Legends of the Fall (1979) - Jim Harrison

Written by Jim Harrison
Read by Mark Bramhall
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: November 1, 2013
Duration: 08:23:16

From one of America’s most versatile and celebrated writers, Legends of the Fall is Jim Harrison’s classic trilogy of epic novellas.

The publication of this magnificent trilogy of short novels—Legends of the Fall, Revenge, and The Man Who Gave Up His Name—confirmed Jim Harrison’s reputation as one of the finest American writers of his generation. These absorbing novellas explore the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when their lives or goals are threatened, adding up to an extraordinary vision of the twentieth-century man.

In Revenge, love causes the course of a man’s life to be savagely and irrevocably altered.

“Revenge” takes place in Mexico and the U.S. Border States, about a man who falls in love with the wife of a friend, a man with money, authority, and a brutal sense of honor and entitlement.

“The Man Who Gave Up His Name” is more contemporary, following a man’s adulthood into the 1970s. Nordstrom is pragmatic, or what his wife called “unimaginative,” he is unable to relinquish his consuming obsessions with women, dancing, and food but he becomes more interesting and increasingly imaginative as his story progresses and he crosses paths with a dangerous man.

Set in the Rocky Mountains, Legends of the Fall is the epic tale of three brothers and their lives of passion, madness, exploration, and danger at the beginning of World War I.

One review…In just 87 pages Jim Harrison tells a story of two generations of the Montana Ludlow family spanning 50 years.

It’s starting point is three young brothers riding from Choteau, Montana to Calgary to enlist in 1914. Subsequently there are tragedies, vendetta and insanity, enough for a novel 10 times its size.

“Legends of the Fall.” centers mostly on Tristan, the middle son of a wealthy rancher in Montana. Tristan is a complicated and endlessly tormented character. He loves, but he leaves, venturing off to sea, or to California, or to Mexico, heeding a call that seems urgent to him. He becomes a bootlegger during Prohibition, which leads to an event that brings senseless grief to many.

One reviewer….Don’t look for happy endings. These stories are intense in terms of what happens: love and frank sex, betrayal and adultery, lots of death, lots of revenge, lots of murder, and lots of vindication. Despite that, the stories are very calm in their telling, and unsensationalized.

From the reviews I’ve read, it looks like love or hate for these stories, no middle ground.