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Denis Johnson

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Train Dreams: A Novella Kindle Edition

by Denis Johnson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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A New York Times Notable Book for 2011
One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
One of NPR's 10 Best Novels of 2011

From the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) comes Train Dreams, an epic in miniature, and one of Johnson's most evocative works of fiction.

Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.

It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.

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August 30, 2011
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Praise for Tree of Smoke:

“Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and Tree of Smoke is a tremendous book . . . It ought to secure Johnson's status as a revelator for this still new century.” —Jim Lewis, The New York Times

About the Author

Denis Johnson (1949-2017) is the author of eight novels, one novella, one book of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. His novel Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Train Dreams 1In the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle.Three of the railroad gang put the thief under restraint and dragged him up the long bank toward the bridge under construction fifty feet above the Moyea River. A rapid singsong streamed from the Chinaman voluminously. He shipped and twisted like a weasel in a sack, lashing backward with his one free fist at the man lugging him by the neck. As this group passed him, Grainier, seeing them in some distress, lent assistance and found himself holding one of the culprit's bare feet. The man facing him, Mr. Sears, of Spokane International's management, held the prisoner almost uselessly by the armpit and was the only one of them, besides the incomprehensible Chinaman, to talk during the hardest part of their labors: "Boys, I'm damned if we ever see the top of this heap!" Then we're hauling him all the way? was the question Grainier wished to ask, but he thought it better to save his breath for the struggle. Sears laughed once, his face pale with fatigue and horror. They all went down in the dust and got righted, went down again, the Chinaman speaking in tongues and terrifying the four of them to the point that whatever they may have had in mind at the outset, he was a deader now. Nothing would do but to toss him off the trestle.They came abreast of the others, a gang of a dozen men pausing in the sun to lean on their tools and wipe at sweat and watch this thing. Grainier held on convulsively to the Chinaman's horny foot, wondering at himself, and the man with the other foot let loose and sat down gasping in the dirt and got himself kicked in the eye before Grainier took charge of the free-flailing limb. "It was just for fun. For fun," the man sitting in the dirt said, and to his confederate there he said, "Come on, Jel Toomis, let's give it up." "I can't let loose," this Mr. Toomis said, "I'm the one's got him by the neck!" and laughed with a gust of confusion passing across his features. "Well, I've got him!" Grainier said, catching both the little demon's feet tighter in his embrace. "I've got the bastard, and I'm your man!"The party of executioners got to the midst of the last completed span, sixty feet above the rapids, and made every effort to toss the Chinaman over. But he bested them by clinging to their arms and legs, weeping his gibberish, until suddenly he let go and grabbed the beam beneath him with one hand. He kicked free of his captors easily, as they were trying to shed themselves of him anyway, and went over the side, dangling over the gorge and making hand-over-hand out over the river on the skeleton form of the next span. Mr. Toomis's companion rushed over now, balancing on a beam, kicking at the fellow's fingers. The Chinaman dropped from beam to beam like a circus artist downward along the crosshatch structure. A couple of the work gang cheered his escape, while others, though not quite certain why he was being chased, shouted that the villain ought to be stopped. Mr. Sears removed from the holster on his belt a large old four-shot black-powder revolver and took his four, to no effect. By then the Chinaman had vanished.

Hiking to his home after this incident, Grainier detoured two miles to the store at the railroad village of Meadow Creek to get a bottle of Hood's Sarsaparilla for his wife, Gladys, and their infant daughter, Kate. It was hot going up the hill through the woods toward the cabin, and before getting the last mile he stopped and bathed in the river, the Moyea, at a deep place upstream from the village.It was Saturday night, and in preparation for the evening a number of the railroad gang from Meadow Creek were gathered at the hole, bathing with their clothes on and sitting themselves out on the rocks to dry before the last of the daylight left the canyon. The men left their shoes and boots aside and waded in slowly up to their shoulders, whooping and splashing. Many of the men already sipped whiskey from flasks as they sat shivering after their ablutions. Here and there an arm and hand clutching a shabby hat jutted from the surface while somebody got his head wet. Grainier recognized nobody and stayed off by himself and kept a close eye on his boots and his bottle of sarsaparilla.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.

He gave the Hood's to Gladys. She sat up in bed by the stove, nursing the baby at her breast, down with a case of the salt rheum. She could easily have braved it and done her washing and cut up potatoes and trout for supper, but it was their custom to let her lie up with a bottle or two of the sweet-tasting Hood's tonic when her head ached and her nose stopped, and get a holiday from such chores. Grainier's baby daughter, too, looked rheumy. Her eyes were a bit crusted and the discharge bubbled pendulously at her nostrils while she suckled and snorted at her mother's breast. Kate was four months old, still entirely bald. She did not seem to recognize him. Her little illness wouldn't hurt her as long as she didn't develop a cough out of it.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, at how it had carried him away like a seed in a wind, young Grainier still wished they'd gone ahead and killed that Chinaman before he'd cursed them.He sat on the edge of the bed."Thank you, Bob," his wife said."Do you like your sarsaparilla?""I do. Yes, Bob.""Do you suppose little Kate can taste it out your teat?""Of course she can."

Many nights they heard the northbound Spokane International train as it passed through Meadow Creek, two miles down the valley. Tonight the distant whistle woke him, and he found himself alone in the straw bed.Gladys was up with Kate, sitting on the bench by the stove, scraping cold boiled oats off the sides of the pot and letting the baby suckle this porridge from the end of her finger."How much does she know, do you suppose, Gladys? As much as a dog-pup, do you suppose?""A dog-pup can live by its own after the bitch weans it away," Gladys said.He waited for her to explain what this meant. She often thought ahead of him."A man-child couldn't do that way," she said, "just go off and live after it was weaned. A dog knows more than a babe until the babe knows its words. But not just a few words. A dog raised around the house knows some words, too--as many as a baby.""How many words, Gladys?""You know," she said, "the words for its tricks and the things you tell it to do.""Just say some of the words, Glad." It was dark and he wanted to keep hearing her voice."Well, fetch, and come, and sit, and lay, and roll over. Whatever it knows to do, it knows the words."In the dark he felt his daughter's eyes turned on him like a cornered brute's. It was only his thoughts tricking him, but it poured something cold down his spine. He shuddered and pulled the quilt up to his neck.All of his life Robert Grainier was able to recall this very moment on this very night.Copyright © 2002 by Denis Johnson

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004YD699A
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (August 30, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 30, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 559 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 125 pages

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Denis Hale Johnson (born July 1, 1949) is an American writer best known for his short story collection Jesus' Son (1992) and his novel Tree of Smoke (2007), which won the National Book Award for Fiction. He also writes plays, poetry and non-fiction.

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Michael J. Ettner

"I don't know where I'll get the strength to take this road at night anymore."

Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2011

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The power of Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams" will remind you of other durable works in the canon of American literature. The book's backwoods setting, the stoic philosophy of its characters, and several encounters with the Native American spirit world, all have sympathetic ties to Hemingway's early Nick Adams stories set in Michigan's Northern Woods. The laconic protagonist of "Train Dreams," Robert Grainier, is an heir to Jack London's solitary men who are fated to enact tales of man-against-nature. Grainier, an uneducated man, survives into his eighties as a day laborer, and it is through this character that the author succeeds in conveying, sensitively, respectfully the relentless hard work of living. Johnson's interest in this common man is reminiscent of Steinbeck's portrayals of kindred spirits in the novels he wrote in the Depression era. As well, Johnson's prose -- simple, direct and unmannered, yet supple enough to shift from factual to lyrical, from realism to magic realism -- is consistent with an indigenous American style. But there is nothing derivative, nothing imitative, nothing second-rate, in "Train Dreams." This is a stand-alone classic.

