Wiebe, Rudy

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First-rate historical fiction

A Discovery Of Strangers
Rudy Wiebe
Manufacturer: Vintage Canada
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0394280830
Release Date: 1995-09-26

Book Description

A Discovery of Strangers tells of the meeting of two civilizations – the first encounter of the nomadic Dene people with Europeans – in an imaginative reconstruction of John Franklin’s first map-making expedition in 1819—21 in what is now the Northwest Territories. At the heart of the novel is a love story between twenty-two-year-old midshipman Robert Hood, the Franklin expedition’s artist, and a fifteen-year-old Yellowknife girl known to the British as Greenstockings. A national bestseller, published also in Germany and China, Wiebe’s first novel in eleven years and his twelfth work of fiction won him his second Governor General’s Award for Fiction at the age of sixty, over strong competition from Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.

It is a story of love, murder, greed and passion in an unforgiving Arctic landscape. French-Canadian voyageurs paddle the small British expedition into the land of the Yellowknives to search for the fabled Northwest Passage. While this trip would not prove as disastrous as Franklin’s third expedition, nevertheless more than half his men did not survive the harsh conditions. The long winter stopover allows for interchange between the cultures. When the son of a Lancashire clergyman and the daughter of a native elder fall in love, they devise a language of their own to cross their wordless divide. Hood will not survive to see the birth of his daughter, perishing in 1821 in an attempt to reach Greenstockings’s band 450 kilometres south. Nor will the Yellowknives survive much longer: within twenty years, they will be all but wiped out by a smallpox epidemic brought by the white men.

The novel is the work of a poetic mind, written in several voices: of the British explorers, of the Tetsot’ine people – named Yellowknife by the strangers – and, most unexpected of all, of the animals that live on the Barrenlands. Wiebe climbs inside the characters, bringing them and the North to life. “Most Canadians have never seen that landscape. Yet I see it as being at the centre of our national psyche. That’s the roots of our world, right there.” He began work on the novel in earnest following a canoe trip between the Coppermine River and the site of Fort Enterprize in 1988, when he was first enraptured by the landscape. The novel contains vivid images, such as stunning descriptions of caribou bursting through snow. In calling the Arctic ‘A Land Beyond Words,’ Wiebe admits how difficult it was to do it justice. “I think there’s always a total contradiction in even trying to do such a novel,” he said in an interview, “and yet it’s the very contradiction out of which any kind of artistic struggle must come. It’s not even worth trying if it doesn’t seem impossible.”

In researching historical sources, Wiebe found letters, earlier accounts of the region such as those of Samuel Hearne, as well as oral stories and mythology told by the Dene elders. “I take the facts, as many of the facts as history gives me, and I use them to tell the story that I believe these facts tell us beyond themselves . . . . How did it happen, why did it happen, what was going on inside people’s heads while it was happening, why did they do what they did?” Franklin’s book on the first expedition contained a small paragraph mentioning Greenstockings as the most beautiful girl of the Dene, and a sketch of her and her father Keskarrah drawn by Robert Hood. Wiebe also discovered a claim made years later by one of the members of the team that Greenstockings had had a child by Hood (these facts are related in his book Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic). From these details, he created a powerful story of their union. “It’s imagination all right, but it has to be an informed imagination.”

The Kingston Whig-Standard claimed the book “is to the North what Big Bear was to the West – an imaginative, and possibly definitive, evocation of a crucial time, place and situation.” It is part of a body of significant historical fiction by Wiebe, including The Scorched-Wood People, which tells the story of Louis Riel, Gabriel Dumont and the Northwest Rebellion of 1885. The third Franklin expedition has been the subject of works by Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler, as well as accounts such as Frozen in Time by John Geiger and forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie. A Discovery of Strangers explores the expedition Wiebe found more fascinating: that of first contact between the Europeans and the Natives, which was so damaging to the Native people in the end, and so essential to the survival of the Europeans. In his acceptance speech for the Governor General’s Award, Wiebe said: “We know too little about our selves. In this enormous, beautiful land we inhabit, we seem to have no eyes to see, no ears to hear, the stories that are everywhere about us and clamouring to be told . . . . Only the stories we tell each other can create us as a true Canadian people.”

