Deep River: A Novel

by Karl Marlantes

Overview

Karl Marlantes’s debut novel Matterhorn has been hailed as a modern classic of war literature. In his new novel, Deep River, Marlantes turns to another mode of storytelling—the family epic—to craft a stunningly expansive narrative of human suffering, courage, and reinvention.

In the early 1900s, as the oppression of Russia’s imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and the politicized young Aino—are forced to flee to the United States. Not far from the majestic Columbia River, the siblings settle among other Finns in a logging community in southern Washington, where the first harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests begets rapid development, and radical labor movements begin to catch fire. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness—climbing and felling trees one-hundred meters high—while Aino, foremost of the books many strong, independent women, devotes herself to organizing the industry’s first unions. As the Koski siblings strive to rebuild lives and families in an America in flux, they also try to hold fast to the traditions of a home they left behind.

Layered with fascinating historical detail, this is a novel that breathes deeply of the sun-dappled forest and bears witness to the stump-ridden fields the loggers, and the first waves of modernity, leave behind. At its heart, Deep River is an ambitious and timely exploration of the place of the individual, and of the immigrant, in an America still in the process of defining its own identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802125385
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Pages:	725
Sales rank:	213,201
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 8.70(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Karl Marlantes graduated from Yale University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, before serving as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. He is the bestselling author of Matterhorn and What It Is Like to Go to War. He lives in rural Washington.

Read an Excerpt

Aino focused on one steam donkey. The cable came up off the ground as the tension increased. She couldn’t follow the entire line of it, because the terrain was so rugged, but could see its end where it wound around an anchoring block that must have weighed a thousand pounds. The block was cinched with a smaller cable to a stump that was at least fourteen feet in diameter. She marveled at the sight. How could men, weighing 150 pounds, have hauled all this dead weight of steel and cable across that terrain?

Those men were now scrambling for safety, ducking behind stumps, finding shelter in the torn ground, as more steam poured into the donkey’s pistons. The massive cable drums whirred, jerking a log weighing several tons from where it laid, bringing it bucking and slamming through the slash like a runaway railroad car to the landing as fast as the massive cable drums could turn.

Ilmari told her that just one of these Douglas firs could produce enough lumber to build three or four houses. She hadn’t believed him. With each splintering, anguished crackle, when fibers that had held for centuries first started to part, with each moaning, creaking groan as the tree leaned and tore loose from its stump, with each shouted whisper of air rushing through the limbs of a rapidly accelerating top, with each ground-shaking crash signaling a tree’s death, she believed. Everything about the place spoke danger and filled her withrespect for these men.

Editorial Reviews

05/06/2019

Inspired by family history, Marlantes (Matterhorn) offers a sprawling, painstakingly realistic novel about Finnish immigrants in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20th century. The saga begins in 1891 Russian-occupied Finland, when tenant farmers Maíjalíisa and Tapio Koski lose three of their six children to cholera. Six years later, their oldest surviving son, Ilmari, now 18, departs for America. By 1903, he owns a farm and blacksmith shop on Washington’s Deep River and dreams of building a church. Brother Matti joins him, and soon Matti is working as a logger and dreaming of starting his own company. Seventeen-year-old sister Aino arrives last, fleeing Finland after being tortured for revolutionary activity. In America, she campaigns for the Industrial Workers of the World. During the 1920s, as IWW activity is suppressed, Aino is separated from her family and even spends time in a Chicago jail. Meanwhile, through the Depression, the Koski siblings put considerable energy into a variety of enterprises including Sampo Manufacturing (timber) and Scandinavia’s Best (salmon). Their perseverance despite hard times and conflicts exemplifies Finnish “sisu,” a combination of determination, courage, tenacity, and endurance. Vasutäti the Chinookan basket-weaver/healer, Aksel the fisherman/bootlegger, and Louhi the whorehouse/saloon financier, provide assistance. Marlantes’s epic is packed with intriguing detail about Finnish culture, Northwest landscapes, and 20th-century American history, making for a vivid immigrant family chronicle. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Deep River :

“Marlantes conveys the elements, arcana and dangerous romance of logging superbly. His descriptions of logging itself—the ingenious mechanics of taking down trees and the skill of experienced loggers—are wonderfully detailed, dramatic and exhilarating…Mighty physical, social and economic forces operate the plot of this novel, buffeting its characters, raising them up, flinging them down, twisting their fates together. Deep River is a big American novel.”
— Wall Street Journal

“ Deep River is an engrossing and commanding historical epic about one immigrant family’s shifting fortunes…a feat of lavish storytelling.”
— Washington Post

“Marlantes poignantly depicts the intimacies of personal dramas that echo the twentieth century’s unprecedented political storms and yet in surprising ways reprise Finland’s oldest mythologies…An unforgettable novel.” — Booklist , (starred review)

