The Rider by Tim Krabbé

Book Review, or maybe book rave?
The Rider by Tim Krabbé. Bloomsbury USA; Reprint edition 2003 (Originally published in the Netherlands in 1978).


The Rider wins my heart. This novel, by Tim Krabbé and translated from Dutch, is like watching a classic one-day race from inside the peleton. For anyone who’s ridden a bike competitively, or ridden “over your head” to keep up with buddies, or seen black from cranking up a hill so big you think it’ll kill you, you will understand this book. The translator Sam Garrett did a beautiful job because the language and metaphors are spot-on. Krabbé has nailed the physical and psychological agony and joy. Some gems:

Despuech, who has just made a break but obviously won’t stay away off the front.: Despuech is crazy. Despuech is only showing us that he doesn’t stand a chance in hell. He knows it too, but still it’s a fact: he has to choose between finishing at the back after shining, or finishing at the back after not having shone at all. Dozeas of riders are now thinking the word ‘Despuech’, and people along the route will clap for him. And later all the riders will slide right over him, like a net over an undersized fish.
Gradually I find a cadence. Climbing is a rhythm, a trance; you have to rock your organs’ protests back to sleep.

I shift down. Forty-three nineteen: the gear of champions. How the hell do I keep talking myself into racing?



Gerrri Knetemann: “You guys need to suffer more, get dirtier; you should arrive at the top in a casket, that’s what we pay you for.”

Asked about the pain of getting dropped, Knetemann say, “It’s too bad, sir, but at a certain point you just can’t do it. And when can’t do it any more, you get dropped. Too bad. Nothing to make a fuss about.”

Perhaps I love this book so much because the protagonist narrating the story is a journalist/writer turned cyclist at age thirty. I fancy myself a combination of those two, so I particularly loved this little soliloquy: “I believed that, while cycling, I would come up with thoughts and ideas for the stories I’d be writing the rest of the time. Fat chance. The rest of my time I spent jotting in my cycling logbook and keeping statistics on my distance and times, and while cycling I thought of nothing at all.

Ha!! 
Fear of heights, multiplied by my velocity. Don’t look to the side. The wind blows right through me…

Descents scare me, I’m the worst downhill rider here…

A sign. It says that the speed limit here is 60 kilometers per hour. My brain flashes a joke for my approval: point at that sign and waggle my finger at the others. Joke rejected.

Curves.

Yup. there we go.I think of coming down a mountain in Eastern Washington State in a small group ride from the The Bicycle Butler bike shop. Switchbacks and all, the pack flying. I was in my drops, aero, keeping up, and then--a switchback, I braked—out of instinct and self-preservation—I slowed, and I was dropped like a wounded bird from the flock.
...saw a rider meticulously peeling a banana with both hands on a downhill stretch at 65 kilometers an hour…
Comments like those about the “up-and coming Hinault” and anectodes of cycling history woven in the consciousness of the rider—the narrator—all in the course of a 150 km race make us as readers feel part of cycling history, part of this race in 1977

Who the hell goes cycling on a hot day like this?
The book’s opening will grab you, if you are one who identifies with the story, or if you are obsessive about any passion in your life. The narrator looks up from his gear at the spectators. "Non-racers…The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Perhaps that’s the crux of it. When cycling becomes so central to our core that a life without it seems empty: there, I figured it out. That’s why I love this book so much.

Zoe's review and the lovely Dodge's Review! YAY!

Great review on a fun blog at Zoe's Book Reviews.

The Lovely Kristin Dodge, of Books for Breakfast, has reviewed Chasing AllieCat and given it 4.75 out of 5! Yippee!! Also on BookBook...YAY!

"Any day above ground is a good day," right? Any day above FREEZING is a good day! Looks like we'll get there again. :)

SPRING! Theater, and Blog Tour continues.

Spring! Spring, spring!

Can anyone anywhere love spring more than Minnesotans and Canadians? It's not possible to be more grateful for melting snow mounds and the sight of bright green grass, is it?

And a bike ride outside (yes, I got one in this weekend in spite of an insane amount of work to do)!

Joe is on the block today on the Teen Book Scene Blog Tour. You can read his interview here at Reading Teen. And don't forget that you can click on the icon here to donate to "Give a Girl a Bike" through Global Giving. Every meaningful comment on one of the host blogs will result in a dollar donated, too. $50 buys a girl in India a bike, which means the difference between being able to go to school or not getting an education.

Besides trying to get a bunch of grading done this weekend, trying to finish my part of the Program Review for Liberal Arts and Sciences report, playing with Freya in the woods, and riding my bike, I went to two theater productions in the Twin Cities: "Annie" by the Immaculate Heart of Mary Middle School in Minnetonka, which was SPECTACULAR and made it hard to believe that it was all seventh and eight-graders on stage.

Five of my Humanities students and I went to the Guthrie on Sunday to see "A Winter's Tale" by Shakespeare. I'd never seen this play, or read it, which is sort of rare for an English major. I hadn't heard the best reviews about it, but I actually truly enjoyed it, and my students did too. We had quite a lot to talk about on the way home. The two time periods of the two acts made sense if we considered the first act to be about 1950, and sixteen years later put it smack-dab in the sixties flower children era.