Customer Reviews:

First-rate historical fiction.......1997-03-19

This is an excellent fictional account of Franklin's *overland* expedition to the Arctic Ocean. Through the device of multiple narration, it presents us with both the Aboriginal and European perspective on the events. Wiebe did his homework: the novel is solidly based on the first-hand accounts of Franklin, Back, Hearne, and others. The influence of Faulkner is evident in narrative style, prose style and theme. Faulkner's great story The Bear was clearly an influence

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Not Quite What I was Expecting
Rudy's Good Book

Sweeter Than All The World
Rudy Wiebe
Manufacturer: Vintage Canada
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0676973418
Release Date: 2002-09-17

Book Description

Rudy Wiebe’s latest novel is at once an enthralling saga of the Mennonite people and one man’s emotional voyage into his heritage and his own self-discovery. Ambitious in its historical sweep, tender and humane, Sweeter Than All the World takes us on an extraordinary odyssey never before fully related in a contemporary novel.

The novel tells the story of the Mennonite people from the early days of persecution in sixteenth-century Netherlands, and follows their emigration to Danzig, London, Russia, and the Americas, through the horrors of World War II, to settlement in Paraguay and Canada. It is told episodically in a double-stranded narrative. The first strand consists of different voices of historical figures. The other narrative voice is that of Adam Wiebe, born in Saskatchewan in 1935, whom we encounter at telling stages of his life: as a small boy playing in the bush, as a student hunting caribou a week before his wedding, and as a middle-aged man carefully negotiating a temporary separation from his wife. As Adam faces the collapse of his marriage and the disappearance of his daughter, he becomes obsessed with understanding his ancestral past. Wiebe meshes the history of a people with the story of a modern family, laying bare the complexities of desire and family love, religious faith and human frailty.

The past comes brilliantly alive, beginning with the horrors of the Reformation, when Weynken Claes Wybe is burned at the stake for heretical views on Communion. We are caught up in the great events of each century, as we follow in the footsteps of Adam’s forebears: the genius engineer who invented the cable-car system; the artist Enoch Seeman, who found acclamation at the royal court in London after having been forbidden to paint by the Elders; Anna, who endures the great wagon trek across the Volga in 1860, leaving behind her hopes of marriage so that her brothers will escape conscription in the Prussian army; and Elizabeth Katerina, caught in the Red Army’s advance into Germany when rape and pillage are the rewards given to soldiers. The title of the novel, taken from a hymn, reflects the beauty and sorrow of these stories of courage. In a startling act of invention, Sweeter Than All the World sets one man’s quest for family and love against centuries of turmoil.

Rudy Wiebe first wrote of Mennonite resettlement in his 1970 epic novel The Blue Mountains of China. Since then, much of his work has focused on re-imagining the history of the Canadian Northwest. In Sweeter Than All the World, as in many of his most acclaimed novels, Wiebe has sought out real historical characters to tell an extraordinary story. William Keith, a University of Toronto professor and author of a book about Wiebe, writes: “Wiebe has a knack for divining wells of human feeling in historical sources.” Here, all the main characters share his name, and the history is one to which he belongs. Moreover, alongside those flashbacks into history is revealed an utterly compelling contemporary story of a man whose background is not totally unlike the author’s own. Wiebe sets his narrative against his two favourite backdrops: the northern Alberta landscape, and the shared memories of the Mennonite people. Sweeter Than All the World is a compassionate, erudite and stimulating work of fiction that shares the deep-rooted concerns of all of Wiebe’s work: how to make history live in our imagination, and how we can best live our lives.

Customer Reviews:

Not Quite What I was Expecting.......2004-04-23

I read this book because it was recommended on Amazon's page for _The Russländer_ by Sandra Birdsell. I really enjoyed that book, so I thought that I would give "Sweeter Than All the World" a try.

