Summary
There are two stories in play here, bound together when the elderly, demented Harry Eide escapes his sickbed and vanishes into the forbidding northernmost Minnesota wilderness that surrounds the town of Gunflint--instantly changing the Eide family, and many other lives, forever. He'd done this once before, thirty-some years earlier, in 1963, fleeing a crumbling marriage and bringing along Gustav, his eighteen-year-old son, pitching this audacious, potentially fatal scheme to him--winter already coming on, in these woods, on these waters--as a reenactment of the ancient voyageurs' journeys of discovery. It's certainly a journey Gus has never forgotten. Now--with his father pronounced dead--he relates its every detail to Berit Lovig, who'd waited nearly thirty years for Harry, her passionate conviction finally fulfilled for the last two decades. So, a middle-aged man rectifying his personal history, an aging lady wrestling with her own, and with the entire history of Gunflint.
Author Notes
PETER GEYE was born and raised in Minneapolis, where he lives with his wife and their three children. His previous novels are Safe from the Sea and The Lighthouse Road.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Continuing the saga of the Eide family introduced in his second novel, The Lighthouse Road, Geye's powerful third outing journeys to the frozen places in the American landscape and the human heart. One November, the elderly Harry Eide, who is suffering from dementia, vanishes into the unforgiving backcountry surrounding his home in the tiny Minnesota town of Gunflint. When his son, Gus, comes to tell Harry's longtime love, Berit Lovig, the news, Gus also begins recounting another defining trip Harry took into the wilderness three decades earlier. In fall 1963, Harry persuaded then-18-year-old Gus to postpone college and join him on a lengthy two-man journey north into the maze of waterways at the Canadian border, where they planned to winter over like the "voyageurs of yore." By the time the first snow fell, Gus had come to understand that the maps Harry had brought were useless and that a showdown with Charlie Aas, Gunflint's corrupt mayor and Harry's longtime nemesis, might be dead ahead. As Gus recalls his tale, Berit looks back to her own past, most notably with Rebekah Grimm, a Gunflint icon whose history links her to the Eides. Capturing the strength and mystery of characters who seem inextricable from the landscape, Geye's novel is an unsentimental testament to the healing that's possible when we confront our bleakest places. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A father and son bond through several months of self-exile in the remote borderlands of northern Minnesota. Geye has chosen a complex narrative strategy, one that mirrors the complexity of the relationships he dramatizes. At the center is Gustav "Gus" Eide, who's distraught at the disappearance of his father, Harry. Gus goes to see Berit Lovig, the narrator of the story and Harry's former lover, to tell her the story of another time Harry disappeared, 33 years earlier, in the winter of 1963-64. At that time Harry and 18-year-old Gus take a canoe trip northward, following the treks previously done by ancient voyageurs, whose fierce independence Harry has come to admire. Unbeknownst to Gus, who thinks they're taking their voyage into the wilderness to test themselves, Harry has another motiveto escape the unfortunately named Charlie Aas, a local big man about town but also a bully and the secret lover of Harry's wife, Lisbet. Leaving at the time of year they do, Harry and Gus find the elements lined up against themice and snow are among their greatest threatsbut Geye is interested in conflicts between men as well as between man and nature, because Harry is convinced that Charlie will be tracking them. And sure enough, eventually Charlie shows upand he's both angry and aggressive. As Harry and Gus square off against him, the reader feels that civilization is a very good thing indeed. The confrontation is dramatic and violent and leads to a secret father and son share for years. As the story unfolds in the present day, Gus, now a husband and father himself, reveals his intuitions about Harry and Berit's relationship. Reminiscent of Jack London's "To Build a Fire" and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Geye's narrative takes us deep into both human and natural wilderness. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Ostensibly, Geye's (The Lighthouse Road, 2012) beautifully written third novel seems most suited to male readers, given its many pages devoted to a father and teenage son spending weeks in the wilderness the headwaters of the Mississippi on the border between the U.S. and Canada, to be precise and to presenting lush details of camping and trekking and living rugged in the woods. But the author's outdoor prose is supported by immaculately conceived characters any fiction appreciator will respond to as well as by Geye's instinctive sense of narrative movement. Gustav Eide relates to Berit Lovig, his father's long-patient admirer, what exactly happened three decades ago when he and his father went deep into the Minnesota wilderness on an expedition that Gus cannot make sense of initially. What Gus eventually discerns is that a long-simmering feud has existed between his father and another man prominent in town, which now promises to break out into open warfare. The relatively small and closed community is Geye's perfect laboratory for exploring human nature, especially male bonding and competitiveness.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2016 Booklist
Excerpts