At any rate, every one of my students can't wait to get back to the Guthrie, so it was worth every minute and every penny spent.

Oh, yeah, I also did a reading/book event at the Blue Earth County Library Saturday morning. It was small, but there were great questions, and we had a delightful discussion. Thanks, thanks, thanks to those of you who came, and to Jennifer Cassman for organizing it!

Blog Tour continues, and I'm reading at the BEC Public Library Saturday a.m.

On Kelly Hashway's Blog today. What a fun interview! Thanks, Kelly.

Tuesday's blog tour visit: a Review at 365 Days of Reading.

You can still find Allie's interview on A Good Addiction from Monday, too

Saturday morning, I'm reading and signing at the Blue Earth County Library on Main and Riverfront in Mankato at 10:30. If you seriously wanted to come to Barnes and Noble and couldn't, this is your chance.

The library always does a good job of hosting events like these, so it should be fun. I'll read some of the same passages, and some different ones, if you want to be a two-timer. Or if you're like me, and you just like being read to...come on down.

Speaking of libraries, stay tuned. I'm coming to Iowa...and will read at the Cambridge Library on Saturday, March 26, 10:30 a.m.

April 7, my buddy Kirstin Cronn-Mills and I will be the readers at the Good Thunder Series at MSU.

Just so you know.

Chris Crutcher blubs Chasing AllieCat

Crutcher has this to say about Chasing AllieCat:
"A wonderful, tough, TOTALLY believable story about brutality, resilience, friendship under fire and the healing power of athletics. Hang on tight. This is quite a ride."

Thanks, Crutch!

Another YA surprise: The Underneath

The Underneath: My Reaction
It must be a good book. I've never finished a book before and been absolutely, compulsively driven to write a review. I am this time. But I hated the book.

The YA authors in my writing group agreed to each read one of the books nominated for the YA American Book Award. My choice/assignment was The Underneath by Kathi Appelt. I was completely excited: an award nominee about dogs and cats! Just my cup 'o tea.

Based on the following reviews, I guess I was expecting a beautiful, lyrical story about love for/between some animals. Thirty pages in, I felt slam-dunked.

"A mysterious and magical story; poetic yet loaded with suspense."-- Louis Sachar, Newbery Medal-winning author of Holes

"The Underneath is as enchanting as a hummingbird, as magical as the clouds." -- Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery Medal-winning author of Kira-Kira

"Rarely do I come across a book that makes me catch my breath, that reminds me why I wanted to be a writer -- to make of life something beautiful, something enduring. The Underneath is a book of ancient themes -- love and loss and betrayal and redemption -- woven together in language both timeless and spellbinding. A classic."-- Alison McGhee, author of the New York Times bestselling Someday

"Kathi Appelt's novel, The Underneath, reads like a ballad sung."-- Ashley Bryan, Hans Christian Anderson Award Nominee and Three-Time Coretta Scott King Award Medalist

All writers I respect. A lyrical story of redemption.

The writing is lyrical, alright. It's downright stunning prose, so much so that the only two comparisons I can make are Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison. And the magic realism is comparable, too. It's a beautiful thing. It reads like a song.

But still, I hated it.

The song is so painful and so awful and so filled with despair, abuse, abandonment, death and revenge, that there's no room for redemption. I'm used to pain and sadness in stories. Conflict is what keeps us reading, right? But here, I had to keep setting the book down because it was too painful to go on.

Most of us are familiar with the phenomenon that watching animals suffer in a story or movie is worse than watching humans suffer. All too true in this novel. I felt as if my heart were wrenched out, flattened with a meat hammer and stuffed back into my chest cavity. Not once, not twice, but again and again and again. By the end of the book, my heart had no room to celebrate redemption. It only had room to lie there, flattenend but pulsing, relieved that the death and abuse and despair were over and that the three characters who had survived the course of the story could live in peace.

I remember, decades ago, seeing "The Fox and Hound" in the movie theater. When the hound falls off the bridge deep into the ravine to his certain death, I remember as a kid being acutely aware of the fact that in order to survive watching the story, I had to emotionally detach from the falling dog. I couldn't bear it. The dog survived, barely, but my heart had detached from pain too great to bear.
By the end of The Underneath, I had detached so many times, I had no attachment left.

The story is omniscient, but we have a third-person close view of nine different characters. Refreshingly, only one of them, is human. That's my favorite part of the story, besides the language.

The book crushed my heart. It must be a good book, if a week after I finished it, I am compelled to respond to it because of its emotional impact. But I still hate it.

Maybe it's not a story for obsessed animal lovers. It's just too painful. Maybe it's a great story if all creatures involved are metaphorical or just that--creatures. Maybe. This much I know: I sure don't ever want to read it again. I don't need that much pain.


Afterward:
I have another comment about the resolution of the story and even the magic realism being too much to swallow, and one physical conflict left completely unresolved, but there's no way to say anything about it without giving away the ending. If you want to hear it and have finished the book, please shoot me an email.