And, as the title of my review says, "Sweeter" wasn't exactly what I was expecting. One thing I enjoy in any novel, especially a "historical" one (in addition to a good story) is getting a good feel of what it was like to live at that particular time and place. "Sweeter Than All the World" has that it parts, but it really contains two threads. One thread contains various interesting stories about Mennonites throughout history, while the other thread is Adam trying to make sense of himself, and his history, present, and future.

Personally, I found the "20th Century Adam" chapters to be tedious, but I don't want to be too discouraging if this sort of thing is your cup of tea.

However, be aware that this definitely isn't a historical novel along the lines of Michener's "Poland" or "Alaska".

Rudy's Good Book.......2002-12-11

If you like good writing, especially when it's grounded in real history, then you'll like Rudy Wiebe's Sweeter Than All the World.. He takes on the story of a Mennonite family over time, a nearly epic family chronicle covering more than five hundred years, and succeeds astonishingly well. The chapters alternate between the historical/fictional stories and the contemporary story of Adam Wiebe and his family The three epigraphs give the reader a good entry into the novel, especially one from the poet Joseph Brodsky: "You're coming home again. What does that mean?" Answering that question is not so simple for Adam Wiebe, the main character. We watch as he loses his childhood home, then finds a home with his wife and family, only to lose it again, partly through his own actions but also because, like the rest of us, he has cast himself adrift in an over-hyped, noisy and fragmented contemporary society. You don't have to be Mennonite to recognize the emptiness of Adam's a long period of self-imposed wandering and exile. He searches to find not just himself but also to recover what he has at the opening of the novel - a sense of being at home. When her parents separate, his daughter too becomes a global wanderer, trying to lose what she feels is the heavy burden of her family past. When she disappears, Adam's wandering takes on a double purpose as he tries to find both his daughter and a place for himself within a recovered family past.
Home, for Rudy Wiebe, is not simply cast as a physical or geographical place and he makes no bones about the essentially spiritual nature of Adam's quest. In contrast to the wanderings of the earlier Mennonite families, forced by persecution and war, Adam's jaunts from lover to lover and airport to airport would seem almost trivial if they were not so painful for him and so familiar to us. As he did in The Blue Mountains of China, Wiebe's careful use of historical sources is convincingly interwoven with the voices of his semi/fictional characters. I enjoyed checking up on some of the historical references he cites at the novel's end and discovered just how historically accurate much of his "fictional" material really is. What finally knits the generations together here is storytelling. Their faith and beliefs, their lives, their accomplishments and their suffering are passed along in the family stories, a force for ill to the young Adam, but ultimately a powerful force good. Wiebe clearly believes that we need to strike a balance between forgetting the past and obsessing over it, and he comes down on the side of memory. His fictional Wiebe family finally shares the stories, not as a way of burdening the younger generation, but of a way of providing them with the roots they need to grow.

Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest

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Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest
Rudy Wiebe
Manufacturer: Vintage Canada
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0676977537
Release Date: 2007-02-06

Book Description

A beautiful, moving memoir of a boy’s coming of age, infused with a deep love of the land, from one of Canada’s most cherished and acclaimed writers.

In Of This Earth, Rudy Wiebe gives vivid life again to the vanished world of Speedwell, Saskatchewan, an isolated, poplar-forested, mostly Mennonite community – and Rudy’s first home. Too young to do heavy work, Rudy witnessed a way of life that was soon to disappear. And we experience with him the hard labour of clearing the stony, silty bushland; the digging out of precious wells one bucket of dirt at a time; sorrow at the death of a beloved sister; the disorienting searches for grazing cattle in the vast wilderness sloughs and the sweet discovery of the power of reading.

Rare personal photographs (reproduced throughout the book) and the fragile memories of those who are left give shape to the story of Mennonite immigrants building a life in Canada, the growth and decline of the small Speedwell community, the sway of religion, and a young boy’s growing love of the extreme beauty of the aspen forests – as well as how all these elements came to inform his destiny as a writer.

