Read Gone to the Forest: A Novel Online
Authors: Katie Kitamura
Tags: #Literary, #Psychological, #General, #Family Life, #Fiction
Gone to the Forest: A Novel
Advance Praise for
Gone to the Forest
“The death-throes of a colonial world captured in dark, obsessive prose, punctuated by images of strange, surreal beauty: the falling ash, the river of dead fish. One thinks at times of both Coetzee and Gordimer, but Kitamura is very much her own writer, and makes you feel keenly the tragedy of her three lost souls.”
—Salman Rushdie
“I have been in a daze ever since I finished this book.
Gone to the Forest
is superb. It is so beautifully written, so balanced—there isn’t a spare sentence or word in the whole thing. Utterly distinctive, it is almost allegorical in its force. Kitamura is one of the best living writers I’ve read, and she gives the dead ones a run for their money.”
—Evie Wyld, author of
After the Fire a Still Small Voice
“Katie Kitamura is a major talent. It is not often I read a book of controlled, illuminating prose and it is even more rare that the story therein survives the style. I was reminded of the writings of Herta Müller and J. M. Coetzee, both important storytellers of our time and vanguards of form. Kitamura’s spare, elegant and affecting work in
Gone to the Forest
brings the reader in and out of the nexus of three souls caught in a nameless land, in a nameless time, and gently observes as they try to give name to their relation to one another, to the land, to the times and to themselves.
Gone to the Forest
is a book of atmospheres and moods, details and desires and Kitamura handles the nuances with the grace and confidence of a writer beyond her years.”
—Laleh Khadivi, author of
The Age of Orphans
“
Gone to the Forest
is a stark, urgent, beautiful novel. Katie Kitamura merges history and fable to create an explosive narrative about people trapped by terrible events they cannot control, but in which they are also deeply implicated. Its themes are ambitious—guilt and innocence, power and submission, meaning and nonsense. The characters and images of
Gone to the Forest
continue to haunt me, a tribute to their lasting emotional power and their creator’s extraordinary gifts.”
—Siri Hustvedt, author of
The Summer Without Men
Praise for
The Longshot
“In her debut novel,
The Longshot,
Katie Kitamura delivers the reader into the exotic, bruising, and hypermasculine world of mixed martial arts with startling economy and even more startling insight. . . . One lesson of
The Longshot
is you must fulfill your commitments, if only to find out what you’re made of. Another is that Kitamura is a major talent.”
—
Boston Globe
“If you’re planning to get into the ring with the heavyweights of boxing lit (A. J. Liebling’s
The Sweet Science,
Leonard Gardner’s
Fat City
), you need a knockout hook. Katie Kitamura, in her debut novel, has one.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“Katie Kitamura has produced a lean, taut little novel as authentic as any sport could hope to have represent it.
The Longshot,
her debut effort, reads the way we imagine the best fighters to be: quiet, measured, self-assured, always thinking ahead . . . [with] a fierce sense of elegance.”
—
The Daily Beast
“Kitamura’s descriptions of mixed-martial-arts fighting are brutal yet beautiful. . . . Her writing is spellbinding. . . . Kitamura is a genuine discovery.”
—
Booklist,
starred review
“Spare and beautifully written. . . . [Kitamura] brings a physicality to her story with descriptions of the action so vivid the reader feels the pain of every punch and kick.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“A real shot to the heart—a resonant portrait of a man out to prove he can take anything the world throws at him.”
—
Kirkus
“Kitamura captures the intimacy shared by the men at battle. . . . Her crisp prose is well suited to describing combat, its staccato sentences delivered like the jabs and kicks of the fighters themselves. . . . Subtly revealing.”
—
Times Literary Supplement
“A rigorous fictional account that examines the sport, exploring themes of discipline and male-bonding.”
—
Metro,
Book Pick (Canada)
“Kitamura, a young writer and art journalist, crafts her beautifully sparse words and pointed language to highlight a story of kinship, male bonding, and staying true to oneself.”
—
The Last Magazine
“Hemingway’s returned to life—and this time, he’s a woman.”
—Tom McCarthy, author of
Remainder
“Back in the day, we’d have wondered how a woman—a woman!—could know so much about this brutally masculine world. The marvel today is that Katie Kitamura can write about it with such grace, compassion, and breezy confidence. She knows her way around the ring and the human heart.”