Some reviews mention that a version of this novella appeared previously. Did Johnson make any changes? The answer is no. I was able to compare the text of the just-released book to the text found in the Summer 2002 edition of The Paris Review, at pages 250-312, where the story made its first appearance. (Copies of it are available from used book dealers on Amazon, here: Paris Review, the #162 Summer 2002 .) The 2002 and 2011 publications track exactly, paragraph for paragraph. The only edits I spotted are insignificant: things like changing a reference to "one-hundred-twelve-foot" so that it now appears as "112-foot," and an all-caps shout of a dying man, "RIGHT REVEREND RISING ROCKIES!" now appearing as a lower case utterance: "right reverend rising rockies!"

The story is also available in the anthology (still in print), The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 (Pen / O. Henry Prize Stories) . In the back of that volume, in a Jurors' Comments section, there are two eloquent appreciations of Johnson written by Jennifer Egan and David Guterson, both of whom declare "Train Dreams" to be their favorite story the year.

My positive experience of "Train Dreams" came the old fashioned way: by reading the book in its physical state. If you're considering buying the audio version (which is short enough to fit on two CDs), there is a free audio excerpt of the first five pages (three-and-a-half minutes long, read by the great Will Patton) available on the publisher's website. To find it, just Google the words, MacMillan Train Dreams.

Some people are enchanted by the book's cover illustration. It is a reproduction of a lithograph entitled "The Race," produced in an edition of 250 impressions in 1942 by the American regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton. A hearty debate could be launched over how well "The Race" reflects the themes of "Train Dreams," and whether the wild horse represents the essential character of Grainier.

I think the picture fascinates us because of the horse's devotion to a wholly quixotic pursuit: the urge to outrun and outlast a devilish machine nipping at its tail. Then there's its moody, dreamlike atmosphere. Just as in dreams, if you study the picture carefully you find yourself pushed and pulled visually between reality and a distortion of reality. In the foreground reflecting pool, the horse is rhymed by its ghost -- or is it a visitor from the spirit world? The horse's free-waving mane and tail are echoed in the background by the steam engine's ominous smoke trail. When Benton was asked to explain the inspiration for this print, he noted how it was a "common enough scene in the days of the steam engine," when he used to observe how "horses so often ran with the steam trains." Fascinating dioramas, a feeling of being caught within a dream state, and encounters with ominous fate, are all things you will re-experience when you open this stunning book.

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Roger Brunyate

The Extraordinariness of the Ordinary

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2011

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I was drawn into this novella immediately by the Amazon "Look Inside" feature: "In the summer of 1917 Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle." The Chinaman escapes, Grainier hikes back to his wife and daughter in their small log cabin in the woods, and the whistle of a distant train wakes him in the night.

This summary of the brief opening chapter is fairly typical of the whole. Johnson has a knack of telling colorful and slightly unusual stories, yet he sets them in the texture of very ordinary life. Days follow nights, summers spent working on the railroad or in the forests are followed by winters of hibernation and recovery, years pass and very little changes. Bob Grainier is an ordinary man, handy with his hands and strong of body, working as a lumberman or bridge-builder until his accumulated injuries turn him into a local teamster, with two mares and a wagon. He marries late and is widowed early, living like a hermit in the woods. Occasionally, he comes into town for church: "Living up the Moyea with plenty of small chores to distract him, he forgot he was a sad man. When the hymns began, he remembered."

But he keeps having these odd encounters: with a dying child molester, a man shot by his own dog, a Kootenai Indian who remains teetotal until tricked by a jug of spiked punch, an Indian woman who rouses his long-buried libido. He has a number of dogs, at least one of whom seems to be half wolf, and the wolf presence in the forests all around him links to the strong thread of superstition that runs through the story. As do his dreams: memories of happier times, and the imagined return of his dead. And the distant whistle of the train, going to places where he has never been, passing through the valleys like time itself.

In depicting the extraordinariness of the ordinary, Johnson has set himself a difficult task. He must bring simple events so brilliantly to life that they become special, and yet he must also show them fading inevitably with the passing years. He has produced a book that is beautifully written and throughly absorbing on a page to page basis, but I wonder if I will remember it as anything more permanent than the lingering whiff of wood smoke. Perhaps that is all we can expect.

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Michael X Smith

An Obscure Destiny *

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 17, 2022

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Previously, I had read reviews of Denis Johnson’s work but never anything by him. Now I am glad I have. Train Dreams is a novella which, like its title, is short and memorable. In part it is a history of the development of the American West. One comment quoted on the inside cover compares the book favourably with the writings of Cormac McCarthy. I also thought of E. L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times, though neither McCarthy nor Doctorow sets his work in the same location as Train Dreams.
The structure of the book is episodic, not linear, with episodes knitted together as the biography of the central character, Robert Grainier, a poorly educated labourer born in 1886 and dying in 1968, the last two digits of the second date reversing those of the first, as death reverses life. Grainier works as a woodsman, haulier and, appropriate to the title, a labourer building railroads and their bridges in the north-western US states of Washington and Idaho. He sees and experiences almost as a child, which gives reality to phenomena produced by his magical thinking. Such thinking is parallel to imaginative writing.
Episodes are connected not only by biography but by repeated themes and imagery: wild nature and human interaction with it, particularly the relationship between human and animal; the wider world, especially war and its connection with the economy of the west, as in the supply of timber; the development and isolation of human settlement; the difficulty and danger of physical work in a primal environment; the limits and intensities of human relationships, especially among the inarticulate and uneducated; and, throughout, the mystery that infuses the everyday, with death as the ultimate closure. As this part-list suggests, Train Dreams has a range and depth that exceed its length.
It is difficult to convey the magic of Johnson’s novella. The key is mostly in the language, with its original and striking combinations of words, where almost everything is said powerfully and perfectly, from short, individual phrases to whole descriptions. So Grainier’s “right shoulder locked up as dead as a vault door” (82), he feels “a palsy which [. . .] was rocking the entire avenue like a rowboat” (109) and “the heat itched in his hair” (111). There is a superb description of a forest fire (78-79). When Grainier’s Bible burns, “here had come a fire stronger than God” (45). After the fire, “[t]he ground about was healing. Fireweed and jack pine stood up about thigh high. A mustard-tinted fog of pine pollen drifted through the valley” (51). This is vivid description with close, specific detail, but not purple prose. The language is never clogged with excess and the pastoral descriptions are always balanced by the suggestion of a wilder nature with the presence of risk: violence, fire, loss and death. It is impossible in a short review to demonstrate adequately the power of Johnson’s language, since almost every page is worthy of quotation, while just to imagine the scenes and characters described—the “feasting fire” (44), the wolf-girl, the wolf-boy and his primal scream at the end—is highly original.
Two other books that express the mystery of primal nature and the human experience of it very memorably are Julia Leigh’s The Hunter and Knut Hamsun’s Pan. They are from other national literatures and in many ways quite different from Train Dreams, yet there is a substantial overlap in the sense of mystery these three works convey. But Johnson’s voice is unique, one test of a great writer. I have not yet read any other books by him but, after Train Dreams, look forward to doing that.

* The phrase is adapted from Thomas Gray’s poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), also used for the title of Willa Cather’s superb trio of stories, Obscure Destinies (1932).

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Maureen L.P.

Every word counts.

Reviewed in Canada on January 31, 2020

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I was constantly startled by the way the novella unfolded. Johnson was a deeply inventive writer, someone I'd say who loved the rest of his species, had a clear and amused eye, who knew tragedy. I like being knocked sideways when reading. It happened over and over again. I was delighted and moved by Train Dreams, my introduction to Denis Johnson. I've read a lot more of his work since.

david eldridge

Just read it

Reviewed in Australia on July 6, 2021

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Magnificent. Read it!
To a non US person , this book is one of the most revealing tales of US history. And he’s a better writer than Hemingway!