A hymn to a lost place and a distant time, Of This Earth follows the best of memoirs in the tradition of Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. It is an evocation of the Canadian west that only a writer of Rudy Wiebe’s powers could summon.

From the Hardcover edition.

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Another truth
Shameful
Scary, heartbreaking, shocking
Stolen Life: The Jorney of a Cree Woman
Don't let your fears stand in the way of your dreams!

Stolen Life: Journey Of A Cree Woman
Rudy Wiebe
Manufacturer: Swallow Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0804010307

Book Description

The powerful, major book, acclaimed across Canada, from the great-great-granddaughter of Chief Big Bear and Rudy Wiebe, twice winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction. A story of justice and social injustices, of murder and morality, and of finding spiritual strength in events that might break us, told with redeeming compassion and poetic eloquence. Stolen Life is a raw, honest, and beautifully written account of the troubled society we live in, and a deeply moving affirmation of spiritual healing.

Customer Reviews:

Another truth.......2006-10-29

I chose this book to read for a review assignment, and I must say, I'm glad I chose it. It is the life-story of a woman, the hardships she had to face throughout her life, as seen through her eyes. The book also shows how the judicial system, which we often view as having distinct boundaries, and as having the final hand in society, cannot ultimately be seen as such. While others may view Yvonne Johnson as a "cold-blooded criminal" and her subsequent novel as a "commercial enterprise", it is rather that this book is simply a means for her to have her voice heard, in a world that has silenced her for so long. We all want to have our voices heard, we all want to find our strengths. This book is how she found hers.

Shameful.......2006-01-21

It's a shame when we put our criminals up on pedestals like this, especially with a murder so cold-blooded and senseless. That anyone can profit financially from such a heinous crime is deplorable and tells us something significant about our culture.

As to the questions of injustice, it's not pointed out very often that Ms.Johnson was not the only native involved in this crime. Her co-conspirators were also native, as was the victim Leonard Charles Skwarok. Where then can we point the finger of racism?

I personally did not find this book very poetic at all. Its narrative is uselessly disjointed, its grammar is often clumsy, and its poetic devices nearly non-existent. While Ms.Johnson writes most of the book in first person, the crucial chapters detailing the murder are written in third person. Is this because Ms.Johnson can't clearly remember what happened that night because she was drunk at the time, or because she wishes to detach herself from the incident, and have us see her more as an observer than as a participant? In any case, it's a clever device designed to separate the criminal from the crime. I for one don't buy it.

Scary, heartbreaking, shocking.......2002-02-06

I just finished the book about Yvonne and her hardships. I read it in Norwegian, but that did not diminish the affect it had on me. It's unbelievable what some people have to go through, without anyone doing something about it. And then actually surviving it all, amazing!
She said it herself in the book that people who have been through hard experiences easier can understand what others have to struggle with. And being as she is a Medicine Woman it is in her blood to try and help, wherever possible.
It is also a startling report on how the Natives are still treated in both America and Canada. One can only hope that books like this can help open at least a few peoples eyes...

Stolen Life: The Jorney of a Cree Woman.......2001-06-16

I have actually just begun to read the book as I became interested in this particular book very recently -- my family grew up in the same neighborhood as Yvonne Johnson and I felt compelled to read the book. I recall certain incidents from childhood such as her father on the front porch lining up all the children &(drunk) screaming "Indians on the Warpath" and one time grabbing my own sister off her bike, throwing her down (mistaking her for Yvonne) and then having to apologize profusely (he was drunk that time also)to my family. I recall her oldest brother dying while in the county jail, how my mother had him at times mow our lawns & we recalled how sad that time was, how the youngest, Perry, looked like a female with the long flowing hair (he had the lightest coloring), the girls Karen, Sharon, Kathy, Yvonne, how the Mother drove truck--the hard-scrabble life they led--I am sure it took a tremendous amount of courage to write this book, I recalled how she struggled with her speech, etc and how people could be mean to her.

