche quella corsa con lo slittino, che doveva regalare la libertà per sempre, che scivola verso l'eternità, si rivela ingannevole, solo l'ultima delle negazioni. Nessuno torna indietro, secondo Edith Wharton, nessuno può decidere di modificare la sua rotta una volta che ha deciso per quale strada incamminarsi, perché è la vita che ce lo chiede, e che ce lo impone.

«Sapevo qualcosa sulla vita di paese del New England molto tempo prima di stabilirmi nella stessa contea dove ho ambientato il mio immaginario Starkfield; ma durante gli anni trascorsi laggiù alcun dei suoi aspetti mi divennero molto più familiari. Anche prima di conoscerlo così a fondo, però, avevo avuto la vaga sensazione che il New England della letteratura avesse poca somiglianza eccetto, vagamente, quella botanica e dialettale con il paese aspro e meraviglioso che io avevo conosciuto.
Anche leggendo le prolisse enumerazioni di tipi di felci, asteri e allori di montagna, e la coscienziosa riproduzione del dialetto, mi rimaneva sempre la sensazione che il granito che affiorava in quella terra fosse stato trascurato in ambedue i casi.»

Hay libros que son una caricia al alma y otros que son directamente un puñetazo. Espero no desvelar demasiado al decir que esta historia es ambas cosas. Parece mentira que un libro tan breve te haga transitar por emociones tan intensas y tan extremas entre sí.

Siento el mayor de los respetos por Edith Wharton por dos motivos principalmente: el primero, por hacer que lo difícil parezca fácil, ya que aunque su escritura es puro virtuosismo, sobre todo en lo que tiene que ver con el dominio narrativo y la creación de personajes, su estilo es sencillo, honesto y desprovisto de pretensiones. Y el segundo es que nunca deja de sorprenderme con finales ALUCINANTES donde, por más que intento adivinar por dónde va a tirar siempre logra dejarme noqueado.

Para mí este librito ha sido una auténtica delicia. Y ahora que (con suerte) os dejo con ganas de meterle mano, yo voy a ver si logro recomponer mis pedazos de lector conmovido...porque telita con la Wharton, me ha destrozado!!!

“If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts, you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked yourself who he was…”
-tEdith Wharton, Ethan Frome

Famously known as an acute observer of class and society in classics such as The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome strays far from her typical stomping grounds, leaving behind wealth and privilege to follow a struggling farmer who is exceedingly close to complete financial ruin. Despite the drastic change of scenery, she nevertheless delivers a hammer-blow of a doomed love story, in one of the least likely places imaginable.

The setting is the aptly named (and fictitious) village of Starkfield, a bleak and grim place that – like Narnia – seems caught in an endless winter. A million miles from New York City high society, the novel’s titular lead is a young man caught in a loveless marriage with a sickly, possibly hypochondriacal wife named Zenobia. The only glimmer of sunshine in Ethan’s gray world is his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, a beautiful, lively young woman who has come to live with them.

This rather dreary love triangle provides the setup for Wharton’s short, well-executed tragedy. I don’t think it is spoiling anything to say that this is a combination of Shakespeare, Anna Karenina, and the Winter Olympics.

Ethan Frome is a framed story, with a prologue and epilogue narrated in the first-person by an engineer who has traveled to Starkfield to do some work. While there, this observer becomes haunted by the image of an aged Ethan, the survivor of an ambiguously-labeled “smash-up.”

It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two.

Because of a snowstorm, the narrator is invited into Ethan's house, where he ostensibly learns the bits and pieces of Ethan’s tale. From there, and for the bulk of the book, Wharton switches to the third-person for what amounts to an extended flashback, showing how Ethan came to be that “ruin of a man.”

At 157 pages in length, Wharton has to make every word count. There is no fat, no wasted moments. The characters are drawn boldly. Though they lack great depth, they are mostly memorable. Of the trifecta, Mattie makes the least impression. She is a bit of a cipher, more symbol than person, existing mainly to show Ethan that there are worlds within worlds, and that he has the possibility of a different life.

