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Crossing to Safety (Modern Library) (Modern Library Classics)

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Recollection, I have found, is usually about half-invention, and right now I realise that there is much about Sid and Charity Lang that I either invented or got secondhand. He, through Larry, recognises “the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man” but this is no breast-beating “woe-is-me” novel. We are reminded of this a little later in the novel when the four, with their children off their hands, spend a sabbatical year in Italy, lapping up art and culture. Written in the 1980s, this is a novel about a friendship forged in the late 1930s, when Larry Morgan and Sid Lang were colleagues in the English Department of a university in Madison, Wisconsin.

They attend a department afternoon tea, and late one day, Larry comes home, bounding down the stairs to cheer up lonely Sally, and is surprised to find company. They live in New Mexico where the weather is better for Sally’s polio, the malady she first suffered in one of the early summers at the Lang compound — and survived, in part, because of Charity’s support and encouragement. Aun así, con mucho esfuerzo y trabajo consiguió cierto éxito tanto en su labor editorial como en su oficio de escritor. Although all four are offered the stage it is the pairing of Sid and Charity that most lights it up.

Can you imagine reading an entire book about the long friendship between two couples and being left gasping at the end, longing for more? Sid, the wealthy scion, turned out to be the most conflicted – a would-be poet and dreamer sometimes at odds with Charity’s agenda and will.

While telling this story Wallace gives a sense of space and time like no other author I’ve read before. In writing Crossing to Safety, he has made all four of his main characters attractive and disappointing. I honour and respect their cultural heritage, customs and beliefs, and respect and support their ongoing care of this country.Sid needs Charity to give structure to his life, to provide direction; Charity needs someone to manage. What I didn't know as I stood blissful in the foam was that I had begun to foam too, though I hadn’t yet felt the salt. His people are academics, so there is a lot of conversation around poetry, literature, history, culture – all of which they love, but if it’s unfamiliar to you, it doesn’t matter.

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