Don't let your fears stand in the way of your dreams!.......2000-01-05

Tansi,

Customer Reviews:

The title.........2006-05-17

.. seems to have nothing to do with the text. But the author is Rudy Wiebe, not Eva Marie Kröller!!!

You have to know Mennonite history to understand the book at all, especially since RW seems to have been bound and determined to become the James Joyce of Mennonite authors. Most of the book is written as introspection, so I can't help you with the meanings of the many sentence fragments, but I can at least do what RW should have done, namely, provide a little dictionary' of a few Mennonite (Plat-) dialect terms:

groutestov/Grossestua-living room
sommastov-summer (or back-) room
Chortitza (where they had originally settled in the Ukraine)
actstov-maybe bedroom or 'sex room'?

The 'Russian' Mennonites originated in Switzerland in Reformation times, as did all Mennonites of that age, then and picked up their language (Platdeutsch) in north Germany. From Prussia they were invited to 'Russia' by Katerina der Grosse. They're pacifist, refuse any but their own (German Bible-) schools, and prefer no citizenship. Ca. 1875 Canada looked more friendly so there was a mass migration but 'Russia' was not emptied of Mennonites (the book begins with the time after the communist revolution in the Ukraine). After WWI their German schools were outlawed in Canada (they go 6 yrs. to learn Hochdeutsch in order to read Luther's Bible) so they migrated to the State of Chihuahua in N. Mexico (and farther into Central and South America) where, in 1991, they still formed a colony some 50000 strong N, of Cuahtemoc (they make Mexico's cheese, e.g.). At that time they had no citizenship, by choice, and did not have to serve in the Mexican army. In Cuahtemoc and in their "Dorfs" north of Cuahtemoc we heard the language spoken (my German wife barely understood parts of the prettily sung old Plat dialect) and were able to speak with them using Hochdeutsch. The language of the Amish and Mennonites who settled Pennsylvania after 1693 ("Pennsylvania Dutch" is an "English" mispronunciation of 'Pennsylvania Deitsch') is a southwest German dialect, related Schwäbisch-Badenrisch, Swiss German and Alsatian. That was an entirely different Mennonite migration. Mennonites and Amish in Pa., Ohio, Ky. and Tenn. would not be able to converse (except via Hochdeutsch) with those in the Dakotas, Canada, and Mexico.

A great Canadian novel.......2002-12-01

A very moving and powerful novel that tells the story of the Mennonites who fled the Soviet Union to escape religious persecution. Although not as highly acclaimed as some of his other works, The Blue Mountains of China is perhaps one of the great Canadian novels.

Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic

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Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic
Rudy Henry Wiebe
Manufacturer: NeWest Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1896300677

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Worth the Effort
Difficult reading choice
Wiebe's beautiful first novel
It goes on and on and on and on and on...

Peace Shall Destroy Many
Rudy Wiebe
Manufacturer: Vintage Canada
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Book Description

In 1944, as war rages across Europe and Asia, famine, violence and fear are commonplace. But life appears tranquil in the isolated farming settlement of Wapiti in northern Saskatchewan, where the Mennonite community continues the agricultural lifestyle their ancestors have practised for centuries. Their Christian values of peace and love lead them to oppose war and military service, so they are hardly affected by the war – except for the fact that they are reaping the rewards of selling their increasingly valuable crops and livestock.

Thom Wiens, a young farmer and earnest Christian, begins to ask questions. How can they claim to oppose the war when their livestock become meat to sustain soldiers? How can they enjoy this free country but rely on others to fight to preserve that freedom? Within the community, conflicts and broken relationships threaten the peace, as the Mennonite tradition of close community life manifests itself as racism toward their “half-breed” neighbours, and aspirations of holiness turn into condemnation of others. Perhaps the greatest hope for the future lies with children such as Hal Wiens, whose friendship with the Métis children and appreciation of the natural environment offer a positive vision of people living at peace with themselves and others.