Ethan is frustrating. Physically strong, he is mentally – and perhaps morally – weak. Just about everything that goes wrong in this novel could have been avoided by even average decision making. Then again, if everyone in fiction used common sense, there would be a lot less drama worth reading about. Though I didn't like him, I can't quite shake him, either.

In my opinion, Zenobia – who goes by Zeena – is the most memorable of Wharton’s creations. Heck, I'd go so far as to say that she's one of the more exceptional low-key villains I've encountered in American letters. Without ever raising her voice or hatching a plot, she skillfully wields her chilly demeanor, her highly refined passive-aggressiveness, and her preternatural understanding of her husband to get exactly what she wants. Though she is mostly hateful, Wharton eventually gives us a few insights into her personality that enrich our understanding of her.

Ethan Frome is a work that is extremely straightforward. The symbols are unambiguous, as is its central theme, that of small-town conventionality stunting an individual’s ability to find happiness and growth via unconventional pathways. Yet, the simplicity is deceptive. Though uncomplicated, the prose does a beautiful job of conveying the oppressiveness of Ethan’s existence, where the walls – represented by the weather, community expectations, and economic failures – are constantly closing in.

When I first read this is high school, I really liked it, and not only because it can be read comfortably in just a couple sittings, and requires no parsing of language to get its meaning. No, my attachment sprung from the repressed passion between Ethan and Mattie, and the way it seemed like the entire universe balanced on their love. At the time, such romantic nonsense really appealed to my sensibilities. As one example among many, I saw Titanic in the theater five times. Five times. While I truly love the historical ship, I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t also there for Leo and Kate and their brilliantly-flaming meteor of a relationship.

Now far removed from high school, I appreciate Ethan Frome on a different level. Ethan’s flaw is in failing to recognize that his problems go beyond the constricting ethical framework in which he is hemmed. His failure is not one of imagination – he knows there is a better life out there, for the taking – but of motivation. Hamlet-like in his dithering, Ethan has an unfortunate genius for choosing the worst option to a difficult question. Instead of looking for the way forward, he is looking for a way out, and that is not the same thing.

Ethan Frome rests on its ending. After all, from the very first page, we are teased with the riddle of Ethan’s fateful moment. For the book to work, the denouement has to work. I think it does. The finale is a bit operatic, bordering on black comedy, but it is effective because of Wharton’s unadorned, just-the-facts style. The epilogue, as well, provides a powerful kicker.

This is a novel that is written with assuredness and confidence. Wharton seems to know exactly what she’s doing with every word. Because of this, and because of her talent, Ethan Frome certainly belongs in the category of “classics.” With that said, it can feel like a minor one. It does not grapple with huge ideas or say something profound about an age. It’s just the story of an unhappy marriage, of a man one step shy of a fool, who can’t get anything to work. For all that, it’s really hard to forget. Certainly, it'll make you think twice about outdoor winter recreation.

This is the first time I've read this book since high school, and I'm a bit irritated with that teacher right now. Why was "Ethan Frome" chosen as assigned reading? The story is grim, and its grown-up themes of adultery and morality didn't mean much to me, other than to make me think I disliked Edith Wharton as a writer.

Which is why I am complaining decades later about this high school assignment. Because now I know that Edith Wharton is a marvelous writer — truly one of my favorite American authors — but for years I walked around thinking I disliked her work because of this negative early exposure.

So when I saw that the library had an audio version of "Ethan Frome," I decided to give it a reread and see if my adult self appreciated it more. I did like it better, although it is still a dark tale.

This reminds me that I still need to reread "The Scarlet Letter" and see if I like that any better as an adult.

n  CAMOUFLAGEn

There is the stark landscape of the stark field. Starkfield it is.

Then slowly, through third party eyes, with all the distance that this implies, we begin to discern a shape that slowly acquires its own entity against its background. No, not even third party eyes, but third parties of the third party. Even further removed. For the book begins thus: I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

And thus, in this remoteness, emerges a figure, and the third party is discarded and we get a lot closer, sitting or, or reading, or looking from the first row.

