An outlaw spirit moves through these fish stories. It flashes like
the glint of a knife or the back of a trout holding in a pool, and
marks these tales from novelist McGuane (Some Horses, p. 699, etc.)
as his iconoclastic, unpredictable own. McGuane is a serious
angler. He watches and listens to the whole nine yards: from
rigging up to the birdsong, the cut of the trees along the horizon
line, the fluid dynamics, those heavenly fish. His approach is
vivid, focused, and intense, as he plays hard and gets dirty in his
"willingness to deepen the experience at nearly any personal cost."
For the payoff is sublime: "I could feel glory all around me," he
says after one of those times when it all came together. He attends
to the most minute details, knowing, for instance, that in Ireland,
"you would have to be born not only among these lanes to find our
aperture of unguarded water but also among its rumors," and
acknowledging when he is tinkering with his fly selection that "the
deep voodoo of salmon is something I am unready to disturb." All
the narratives are instantaneous, as if your attention had been
momentarily diverted and McGuane were reporting what had just
transpired, but not all is skittish esoterica. He allows notes of
sentiment when revisiting favorite haunts ("universal irony might
just have to eat hot lead for the moment"), and readers will take
him at face value when he says, "If the trout are lost, smash the
state," in a classic piece that is included here among stories that
range from early more-outrageous-than-thou fishing high jinks to
recent fishing in remote venues, the fury of his pursuit now in his
head rather than on his sleeve. "Of course, it's all in my head;
that's the point." It's a daring head, too, audacious and
unrepentant and wild for the type of experience you could write
about. (Kirkus Reviews)
"We'd all rather be fishing than doing anything else. But if you can't do it, then reading about it is the next best thing. The Longest Silence is one of the best fishing trips I've had this year. " Jeremy Paxman, Daily Telegraph."Thomas McGuane, much-lauded American novelist, has spent over 50 years in pursuit of the catch and in the course of 33 short, dreamily episodic essays he succeeds in capturing the sometimes spiritual, sometimes challenging, occasionally amusing and more often than not enchanting world of the whenever-possible angler. Few are the works of literature which can successfully capture the essence of a sport. With this soulful and reflective work McGuane has surely created a modern classic" Scotland on Sunday"It is a meaty book, and an uplifting one, dazzling well-written. Just as I'd be a proud angler if I could catch specimens half as big as his 25lb sea trout from the Rio Grande, or his 18lb steelhead form the Dean, so I'd be a proud man if I could write a book half as good as this." Financial Times "Writing to die for" Daily Mail
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