Wiebe’s groundbreaking first novel aroused great controversy among Mennonite communities when it was first published in 1962. Wiebe explains, “I guess it was a kind of bombshell because it was the first realistic novel ever written about Mennonites in western Canada. A lot of people had no clue how to read it. They got angry. I was talking from the inside and exposing things that shouldn't be exposed.” At the same time, other reviewers were unsure how to react to Wiebe’s explicitly religious themes, a view which Wiebe found absurd. “There are many, many people who feel that religious experience is the most vital thing that happens to them in their lives, and how many of these people actually ever get explored in modern novels?”

The concept of peace is an important theme in Wiebe’s first three books. The attempt to live non-violently, one of the basic tenets of the Mennonite faith as taught by the sixteenth-century spiritual leader Menno Simons, is what has “caused the Mennonites the most difficulty in their relationship with everybody,” forcing them to move again and again. The theme of peace versus passivity is further explored in The Blue Mountains of China, where inner peace, a state of being, is contrasted with the earthly desire for a place of public order and tranquility where the church is “there for a few hours a Sunday and maybe a committee meeting during the week to keep our fire escape polished,” as Thom, the protagonist puts it.. Wiebe has said, “To be an Anabaptist is to be a radical follower of the person of Jesus Christ . . . and Jesus Christ had no use for the social and political structures of his day; he came to supplant them.”

While Peace Shall Destroy Many takes place in a Mennonite community, its elements are universal, delineating the way young idealism rebels against staid tradition, as a son clashes with his father. In the face of violent confrontations between beliefs all over the world, the novel remains as compelling now as it was nearly forty years ago.

Customer Reviews:

Worth the Effort.......2004-08-26

PSDM tells the story of Thom Wiens, a young Mennonite man struggling to make sense of his faith in a world of increasing complexity. Set in the rural town of Wapiti, Saskatchewan, during WWII, the relationship of peace and Christianity stands as the central theme of the book. As the other reviews show, this is a character (and not plot) driven book.

The belief in peace and nonviolence is probably the central and most compelling aspect of Anabaptist belief. While other Christian traditions place numerous qualifications on the Sermon on the Mount, Mennonites have high regard for the hardest and literal words of Jesus. As a result of their noncompliance with 'worldly' government, they have also been historically persecuted, leading to a narrative identity as a "peculiar people."

While one of the most important forms of Christianity, Anabaptists also have many internal problems as a result of their beliefs. In many instances, Mennonite communities become insular and xenophobic, havens for power mongers and anti-intellectualists, and sadly, shelter for abusers.

In this book, Thom Wiens struggles to reconcile biblical imperatives with the teachings of Deacon Block. Block is a Mennonite Moses, a strong and conflicted leader of conviction who has built Wapiti with sheer will power and tireless effort. While Wiens seeks to live out his Christian faith and to love his Metis and Native neighbours, Block simultaneously seeks to protect the community from the influence of outsiders. Wiens grows increasingly aware of the darker side of Mennonite separation, seen in Block's own family and in the devil's choice between community and evangelism.

The most compelling sections of this book show the dissonance between the events of the wider world and the particular fascinations of the Mennonite vision. In one scene, Thom grapples with the ethics of a mixed marriage between an estranged Mennonite and a Metis "breed," without being aware of the war-time broadcast of the liberation of France on the radio. It is hard to fault Thom for worrying more about this threat to his rigid ethic more than the fate of a continent.

PSDM is a cri de coeur for an authentic Mennonite vision in a changing world. It is the work of an insider, a Mennonite who must have walked Thom's path of conversion himself. Wiebe clearly loves the Mennonite tradition despite his own reservations about it. As the dissolution of a Christian narrative, it is not a joyous book, nor is it Wiebe's best. It is important for its portrayal of a man on the cusp of a decision --- Peace or Love?