But still. Hardly discernible, even if the title helps to focus on the developing shape.

n  He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.. n

.

Veiled are also the rest of the characters. They all live a discoverable and outward, but their feelings are hidden: to the others and to themselves. Again, as one tunes in one’s eye, one’s senses, one begins to discern those covered, those concealed and unformed emotions. Feelings are so clouded that it takes them years, for people living under the same roof, to identify them, to let them free. Actions and speech of the people in Starkfield are all concealments. They do not perceive what they are, or identify what think; they interact without discovering the other person. Appearances delude.

But then there is all that snow, cold, brisk and bleak: paralyzing.

This is so until disaster strikes – and then the characters continue to live, or die, secluded in their eclipsed-away house, as if they were already living, or not living, in their graves. And their physical appearances take on the abandoned, disgruntled, nature of their settings.

Even the author has camouflaged. The writer of the upper echelon of social classes of the New England is here transporting us to poverty and to rural and snowy settings. Unrecognizable. After reading The Reef, I had to rub my eyes and squint if I were to accept that this was Wharton’s world, and that I was not reading something akin to Growth of the Soil. Wharton has donned a Norwegian cloak.

But her words...., her words lead you.

And, eventually, one can see the cat... It was on the first photo too.

If you told me this was a longish deleted segment of Winesburg, Ohio, I would totally believe you, even taking into account the fact that one of the books was written by Sherwood Anderson and the other by Edith Wharton. Like the stories in that much revered short story cycle (no not novel), Ethan Frome concerns itself with grim characters burdened by unfulfilled dreams, dreams unfulfilled because of the strictures of society or their own inability to truly sieze the day. A chilly atmosphere, a grim sense of place, a punch in the gut ending that would be lurid melodrama if the story wasn't already so unrelentingly bleak throughout.

One to read if you want to feel really bad. Or maybe to feel really good. Basically, you can close the book and sink into a funk or swallow the lump in your throat and hug your girlfriend or your wife or your boyfriend or your husband (or maybe even your cat), because you can, because you're lucky enough not to be the one who entered into a marriage of convenience rather than one of passion, that you aren't doomed to limp through life, scarred and nerve-damaged, metaphorically or otherwise.

Here are some other depressing stories about sleds:

3.5 Se trata de una novela corta, situada en el pequeño pueblo de Starkfield, en el estado de Massachussetts. Y nos adentra en la vida Ethan Frome, un hombre serio, maltratado por la vida, y sin embargo, respetado por los vecinos del pueblo.

La historia empieza explicándonos que nuestro protagonista sufrió en el pasado un terrible accidente, que le dejó grandes secuelas. Pero, que le pasó? Quien es Ethan Frome?.....para saberlo, recomiendo leer este libro. Es tan corto, y engancha de tal manera, que si digo algo más, estropeo la lectura.

Me ha gustado especialmente cómo están definidos los personajes, todos con personalidades muy marcadas. Y el paisaje, con la nieve, sus noches estrelladas y el frio, me ha parecido un personaje más del libro.

Una lectura sencilla, pero que te llega al corazón

"Ethan Frome" is easily Edith Wharton's most accessible work, and I believe her most relevant. I challenge any reader to read this text and not see a bit of themselves in some of the plot devices.
Wharton sets this frame story in the middle of a desolate and dreary landscape and her evocation of the harsh environment easily surrounds the reader and forces us to succumb to the numbing depression and pain that the main characters feel. This text is essentially a three character study and although there is little "action" to speak of it carries the reader along at a good clip. I have never read this book, or talked about it with other readers, when we were not all gripped from the beginning with the novel's ambiguities and tensions.
"Ethan Frome" is also a novel that is endlessly debatable and regardless of one's final perspective it will leave you casting about with a void in your heart. Beware; a reader will feel the pangs of recognition, or the fellowship of sympathy, upon completing this text. Either way, it will stay with you long after you set it down.
This is an excellent choice for students or book clubs. It is not a long or difficult read and the novel is wonderfully symbolic and suspenseful in just the right places.

