If I was tasked with proving that literary award a cruel joke and that life is nothing but a bleak and meaningless trudge towards the grave , exhibit A would be what I have dubbed the Great Pulitzer prize for fiction travesty of 2012 was, ofcourse the years the Pulitzer board ( not the jury) decided that no book published in the previous twelve months merited the most prestigious honour of American letters, despite the facts that the Trinity of finalised included denis Johnson's hallucinatory .
Master works train dream' as well as Karen Russell's lushly brilliant debut novel swamplandia and David foster Wallace unfinished opus the pale king ( An explanation as to how this happened was proffered by novelist and 2012 jury members Micheal Cunningham in a rather wonderful letter to the new yorker in a wake of the non -decision ), train dream' may well be the 21 century most perfect novella ( he said, having ofcourse read them all ) ..... It's the incantatory story of a turn of the century logger and railroad labourer, Robert Grainier , who loses his family to a wildfire and retreats deep into the woods of the Idaho Panhandle as the country modernizes around him .
Johnson's spare, strange,elegiac prose conjures a world that feel both ancient and ephemeral , full of beauty and menace and deep sorrow, as Anthony doerr wrote in his new york time review : " his prose tiptoes a tight tropes between peace and calamity and beneath all of the novella' s best moments ,
Johnson runs twin strains of tenderness and the threat of violence. " An American epice in miniature, train dreams is a visionary portrait of soul untethered from civilization , a man stoically persevering On his own hermertic term in the face of unimaginable tragedy . A haunted and haunting reverie --- Dan sheeban,