Difficult reading choice.......2004-02-01

I had to read this book for my Anabaptist Theology class at Fresno Pacific University. I had a difficult time following the plot and getting characters mixed up. I would encourage anyone to try to read this book in only one or two sittings, I had to read it over the course of 2 weeks and I felt that I lost some of the emotions in the novel. The novel raises soem very interesing questions about Mennonite views. I woudl encourage anyone involved with a Mennonite church to read this novel - it gave me great insight to our church.

Wiebe's beautiful first novel.......2002-11-27

There is a tendency to tokenize traditional Mennonite communities. Their separated lifestyle demonstrates, for many, an attractive way of being; the oddity of their appearance both mystifies and intrigues us. Yet, many cannot see beyond these romanticized notions. Rudy Wiebe explores the more hidden cultural and social aspects of traditional Russian Mennonite life in his book Peace Shall Destroy Many. Wiebe paints a picture of a tense, complex and changing community, struggling to stay true to the faith, but prone to prejudice, corruption and divisiveness.

It goes on and on and on and on and on..........1999-06-28

I had to read this book in grade twelve...twice! Once for a Christian Ethincs Class and once for English studies on Canadian Literature. It was quite disappointing, taking a long time to build up to a climax that didn't exist...it was more of an anti-climax. The symbolism in the book makes up for the less-than-admirable plot about a boy deciding whether to rebel against his upbringing and allow war and violence into his life.

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Not all that great

The Mad Trapper
Rudy Wiebe
Manufacturer: Red Deer Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 088995268X
Release Date: 2003-01-29

Book Description

When it began, he was just another stranger without a name. When it ended, he was the most notorious criminal in North America, the object of the largest manhunt in RCMP history. This is the story of Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper, a silent man of superhuman strength and endurance, who defied capture for fifty days in the bitter cold of winter, north of the Arctic Circle. He was a man who crossed hundreds of miles of frozen tundra on foot, who survived dynamite blasts and the pursuit of police, trappers and the army, and who became the first man to cross the Richardson Mountains in a blizzard.

Customer Reviews:

Not all that great.......2003-06-21

This novel is based on an incident during the winter of 1932, when a trapper in the NWT, Canada by the name of "Albert Johnson" led the RCMP on a epic cross-country chase through the Canadian arctic. Although a media sensation, the story soon faded to obscurity; only to be resurrected by Dick North, a small-town newspaper editor, in his book The Mad Trapper of Rat River, and the dubious Thomas P. Kelley in his The Rat River Trapper. Both published in 1972. Soon afterwards, Saskatoon-based Granicus Films began work on a movie based on the story, enlisting Rudy Wiebe as screenwriter. When the financial backing for the movie fell through, Wiebe reworked the screenplay into a novel. Although I have yet to read much of Wiebe's work, what I have read has impressed me much, so I was looking forward to reading his take on the Mad Trapper. It was not far into the book that my interest began to wane; it is not particularly well written, but what disappointed me more was fairly significant manner in which the plot was reworked for dramatic effect. The most obvious of these changes is the role that Constable Millen plays. Also the characterization of "Wop" May, whose role in tracking of the MAd Trapper was instrumental in its success, was somewhat questionable. Not surprisingly, this novel is not considered among Wiebe's best.

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Temptations Of Big Bear: A Novel
Rudy Wiebe
Manufacturer: Swallow Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Action & Adventure | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Stolen Life: Journey Of A Cree Woman

ASIN: 0804010293

Book Description

Early in his writing career, Rudy Wiebe’s imagination was caught by a heroic character of Cree and Ojibwa ancestry whose birthplace was within twenty-five miles of where Wiebe himself was born 110 years later. The man’s name translated into English was Big Bear, and he came to be the subject of one of Wiebe’s most highly praised works of fiction. A modern classic, Wiebe’s fourth novel is a moving epic of the tumultuous history of the Canadian West. The book won the 1973 Governor General's Award, and in the 1990s was made into a CBC television miniseries based on a script co-written by Wiebe and Métis director Gil Cardinal, shot in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley.