Alysson Oliveira

Todos os Belos Trens

Reviewed in Brazil on May 16, 2016

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Sonhos de TremJesus' Son Pelo seu ritmo peculiar, sua prosa e precisa, é possível imaginar TRAIN DREAMS (Sonhos de Trem, em Trad. de Alexandre Barbosa de Sousa) somo um filme em preto-e-branco de Béla Tarr (uma cena-chave, no entanto, poderia ser em cores). Denis Johnson é um dos maiores escritores norte-americanos da atualidade, e, creio, até hoje não recebeu a devida atenção. Essa novela poderia ter ganhado o Pulitzer 2012, ficando entre os finalistas, mas foi um ano em que o conselho do Prêmio não o deu para nenhum dos selecionados na categoria ficção. Uma pena.

Train Dreams é uma narrativa curta, pouco mais de 100 páginas, que traz em si toda a trajetória de vida de Robert Grainier, sua infância como órfão, sua maturidade quando uma grande perda o persegue, e a velhice solitária até a morte. Johnson, no entanto, não segue a ordem cronológica, mas num fluxo de idas e vindas compondo um painel emocional de seu protagonista, sempre assombrando.

O tempo da prosa é ditado pelos deslocamentos do personagem – seja por trem, a pé ou até num avião, numa cena. Johnson não tem pressa em construir a paisagem emocional de Grainier, flertando com realismo mágico, e, especialmente, com os primeiros romances de Cormac McCarthy. Na trajetória de seu protagonista – cuja narrativa começa em 1917, e vai e volta – o autor espelha uma jornada de conquista do Oeste americano por meio da mecanização. O aumento dessa equivale ao esvaziamento do que há de humano nele.

Em JESUS’S SON, uma coletânea de contos interligados, Johnson encontrava poesia na crueldade da existência de um viciado em drogas. O bonito de sua prosa emergia das fissuras da vida do protagonista. Uma das imagens mais fortes é uma tela de cinema gigantesca no meio de um descampado. Aqui, novamente, as fissuras emocionais se cristalizam com a mecanização da vida, com o esmaecimento do contato com a natureza.

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MarcoPolo

Ein Epos von einem Bändchen

Reviewed in Germany on December 3, 2012

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Mehr als 116 Seiten braucht diese Geschichte nicht, um mehr zu erzählen, als mancher Ein-Kilo-Wälzer. Anhand der Lebensgeschichte des Robert Granier erzählt sie gültig über das Mannsein, über den Urboden der heutigen repulikanischen Kreise in den USA, über die Liebe, ja - über das Leben an sich. Sagenhaft, wie der Autor Figuren teils mit wenigen literarischen "Pinselstrichen" plastisch und nuancenreich erstehen lässt. Zwischen beglückend und erschütternd der gewaltige Resonanzboden seiner lakonischen Sätze, der dem Leser /der Leserin so vieles - und oft das Wesentliche - nicht sagt, sondern im Tiefbau des Textes "injiziert".
Mit Robert Granier nimmt sich die Erzählung des zurückgezogenen Lebens eines einfachen Mannes an. Eines Mannes, der prototypisch für eine ganze Aufbaugeneration in Nordamerika - und wohl auch in Europa - stehen kann. Ein Mann, der hinnimmt und ehern weitermacht, wenn er in einer Brandkatastrophe Frau und Kind verliert, wenn sein abgearbeiteter Körper ihm schon mit 40 vom Ende kündigt, wenn Träume, Ängste, Lüste durch ihn hindurchrauschen. Das als "tapfer" oder "heldenhaft" zu verklären, wäre ein Missverständnis. Es ist der Mangel an Möglichkeiten, vielleicht an Fantasie, die ihn seinen Weg weitergehen lassen, bis er ihn in die vollkommenen Einsamkeit führt. Und selbst die lebt er am Ende genügsam und ohne Klagen.
Denis Johnson's Erzählung "Train Dreams" macht deutlich: So einfach und reduziert im Ausdruck kann ein Mensch gar nicht sein, dass sich darin nicht die ganze Fülle menschlicher Gefühle, Sehnsüchte und Dramen abspielt und spiegelt.

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