It is a novel to despair of love, pessimistic, where selfishness and conventions are predominant. It is a novel where the silences speak louder than the words.
That's a closed door where Edith Wharton, between the lines, seems to denounce her time's customs and social conditions with her precise writing.
It takes us into literature from another age, where talent was a necessary preamble to writing.

This novel wrenched my heart in a way that I had not seen coming! For a novel that has only a few austere characters, whose nearest town is called Starkfield and which takes place in a bleak, wintry and isolated countryside, it packed a surprising punch, more than the other novels I’ve read by Wharton, most of which take place in upper-class, dazzling New York, a setting which most people, me included, would find much more compelling.

In the beginning I practically swooned at Wharton’s exquisite prose – so languid, so dwelling on small things, and meanwhile the quiet drama gradually sneaked up on me and caught me unawares.
The frame story is provided by an unnamed narrator, a traveler of some kind, who sees Ethan Frome from afar when he arrives in town and is told just enough about him to feel intrigued by this quiet, broken man. During a sleigh ride with Ethan Frome, a winter storm suddenly means the narrator has to spend the night at Ethan’s house – the first stranger to enter it in decades. And here the real story begins, in the form of a flashback to Ethan’s life twenty-four years before.

We are told the story about Ethan’s anguish in his loveless marriage to Zeena and his infatuation with Zeena’s cousin Mattie, who lives with them. And we are shown how people, especially Ethan, can feel desperately trapped in their lives – by poverty, by snow, by marriage.  I sympathized with Ethan, who is a good man despite his yearnings for another woman. Zeena, after all, is a miserable hypochondriac, but her sadness and entrapment, too, can be read between the lines. They are all, in different ways, victims.

The desolation was palpable. I felt the harsh winters, the painful and almost total lack of choice, the misery and missed chances. Such descriptions might at other times make me give a novel a wide berth, but in Wharton’s hands the story vibrated in me hours afterward, and I knew I had just read something quite wonderful.

4.5 stars

For over a decade, I’ve wanted to read Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome in the winter. I’m one of those folks who likes to time reading a book with the season in which the book is set.

This year, I finally got around to it. I think what had prevented me from finishing the book before was the narrative device Wharton uses. You know the one: the narrator comes upon a scene, spots the central character, and then somehow gets enough information to tell the main tale. (See also: Wuthering Heights.)

The thing is: this technique can seem fussy, distracting and gimmicky. But after I’d finished the short novel I went back and reread the opening chapters, and it’s an interesting device. I still don’t think it’s necessary, but it’s not as awkward as I at first thought.

But back to the book. It’s about a poor farmer who’s stuck in a dead marriage with his sickly wife, Zeena. Zeena’s pretty cousin, Mattie, is living with them to help with the chores, but she’s not a very good housekeeper and Zeena doesn’t like her. To complicate matters, Ethan has fallen in love with Mattie, and we think she has similar feelings.

We’re told early on about the winter “smash up” that gave Ethan his limp, and there’s a rich description of a great big (symbolic) tree early on… and so we know an accident will probably figure into the tale.

What’s remarkable isn’t the simple story, but the evocative language and the generous empathy Wharton has for her characters. The author is best known, of course, for being a sharp observer of upper-class New York society in books like The Age Of Innocence and The House Of Mirth. What does she know about simple country folk?

There’s not an ounce of sentimentality about her portrait, and even though the working class characters’ speech is plain and colloquial, you don’t get the feeling that Wharton judges them. If anything, she pities them. This is a sad story.

And the descriptions of the wintry landscape? Absolutely stunning. If, like me, you’ve wanted to read this, here’s my advice. Get a nice warm blanket. Put on a pot of tea or coffee. And cuddle up with the book. You won’t regret it.