Our winters are faithful and unfailing and we take what they bring, but this season has tested even the most devout among us. The thermometer hanging outside my window reads thirty-two degrees below zero. Five degrees warmer than yesterday, which itself was warmer than the day before. I can hear the pines exploding, heartwood turned to splinter and pulp all up and down the Burnt Wood River. As if the cold weren't enough, yesterday brought another unkindness. Gustav Eide came bearing it: his father's red woolen hat--the one he wore almost every day, the type children wear tobogganing--found by those Bargaard twins as they ice-skated out past the breakwater. It wasn't the first time Gus came knocking this winter. Back in November he held his own hat in his hands. Gus, with his father's lonesome, lazy eyes, standing bareheaded but buttoned up outside my door. "I hate to drop in unannounced, Berit," he had said then. "Since when do we stand on ceremony around here? Come in." He stepped inside but stood with his back against the door, his eyes studying his bootlaces. I've seen much of this town's woe, its suffering and tragedy, and have marked it all. While I stood there waiting for Gus to speak, I knew my own everlasting sadness was suddenly upon me. "He disappeared last night, Berit." He spoke without looking up. "He's gone." I turned and stepped carefully to the bench under the window and sat. "We found tracks heading up the river," he said. I looked up at him, now looking down at me. I thought of sitting at his father's bedside the evening before, holding his hand, singing to him. I thought of how Harry had looked at me, his gaze seeming to go through me and into some past only he could see. I was disappearing from his view. This I knew. Gus came and sat next to me on the bench. "That new sheriff--Ruutu's his name--is leading the search. We went all the way up past the lower falls. The dogs lost his scent around the Devil's Maw. Ruutu's down in Gunflint right now, calling for more help." He reached over and held my hand, a gesture he surely learned from his father and one that calmed me down, at once familiar and uncanny. There are depths to those Eides no sounding line will ever reach. I knew this about Harry and I have come to know it about Gus, though on that November morning he knew me much better than I did him. "They're not going to find him, Berit." He let my hand go and sat back and rubbed the cold from his cheeks. "Why would you say that? He can't have gone far," I said, thinking again of that faraway look in Harry's eyes. "We've heard this story before, haven't we?" "Speak plainly, would you? For the benefit of an old lady?" Then Gus looked through me just as his father had only hours before. "People searched for don't get found here. Not in these woods." He closed his eyes and shook his head as though to banish some thought. "Put on some coffee? I'll tell you how all this happened." So I did. I went to the kitchen and filled the kettle at the sink. As the water poured from the faucet I glanced upriver, where I have kept my eyes more or less since. Two stories began that day in November. One of them was new and the other as old as this land itself. Both of them were borne by the river. Ruutu and his deputies and Gus and his sister, Signe, and the good people of Gunflint spent a week searching for Harry, every dawn following some new dead end into the wilderness, every dusk emerging from wherever they'd been, tired and cold and no closer to finding him. Gus stopped by each evening to tell me where they'd looked, assuring me every single time they'd never find him. Even still, the next morning he went out with the others. Sometimes three or four parties, following three or four leads. When, finally, they conceded Harry to the wilderness, it was thanks to Gus's insistence. Signe went back home to Minneapolis. Gus back to his job teaching English and history at Arrowhead High School. Ruutu back to our local misdemeanors and traffic violations. Me? I was still searching in my own fashion. That first morning, I visited Harry's empty bed. There was the iron headboard and the flannel linens and the quilt crumpled at the foot of the bed. Harry was always too warm. The pillow still held the imprint of his head. His medication sat on the bedside table, next to the radio and a half-drunk glass of water. The bureau opposite the bedside table was as old and timeworn as whatever part of Harry stored his memories. I crossed the room and opened the top drawer and noticed straightaway his knit hat was missing. Strangely, the pompom had been snipped off. I'd passed the previous evening as I had so many others before it, sitting at his bedside, reminding him of who we used to be, feeling at times that I was not only disappearing into the darkness of his mind but from the world altogether. It was no less strange that evening than it had been at the start of his confinement to see a man still so bodily strong becoming a child again. No less strange and no less unbearable. Of that last night we spent together, I cannot say he exhibited any signs he was about to undertake a disappearance, no word spoken or gesture made that gave me pause. He did nothing that might've forewarned me. That evening I only hoped, as I did every night, that when he finally fell to sleep he would do so with the knowledge of my love, and that when he dreamt it would be of peaceful things. It was Doctor Ingebrigsten--who grew up in Misquah, went to medical school in Minneapolis, and returned to Arrowhead County because, she said, this place needed one of its own to care for its sickly--who described to Gus and me what it would become like for Harry. "You and I," she said, "we see our past as though it were a bright summer day. The trees green, flowers blossoming, the water shining blue. Harry's going to start seeing less and less of his past until--sadly--everything will seem as though it's taking place in a nighttime blizzard in the dead of winter." She said this on a September morning, with the trees in full autumn blaze--our loveliest time of year--and I wept to think that the man I loved would never register that beauty again, even if he lived another ten years. That same morning Doctor Ingebrigsten told me the best thing I could do for Harry was to be with him. Sit at his bedside and talk to him and tell him I still loved him. To hold him among us for as long as I could. So I did. Of course I did. And now it's been half of a winter since Harry vanished, and I can finally rest my thoughts. I ought to feel relief. Of this I'm sure. But do you know what it's like to hold proof of the last heartache you'll ever know in your own raw hands? I hadn't known, either, not until Gus delivered Harry's red hat yesterday morning, a cork bobber sewed on where the pompom should've been. Gus's stories and that damn hat--handed to me like a verdict and never spoken of again--these things have made of my heart what this season has of the splintering pines along the river. Excerpted from Wintering by Peter Geye All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
