Train Dreams

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.

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.

hinterlässt aber trotzdem einen bleibenden Eindruck. Auf knapp über 100 Seiten wird hier das Leben von Robert Grainier nachgezeichnet, einem Tagelöhner im Nordwesten Amerikas zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Das Buch besticht durch eine schlichte Darstellung, bietet aber zugleich tiefe Einblicke in den Wandel der Zeit und das menschliche Sein. Denis Johnson gelingt es, mit wenigen Worten starke Bilder zu erzeugen. Seine Erzählweise zieht den Leser in die raue Natur und das stille, intensive Leben des Protagonisten. Die lyrischen Beschreibungen der Natur und des Menschseins verschmelzen zu einer Erzählung, die sowohl bodenständig als auch erhaben anmutet.

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).

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.

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!

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. Sonhos de TremJesus' Son