—Elizabeth Benedict, author of
The Practice of Deceit
“Katie Kitamura has written a novel as terse, elegant, thoughtful and economical as Roy Jones, Jr., on his best days. Her writing is spare and graceful, her ear for dialogue precise, and she writes with the kind of controlled, compressed passion that produces literary gems.”
—Jon Fasman, author of
The Geographer’s Library
“Deft, subtle and hard-hitting all at once. . . . A disquisition on hope, hurt and vulnerability that’s heartbreakingly acute . . . Katie Kitamura has conjured a style that is spare, elegant and controlled; deadly in its scrutinizing gaze. . . . I am knocked out.”
—Ekow Eshun, author of
Black Gold of the Sun
“With refreshingly unadorned prose, Kitamura reduces to an intensely crystalline moment the tension surrounding a fighter and his coach as they prepare for a match. Kitamura’s language sticks to the page with a delightful monocular clarity that invites readers to enter into the minds of these two men.
The Longshot
gives readers a rare glimpse into an intriguing world.”
—Yannick Murphy, author of
Signed, Mata Hari
“A terrific debut: charged, intimate, raw. Here is an author who not only understands the alloying of muscle and mentality in sport, the elation and heartbreak of competition, and of life, but can also write about it all with compassion and beautiful austerity.”
—Sarah Hall, author of
The Electric Michelangelo
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For Hari
I have gone to the forest.
—KNUT HAMSUN
The Mountain
1
T
om hears the noise from across the hall. A
quick stream of native patois. At first he thinks it is the servants talking. But then
he hears the crackle of static. The high cadence of a bugle. The voice picks up again
and is louder. Agitated and declaiming.
It is the radio—somebody has left the radio on. Tom gets to his
feet. The old man is not in his study, he is out by the river. But the noise is not
coming from the old man’s study. Tom follows the sound down the corridor. He goes
to the kitchen, thinking perhaps Celeste has been listening to the afternoon
drama—
The kitchen is empty. The dishes sit washed and gleaming on the shelves. A
drip of water from the tap. Perplexed, Tom turns around. The voice continues to speak
from somewhere behind him. He follows the sound to the veranda. There, a radio sits on
the edge of the table, the volume turned high.
Brothers, our time has come. We are tired of being
ground under the boot of the white oppressor. We are tired of being suffocated by
these parasites. For so many years we have not even been aware
of their tyranny. We have been sleeping!
A chair has been pulled up to the table. As if someone has been sitting
and listening intently. Tom does not immediately recognize the radio—he thinks it
has been taken from the library, he cannot be sure. On the farm, they do not often
listen to the wireless. Impossible to understand why it is here on the veranda.
Now it is time for us to awaken from our slumber. Rouse
up, brothers! We will achieve our liberation and we will free this land!
There will be a price. The parasites will not give up this country so easily. But we
are brave, we are righteous men—
Tom frowns and switches the radio off. It is unusual to hear a native
voice on the radio. The patois is thick and filled with anger. He can barely understand
the words, it is a guttural nonsense to his ears. He still cannot imagine who could have
moved the radio to the veranda. No servant would have dared do such a thing.
He looks at the chair. He thinks he can see an indentation in the seat.
Like a ghost has broken into the farm, and in broad daylight, too. It is a good thing he
was the one to discover it. Tom looks both ways before adjusting the chair and picking
up the radio. Holding the machine, he looks out onto the land. It is quiet and he
retreats inside.
T
HE HOUSE SITS
by the edge of the river.
It is big—a house with multiple wings and rooms and a veranda running along three
sides. Outside this giant house there is a double row of trees,
planted by the old man’s natives. Tom sits in the dirt beneath one of these trees,
where there is shade from the blistering sun.
Tom’s father was among the first of the white settlers. Forty years
ago, the old man arrived in the country and claimed his piece of land. One hundred
thousand acres down a ten-mile spine running through the valley. The land belonged to no
one and then it belonged to him. A stake driven into the soil.
The old man swallowed up
the land and filled it with native hands. The money and good fortune came shortly
after.
The farm sits adjacent to the border and from its perimeter the
neighboring country is visible. The parcel is big and the soil arable and there is also
the river, which is wide and fast, clouded with sediment and Sargasso weed. The old man
picked the land for the river. It runs straight out to the sea. The carnivorous dorado
swim through in herds and purple hyacinth sprout on the surface.