The Wandering Hill

Amazon.com
The Wandering Hill, the second volume in Larry McMurtry's The Berrybender Narratives, retains the humor of the first installment, Sin Killer, while establishing a more meditative mood. Picking up where Sin Killer left off, The Wandering Hill finds noble English family the Berrybenders waiting out the oncoming winter at a high plains trading post, delaying their hunting expedition through the frontier-era American west. Tight confines force the spirited, bickering Berrybenders to contend with one another, as well as an assortment of colorful attendants and raw trappers. Conflict has arisen between fiery and very pregnant heroine Tasmin and her stoical, evangelical mountain man husband Jim Snow, a.k.a. Sin Killer. Selfish, randy patriarch Lord Berrybender, having lost a leg, seven toes, and three fingers thus far on their journey (though not his "favorite appendage"), is slowly losing his sanity. Malicious youngest child Mary begins an odd pseudo-sexual friendship with naturalist Piet Van Wely, while "foppish" heir Bobbety's no less ambiguous relationship with priest Father Geoffrin inspires his father to accidentally stick his son in the eye with a fork. In between many such self-inflicted disasters, three children are born, fierce native tribes attack, a man is sewn into a buffalo carcass, and many lives are lost, often in the presence of a strange, mobile hill whose legendary appearance signals impending doom. McMurtry, meanwhile, continues the momentum he built with Sin Killer, offering graceful storytelling, wonderfully dimensional realism, and deadpan wit. The wintry Wandering Hill, however, diverges from Sin Killer's madcap activity to further consider the inner lives of many of its splendid characters. McMurtry will have his fans clamoring for an answer, though delighting in his wandering path toward a resolution. --Ross Doll


From Publishers Weekly
This is the second volume in McMurtry's four-book series the Berrybender Narratives, following last year's Sin Killer. Set in 1833 along the banks of the Yellowstone River, the comedic melodrama mixes unwashed mountain men with an arrogant, obnoxious and uncouth family of English aristocrats in a saga of high violence, low morals and lusty copulation. Lord Berrybender and his brood of selfish bumbling children, servants and mistress are touring the American West, shooting every animal in sight. The lord is a one-legged, drunken satyr who cares only for his own pleasure, and pokes his son's eye out with a fork. The rest of the family is just as self-centered and irresponsible. Eldest daughter Tasmin, a vulgar, opinionated woman, is married to enigmatic mountain man Jim Snow, known as the Sin Killer for his fervent brutality in the punishment of sin (not his own, of course). He cannot understand why Tasmin willfully refuses to be more like his two Indian wives, silent, obedient and submissive. Still, their love is passionate and so are their fistfights. The English group and a bunch of smelly, hairy mountain men winter over at a trading post through months of quarrels, meanness and downright coarse behavior, while marauding Sioux under the command of a white man-hating war chief called the Partezon gruesomely torture and slaughter any white they can catch. McMurtry tosses in famous hunters and mountain men like Hugh Glass, Kit Carson and Tom Fitzpatrick, plus a buffalo stampede, grizzly bears and an Indian ambush, but these are just props to support the soap-opera antics of the Berrybender clan. A few folks manage to get themselves killed, but there are plenty of annoying Englishmen left to people the next two volumes. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
In the second installment of the Berrybender saga, Tasmin and her eccentric family continue their journey through the American West. Tasmin is now married to Jim Snow, the Sin Killer of the first narrative, and their relationship and the impending birth of their child add to the drama that always seems to follow the Berrybender clan. As in any McMurtry novel, each character the reader meets has glorious quirks, and Alfred Molina gives an understated, eloquent performance that allows the language to shine. The novel sometimes lags between its big events, but it always returns to the path it intends to follow--that of a larger-than-life American adventure. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* This is the second volume in a projected four-part series following the aristocratic Berrybender family as they traverse various frontier river systems in the 1830s. As in the first installment, Sin Killer [BKL Ap 1 02], the feisty, passionate Tasmin Berrybender and her enigmatic, primitive husband, Jim Snow, occupy the center of the story. These two individuals are the most compelling and memorable of McMurtry's characters since Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call graced the pages of Lonesome Dove (1985). Now they and a fascinating cast of both fictional and historical characters interact in a wonderful pageant that re-creates the era of the mountain men who hunted and trapped along the upper Missouri and its tributaries. McMurtry offers a full range of Native American personalities, from chronically hostile Blackfeet to half-assimilated Utes to a frightening, sociopathic Lakota. The historical characters include a youthful Kit Carson, a grizzled Hugh Glass, and Pomp Charbonneau, the son of Sacagawea. The latter was educated in Europe but is irresistibly drawn back to the frontier, and his efforts to navigate between two worlds are particularly poignant. The landscape is stunningly beautiful, but the beauty is often disrupted by spasmodic, gruesome violence. Nonetheless, this novel is an engrossing, exciting, and sometimes heart-rending saga of the American West that shows McMurtry at his best; and it will be in heavy library demand. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
New York Times Book Review Exquisite descriptions....Simply irresistible storytelling, rich and satisfying.


Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry continues his epic four-novel telling of The Berrybender Narratives with a new adventure that is both a grand literary achievement and riveting entertainment as forged by a master wordsmith.... The indefatigable Tasmin Berrybender and her eccentric family trek on through the unexplored Wild West of 1830s America -- and suffer the harsh realities of the untamed wilderness, including sickness, brutal violence and death, the desertion of trusted servants, and the increasing hardships of daily life in a land where survival is never certain. Filled with larger-than-life legendary figures such as mountain men Jim Bridger and Kit Carson, vividly rendered action, irresistible good humor, and an ever-changing cast of characters that readers will treasure, The Wandering Hill proves again that Larry McMurtry still reigns as the first statesman of the Old West.


About the Author
Larry Mcmurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and many other awards, is the author of twenty-five novels, two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, and is the editor of an anthology of modern Western fiction. His reputation as a critically acclaimed and bestselling author is unequaled.


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

Fans of Molina's reading of Sin Killer, the first volume in McMurtry's over-the-top Berrybender Narratives, will be pleased to find that he has lent his considerable talents to this second volume. Again, the marriage of McMurty's capable storytelling and Molina's dramatic reading gifts create a sum that is greater than its parts. The Berrybenders are a noble English family bent on exploring the Wild West in the 1830s. Just as the West holds no sympathy for its inhabitants, so it is with the Berrybenders, whose lives are rife with dark wit and unexpected (and often strangely humorous) violence, as when Lord Berrybender, himself "whittled down" by a leg, seven toes and three fingers, pokes out his son Bobbety's eye with a carving fork. As with all their hardships-stampedes, murderous Indians, grizzly bears, etc.-the victim as well as his family take this in stride. "You've made Bobbety a Cyclops, Papa," says young Mary Berrybender, "only his one eye is not quite in the middle of his head as it should be in a proper Cyclops." Listening to Molina capture the comic subtleties of every character-from the shy young Kit Carson to the Berrybenders' pet parrot-is to experience the art of the audiobook at its very best. Simultaneous release with the Simon & Schuster hardcover (Forecasts, Mar. 31). (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. Read all 7 "From The Critics" >


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices