Friday, May 21, 2010 — We don’t generally run items from our newsprint edition on the web right away, but we wanted to make sure people knew about this in time to plan ahead.
One thing that didn’t make it into this item: RiverRun is going to donate $3 from every copy of Matterhorn sold in May and June to VASH, the VA Supported Housing Program.
RiverRun Lands Another Big One
RiverRun Bookstore continues to attract the best writers working today to read and speak right here in River City. We would profess not to know how they do it if it weren’t so obvious: owner Tom Holbrook keeps Michele Filgate on the staff specifically to bring them in, the whole staff reads extensively, and the customers have come to know that the whole world of ideas is right here.
One of the next big guns slated to appear on Congress Street will be Karl Marlantes. The author of Matterhorn, a current New York Times bestseller, he is scheduled to speak on Friday, June 4, at 7:00 p.m.
Sprawling, naturalistic novels about big groups of men in combat, like The Naked and the Dead and From Here to Eternity, were declared dead long ago along with 58,195 Americans, in Vietnam. The genre never quite recovered from the surrealism of Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, the thinking went. Dispatches and The Things They Carried finished it off.
Maybe no one told Karl Marlantes, or maybe he just didn’t give a damn. Why should he? He’s done extraordinary things before, with considerable success.
Granted, there was nothing very unusual about a former high school football player from a small Oregon logging town joining the Marine Corps in the early 1960s. Attending Yale for the first four years of his enlistment moves his career track towards the edge of the bell-shaped curve, though. When a Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford, that fairly well threw out the rulebook.
Somewhat like the Mounties, though, the Marines eventually got their man. Marlantes was shipped up to I Corps, just south of the DMZ, where he served with the 1st Battalion of the 4th Marines.
That was a time and a place where Marine infantry lieutenants were a very perishable commodity. Marlantes came out alive, if not unscathed. After one particularly harrowing week in the DMZ, during which he assembled the remnants of two shattered companies and took a hill under withering fire despite being badly wounded, the Marine Corps hung a Navy Cross on him. After the war, while also working as a businessman, he spent thirty years fighting to get the war he knew on paper.
Long after the market for Vietnam novels had come and gone and nearly been forgotten, a small West Coast publisher saw something other publishers had missed and arranged a limited edition. The book caused a stir among readers. Atlantic Monthly Press got wind of it and arranged a full-scale release.
It’s a hell of a book about a hell of a thing, and Marlantes is a hell of a writer. Don’t miss it.