How The Night Is Divided
A story of the Southern California chaparral as it edges toward the Mohave Desert, and of people there in the 1940s and early 1950s, Jews, who were among the first farmers, and who cut out a chunk of it and sometimes disintegrated before the passions of the settlement that made them. They raised and hybridized roses, roses were their livelihood and their passion, but they also smuggled arms to Israel, and were almost murderously divided over Stalin, over Spain, over water. This book is also about an Oklahoma-raised Kiowa Indian, Tom Green, who befriends the farmer and his family, and who is presented against his psychic background of dreams, voices and disappearances brought to this place of rose fields. From the annihilation of the ancient redwoods to the grizzly-hunting vaqueros in live oak canyons, How the Night Is Divided carries western life into the central drama of 20th-century existence. An experience of viscerally emotional and intellectual excitement, here is a novel that takes the reader to the edge, and refuses to let the reader back away.
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A story of the Southern California chaparral as it edges toward the Mohave Desert, and of people there in the 1940s and early 1950s, Jews, who were among the first farmers, and who cut out a chunk of it and sometimes disintegrated before the passions of the settlement that made them. They raised and hybridized roses, roses were their livelihood and their passion, but they also smuggled arms to Israel, and were almost murderously divided over Stalin, over Spain, over water. This book is also about an Oklahoma-raised Kiowa Indian, Tom Green, who befriends the farmer and his family, and who is presented against his psychic background of dreams, voices and disappearances brought to this place of rose fields. From the annihilation of the ancient redwoods to the grizzly-hunting vaqueros in live oak canyons, How the Night Is Divided carries western life into the central drama of 20th-century existence. An experience of viscerally emotional and intellectual excitement, here is a novel that takes the reader to the edge, and refuses to let the reader back away.
"This novel is an amalgam of elements so beyond the usual novelistic purview that it convincingly projects the conviction of genuine experience. . . .The element that holds it all together is water, put to use with irrigation to create cultivation in the midst of a geographic and historical environment that would seem to dictate nothing but brutality and crudeness. This is a myth of the real West . . . The writing is dense and poetic -- not the fak-o poetry of literary imposition, but the poetry that comes from a tough adherence to the texture of a strange, even fantastic reality. This book bites off a chunk of our culture that seems too big to chew, . . . and digests it for us elegantly." — Ron Sukenick
"There are unforgettable scenes in How the Night Is Divided ; haunting images that almost scorch the printed page." — Washington Post Book World
"In his first novel, Matlin explores with almost mystical intensity a clash of cultures. . . .[His] introspective prose is haunting . . ." — Publishers Weekly