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It's no Desert SolitaireNo Abbey book has ever satisfied after that one. He writes beautifully, among the best, but just not my cup of tea
This is a story about a dirty old man who lives in the woods. A very bright and psychologically healthy all-American girl attacks him out of nowhere and he has no choice but to fall in love with her. This is very easy because she is 19, has no discernible flaws except for slightly uneven teeth and goes hiking in little Catholic school girl skirts. She disappears and then the main character who has many things in common with the novelist gets to experience many tragically romantic and romanticall...
Reading Challenge: A book with a color in the title.I had to skim through to get to the end. First Abbey book I read, should have probably started with one of his more well-known classics because I did not enjoy this sexualized male fantasy of living in the woods and banging a girl 20 years younger than you. 🤷🏼♀️
This book is going to be difficult for me to review. There are pieces of it Abbey could have done without (entire characters, in fact), and there are pieces that are simply stunning. Black Sun is apparently Abbey's personal favorite of all his books, and I get that. It's also one of his books that critics and readers (and critical readers) didn't dig, or didn't understand, or didn't care to in either regard, and I get that, too. A month later and I can tell it'll be one that sticks to my bones f...
Annoying and frustrating objectification of women through this entire book. It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t heartfelt… Written by a man for men.I liked the premise - Will - older man (not really, he was 37), Sandy - younger woman (she was 19), sex in the forests, blissful solitude deep in the mountains, she disappears, he’s heartbroken. Nice backbone, but no meat. The conversations between the two are frenzied, terse, quippy and snarky. Not real or believable. He refers to her as “...
Meh. Not much more than an extended MALE sexual fantasy. Guy lives alone in beautiful woods, cooks breakfast while watching the deer. Nubile 19 year old maiden shows up. They have sex all over the place. He is apparently in love, but will not give her any commitment. He stands in rugged, manly contrast to her smarmy, brutish, prep-schoolish fiance. Way too explicit in parts to recommend.But it is Edward Abbey, who is funny and can write nature like no one else. Note that I thought the love story...
After finishing this book, I read through some of the reviews of this and other of Abbey's books. Quite fascinating to me. It certainly appears you either love Abbey or you hate him. Not much in between. Black Sun is classic Abbey and I enjoyed it immensely (although The Fool's Progress remains my favorite of Abbey's 'fiction'). Yes, he can be crass and vulgar. But the book is as honest as it is beautiful. It's a book of love plain and simple. Love for a girl. Love for the desert and the forests...
Will Gaitlin is a stone cold stoic, a self-critical ex-teacher who has practically gone feral. His sole responsibility is a big one, spotting smoke or forest fires from a tower, but it requires minimal human contact. He lets us in on scant information from his past. He’s more interested in the deer in the woods and the shadows. Art Ballantine, who thinks nature is where you throw your beer cans, wants Gaitlin to come back to civilization before he dies. But Will Gaitlin isn't going anywhere. Gai...
A simple and lovely novel by the late and truly missed master of environmental essays. What is best is its honesty. The portrayals of sexual desire will be uncomfortable for many. But for those readers who recognize themselves as humans not bound by out-of-date moral strictures, it is eerily moving.
A re-read,20 years later. I'm all atwitter.
This book really touched on what it is to be lonely and to live a life of loneliness and melancholy. The main character is a machismo yet philosophical, ex professor who takes on a job for half of the year as a fire lookout. He remains in contact with another character mainly through letters that mostly talk about sexual encounters with women, failed relationships, and how silly it is to live in the forest for half of the year. The letters are quite misogynistic and consistently go into detail a...
This is just silly, macho bullshit! The guy loves walking around naked. Fine. You don't catch rainbow trout and catfish in the same stream. Then we have the obsession with the beautiful 19-year-old girl. It's just ridiculous!
Ed Abbey's women characters are... not good. Rolled my eyes pretty much continuously.
I thought this book was amazing and the reason being is that the story is so believable. While reading it I was inspired to begin writing my own book based on a very similar story I have in my mind and have experienced in my life. Abbey is a wonderful author. I believe that Abbey did a great job at recreating the emotions involved with a true love affair. Some scenes are not appropriate for the sexually inexperienced person or love-deprived because the depth of the writing is discovered through
I have been a fan of Edward Abbey since I read The Monkey Wrench Gang in college. I enjoyed Black Sun because it showed a different side of Abbey and frankly it reveals a truth about male experience that men hide about themselves until they are long married--that truth being that they become profoundly attached to their woman partner and losing her can have catastrophic consequences for a man. Several reviewers have dubbed the main character a "dirty old man." How can Will be that at the age of
Absolutely loved it. A gentler Abbey, but still the dirty old man that he is with a great vocabulary and passionate hatred for organization, government, etc. Gritty.
Those of us from the Rocky Mountain states have always revered the late Edward Abbey for his famous memoir Desert Solitaire as well has his other non-fiction writings that testify of his love for the American west and his white-hot determination to preserve the beauties and bounties of its wilderness areas and to protect them from encroaching development. Black Sun is a slightly different kind of a work for Abbey-- a short, bittersweet novel with a cryptic ending and no particular respect for ch...
I'm in love with this book in every way. Edward Abbey is a phenomenal writer, and it's a pity that his literature gets tossed aside because of the "ecoterrorist" themes in the Monkeywrench Gang. His imagery in Black Sun is like poetry: beautiful enough to make you cry. On the very second page I read the best coffee description in my life. I don't have the book with me right now, but it was something like, "he poured himself a cup of black, smoking, rich and murderous coffee." Brilliant.
For a Abbey book, there was way too much sex, no where near enough wilderness, and not a peep about Forest Service shenanigans. And it was anticlimactic, we never did find out what happened to the girl.
This is a beautiful, heartbreaking story about the mysteries of love and nature, set against the background of the American Southwest. Abbey never fails to surprise and having previously read The Monkeywrench Gang, Hayduke Lives, and Good News, this was a BIG surprise. This is a tender, tragic romance. A story of love and beauty and the ultimate impermanence of both.