“As a portrait of a complicated American era, and one family’s mighty struggle against it, the novel is both fascinating and fierce. And well worth the hours it asks of its reader.”
— San Francisco Chronicle

“ Deep River seems a work born from Willa Cather by way of Upton Sinclair. But this new book is its own animal, and it’s something of a masterpiece… In Deep River , [Aino] takes her place beside Antonia Shimerda as one of the great heroines of literature.”
— BookPage (starred review)

“Inspired by family history, Marlantes ( Matterhorn ) offers a sprawling, painstakingly realistic novel about Finnish immigrants in the Pacific Northwest during the first half of the 20th century… Marlantes’s epic is packed with intriguing detail about Finnish culture, Northwest landscapes, and 20th-century American history, making for a vivid immigrant family chronicle.” — Publishers Weekly

“A riveting read in the classic western literature tradition of Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain , delivering the rich pleasures of an epic story well told…The realism of Deep River comes with a magical tinge.”
— Oregonian

“An admirable work, this monomyth is dense…with Marlantes’s gift for lyricism and evocative language.”
— Library Journal

Praise for Karl Marlantes:

“A raw, brilliant account of war that may well serve as a final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history . . . One of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam—or any war.” — New York Times Book Review , on Matterhorn

“Marlantes’ story is so intense that there were times reading it when I thought I could not stand to turn the page . . . Vladimir Nabokov once said that the greatest books are those you read not just with your heart or your mind, but with your spine. This is one for the spine.” — Philadelphia Inquirer , on Matterhorn

“Carefully constructed and beautifully realized . . . Filled with truth, wisdom, love, and a rich vein of dark gallows humor.” — Newsweek , on Matterhorn

“ Matterhorn will take your heart and sometimes even your breath away.” —NPR’s All Things Considered , on Matterhorn

“Superb . . . A treasure . . . It’s a bloody Vietnam epic, to be sure. But it’s also a full-blooded inspection of the human spirit.” — Christian Science Monitor , on Matterhorn

“Visceral . . . Evocative . . . [Marlantes] pitches us into a harrowing narrative we won’t soon forget.” — USA Today , on Matterhorn

“A powerhouse: tense, brutal, honest.” — Time , on Matterhorn

“Engrossing.” — Seattle Times , on Matterhorn

“Vivid . . . Elegant . . . It tolls in the reader’s mind and leaves a long, haunting echo.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune , on Matterhorn

“Lush, compelling, and tragic . . . An unflinching story.” — Denver Post , on Matterhorn

“That rare modern novel destined to become a classic.” —Vince Flynn, on Matterhorn

“A novel of great authority and humanity. It builds inexorably to a devastating and magnificent final movement.” —Charles Frazier, on Matterhorn

“Marlantes brings candor and wrenching self-analysis to bear on his combat experiences in Vietnam.” — New Yorker , on What It Is Like to Go to War

“A precisely crafted and bracingly honest book.” — Atlantic , on What It Is Like to Go to War

From the Publisher

2019-04-14
Marlantes (What it Is Like to Go To War, 2011, etc.) moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the old-growth forests of Washington in this saga of labor and love.

It's the late summer of 1901, and Aino Koski is learning to read and write courtesy of a schoolteacher boarding with her family in the Finnish backwoods, his textbook of choice The Communist Manifesto. Soon she's a socialist, and so she will remain, even as her neighbors and siblings follow other beliefs and courses. Escaping the Russian occupation of her country, Aino and others in her community move across the waters to Washington state, where, despite her hope that America will prove a socialist paradise, any utopianism is worn away by the realities of endless hard work in the forests and mills: "Aksel's hands," Marlantes writes, "work-hardened since he was a boy, still blistered from the nine-pound splitting maul and eight-foot-long bucksaw." Aino devotes herself to labor activism while members of the Finnish immigrant community work, build families and lives, grow old, and die. Aino hardly has time to take a breath, but she still finds room for agonies of secret-charged love that stretch out over the decades, until fate finally allows some measure of happiness: "He leaned over and smothered his face in her hair," Marlantes writes poetically of Aino's husband-to-be, who has followed a hard path of his own, "and the pain and the disappointment poured out as he said her name over and over." The story is long and has its longueurs, but Marlantes carefully builds an epic world in the forests of Scandinavia and the Northwest, taking pains to round out each character, especially the long-suffering Aino. Drawing on his family history, he weaves themes from the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic—as he writes, the paterfamilias has named all his children after the mythological heroes and heroines in its pages—as well as real-world events in the annals of the early-20th-century labor movement.

A novel that sometimes struggles under its own weight but that's well worth reading.

Kirkus Reviews