2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER
Peter Matthiessen's great American epic-Killing Mister Watson, Lost
Man's River, and Bone by Bone-was conceived as one vast mysterious
novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into
three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly
a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while
deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with
brilliant rewriting throughout. In "Shadow Country, " he has
marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original
vision.
Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the
turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend
of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J.
Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end
at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that
obsessed his favorite son.
"
Shadow Country" traverses strange landscapes and frontier
hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color,
including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism
that, as Watson's wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the
nation."
Peter Matthiessen's lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson
narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul
Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I
read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in
my hungry impatience to find out more and more."
Praise for" Shadow Country"
""Shadow Country" is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly
told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great
American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in
our literature. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race,
history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph
Ellison's "Invisible Man" and Robert Penn Warren's All "the King's
Men." Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson
call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably,
Faulkner. In every way, "Shadow Country" is a bravura performance,
at once history, fiction, and myth-as well as the capstone to the
career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our
time." -- "The New York Review of Books"
"Magnificent and capacious.... I'll just say right here that the
book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go.
Matthiessen has made his three-part saga into a new thing....
Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with
Watson's song the last sound, all the elements fuse and
resonate....a breathtaking saga." -- "The Los Angeles Times
"
"Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, "Shadow Country" is
the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen's] career, every bit as
ambitious as "Moby Dick."" -- "National Geographic Adventure"
magazine
"Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida --
and crafts something even better...[He] deserves credit for decades
of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that
converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed
literature....Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to
Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel."
-- "Miami Herald
"
"Matthiessen is writing about one man's life in "Shadow Country,"
but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course
of half a century. Watson's story is essentially the story of the
American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and
of what such empires cost....Even among a body of work as
magnificent as Matthiessen's, this is his great book." -- "St.
Petersburg Times
"
""Shadow Country" is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in
creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute
in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development
of this nation." --"Seattle Times"
"Shadow Country" is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of
literature that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr.
Matthiessen's integrity as an artist that he felt compelled to
return to the Watson material to produce this work and satisfy his
original vision....a multifaceted work that can be read variously
or simultaneously as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a
morality tale, a political allegory, or a mystery. -- "East Hampton
Star
""Matthiessen's Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American
literature...this reworking...is remarkable....Where Watson was a
magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of
iconic here; it's difficult to find another figure in American
literature so thoroughly and confincingly portrayed." --
"Publishers Weekly," starred review, Pick of the Week
"Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy's
novels...a mosaic about the life and lynch-mob death of a
turn-of-the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial
killer named E. J. Watson -- into the 900-plus-page "Shadow
Country." This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were cut
from the novels, previous background characters now tromp to the
foreground, and the books' rangy, Faulknerian essence is rendered
more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick
porterhouse of a novel." -- "Men's Journal"
"The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in
my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. SHADOW
COUNTRY lives up to anyone's highest expectations for great
writing." -- Richard Ford
"Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious writer, an
inspired anatomist of the American mythos. His storytelling skills
are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable." --
Joyce Carol Oates
"Peter Matthiessen's work, both in fiction and non-fiction, has
become a unique achievement in his own generation and in American
literature as a whole. Everything that he has written has been
conveyed in his own clear, deeply informed, elegant and powerful
prose. The Watson saga-in-the-round, to which he has devoted nearly
thirty years, is his crowning achievement. SHADOW COUNTRY, his
distillation of the earlier trilogy, is his transmutation of it to
represent his original vision. It is the quintessence of his
lifelong concerns, and a great legacy." -- W.S. Merwin
"From the Hardcover edition."