The Post-War Dream

Zusatztext “Exacting! suspenseful! elegiac yet life-embracing.”— Los Angeles Times “Cullin followers will recognize the same sharp psychologist who meditated on deterioration in his previous novel! A Slight Trick of the Mind .” — San Francisco Chronicle "Mitch Cullin's fine novel The Post-War Dream is as much about love as it is about coming to terms with memories. . . . A sensitively told! finely crafted story." — The Denver Post Informationen zum Autor Mitch Cullin is the author of eight books, including A Slight Trick of the Mind , Tideland , and Branches , a novel-in-verse. He lives outside of Tokyo, Japan, where in addition to writing fiction he collaborates on various projects with the artist Peter I. Chang. Klappentext Sixty-eight-year-old Hollis and his wife Debra have settled into their golden years in a gated community outside of Tucson, Arizona. Although they are devoted to each other, events that took place decades earlier, when Hollis fought in the Korean War, have left him with a deep-seated trauma — and with a secret he has never been able to share with his wife. As a reluctant Hollis revisits his past after his wife becomes dangerously ill, we see just how much the years of war changed his life forever. In rapturous prose, Cullin captures in The Post-War Dream the complexity of a marriage and the indelible force of the past on one man's life. Leseprobe 1 Throughout the years Hollis has observed them among his dreams, watching from a distance as they foraged under a blackened sky. After a time he understood that they, like him, had sensed the flux of earth, yet were undaunted: having journeyed perhaps twenty miles in almost fifty days, a procession of cows-nomadic Herefords and Jerseys-grazed onward, wobbling over a moonlit prairie, bulky heads lowered; their hooves crunched sandstone and pumice, and their excreta, hardening behind them, marked the slender trail in uneven circles-testaments to how far they had come, symbols of presence, like the burned-out and rusting wheelless cars they encountered within unkempt pastures of bluebonnets and high brittle grass, or the gutted houses abandoned on good soil (porches collapsing, doors gone, the wind sneaking through busted panes into dim interiors), or any number of fading signposts passed along the way, those many things fashioned by man-made design and then left again and again as the herd proceeded, weaving blindly ahead for no other reason than it must.And there, too, he has infrequently witnessed the approach of other languid creatures: half-naked human figures emerging whenever the recurring cows failed to manifest, hundreds of pale bodies cutting through the landscape, angling across the same nighttime terrain but traveling in the opposite direction. That serpentine formation of listless souls wound back into the darkness-the shapes of children, men and women, mothers cradling infants, the elderly-coming from where the cows had been headed, drawing nearer while never quite reaching him. But it was the gas mask each one wore which disturbed him the most-such cumbersome equipment obscuring their faces, too large for the heads of small children and practically consuming the entire bodies of the infants, giving the group a uniform, superficial appearance not unlike that of cattle. Even so, he perceived their determined movements as a kind of miserable retreat, a retrogression toward the past and, indeed, toward the living-where, upon arriving at their destination, he imagined the masks would be cast aside and all of them would inhale freely once more.Yet every step of their bare feet was now preceded by labored breath, a collective exhalation delivered in unison and released as a muted, staccato gasp through chemical air filters-while their paper-thin skin contracted around pronounced rib cages, and many of their arms hung like broken branches at their si...

Product details

• Authors: Mitch Cullin
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 10.03.2009
• EAN: 9781400078233
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7823-3
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 203 mm x 13 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature