Denis Johnson
Train Dreams

Picador; First Edition edition, May 22, 2012. 116 pp.

This lovely edition of Johnson’s classic novella gives us another chance to add Train Dreams to our permanent collections. For all its simplicity, the story has a quaking resonance; it merely follows the life of one Robert Grainier, but it spans the American era, when trains and roads and finally airplanes changed the landscape and the importance of many things.

Grainier was born in 1886, “either in Utah or in Canada,” orphaned, but no one knew how, and sent by train to live with cousins in Idaho. It was a time of great flux and movement — refugees and migrant workers and entrepreneurs drew new lines across the country. Grainier grew up and worked for the railroads, laying tracks. He was Adam in a Garden of Eden that was being destroyed, hacked to pieces by corporate greed. He married late, had a baby daughter and came home to the cabin he had built for them one day to find it burned to the ground, his wife and daughter gone. Certain that the curses of a Chinese laborer he and some fellow employees had come close to murdering one fateful day have caused the calamity, Grainier lives the rest of his life alone and sorrowful. He dies in 1968.

This is an eerie, multilayered story, like Upton Sinclair’s’ The Jungle, or Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, or Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, suffused with guilt. Grainier is an American original, an unforgettable character, but he is also imbued with an everyman quality that makes Train Dreams part story and part fable. It is not a morality tale, nor is it the story of the American Dream. It’s the story of American loneliness, self-destruction, and sorrow.

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Andrei Makine
The Life of an Unknown Man

Graywolf; Reprint edition, June 5, 2012. 208 pp.

The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine, translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan Shutov is an under-appreciated Russian writer living in Paris, recently dumped by his younger lover. He’s in mourning; reading Chekov, and going back over his 50 years, including the Soviet childhood that rendered him, as his ex reminded him frequently, unbearable and unfit for human relationships. “For a long time he had lived in the company of the faithful ghosts that are the creatures brought into being by writers. Shadowy figures, certainly; but in his Parisian exile he got on well with them.”

Unable to bear the humiliation of his ex-girlfriend’s visits to pick up her things (accompanied by her handsome young new boyfriend), Shutov decides to go back to Russia, to St. Petersburg to find another past lover. Of course it is not the Russia he left twenty years earlier, and the woman has become a real estate operator — juggling apartments and beating the system. Shutov accepts her offer to stay in one of her apartments and it is there he meets an old bedridden man named Volsky.

In less than an hour, Volsky tells Shutov the story of his broken life — his young adulthood in the early 1940s in the besieged city of Leningrad. Everyone was starving; everyone was separated from loved ones; many, including Volsky, were sent to work in the camps. Unlike Shutov, Volsky was able, in spite of the for...