From the early days of North America, European settlers forced Natives aside, taking over their land on which they had lived for thousands of years. Big Bear envisioned a Northwest in which all peoples lived together peaceably, and in the 1880s made history by standing his ground to keep his Plains Cree nation from being forced onto reserves. The buffalo food supply was vanishing, but Big Bear led his people across the prairie, resisting pressure to cede rights to the land and give up freedom in exchange for temporary nourishment. The struggle brought starvation to his followers, tearing apart the community and eventually his own family. The story follows Big Bear’s life as he lives through the last buffalo hunt, the coming of the railway, the pacification of the Native tribes, and his own imprisonment.

Wiebe’s magnificent interpretation of Western Canadian history encompasses not only his hero's struggle for integrity and justice but also the whole richness of the Plains culture. Writing the unrecognized history of Western Canada required six years of study and travel through the prairies, a journey described vividly in the essay On the Trail of Big Bear. Wiebe was convinced that a new perspective was needed on the Canadian past and on prairie literature, which seemed to consist in “equal parts of Puritanism, Monotony, Farmers and Depression.” His aim was to draw the “imaginative map of our land,” to stamp a shared memory on it and make it come alive. He described how an epic might accomplish this:

. . . to break into the space of the reader's mind with the space of this western landscape and the people in it you must build a structure of fiction like an engineer builds a bridge or skyscraper over and into space. A poem, a lyric, will not do. You must lay great black steel lines of fiction, break up that space with huge design, and like the fiction of the Russian steppes, build giant artifact

Every character, date and major event in the book was taken from historical sources. As an author of historical fiction, Wiebe sifts through documents, searching for the story he needs to tell. “I see a number of possible stories I could write, and it sometimes takes longer . . . to decide which is the story I’m going to write, than the actual writing of it.” His art lies in bringing the characters to life. “You want your reader to understand these people . . . . You have to choose certain details to help readers see the kind of thing they did, the kind of people they were.” In The Temptations of Big Bear, he gradually places layers of imagined voices over the silence in the history books to create his narrative.

In November 1992, Wiebe received a letter from a woman who said she was Big Bear’s great-great-granddaughter. Yvonne Johnson was serving a twenty-five-year sentence for the murder of a man she believed to be a child molester in her home in Wetaskiwin, Alberta. The letter led to five years of phone calls and prison visits, interviews and personal journals, and finally to Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, which Wiebe and Johnson wrote together. He realized that this mother of three had suffered not only a lifetime of abuse, but a miscarriage of justice. “The truth about it had to be told.” The book tells of the physical and sexual abuse of Johnson’s early years. She had little schooling and was a teen alcoholic. Wiebe felt it was a particularly moving story for women. “There are a lot of abused people. It doesn't depend on the colour of your skin or your heritage.” However, in the aftermath of the Canada-Indian Treaties and colonization, the statistics for violence, abuse, family breakdown and incarceration among Natives in Canada have certainly fulfilled the fears the Cree chief Big Bear had for his people.

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The Scorched-Wood People
Rudy Wiebe
Manufacturer: Fitzhenry and Whiteside
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Historical | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

"Sixteen years later Louis Riel would be
dressing himself again ... to be hanged by
his neck until he is at last, perfectly,
dead. 0 my God have mercy." So begins Rudy Wiebe's powerful portrayal of Louis Riel, the mystic revolutionary of the Northwest, and Gabriel Dumont - "the savage" as he calls himself - the great buffalo hunter who becomes Riel's commander-in-chief. With the same epic scope and inspired vision that he brought to The Temptations of Big Bear (winner of the Governor Generals Award for Fiction), Wiebe recreates an agonizing chapter in Canadian history which can never be forgotten - the explosive world of the North West Rebellions and the characters of the two men who led them. Written with powerful clarity and compassion, The Scorched-Wood People is an immense achievement, a brilliant exploration of the faces of prophetic vision, the morality of politics and the nature of faith.

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