Coal Black Horse

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		Coal Black Horse
		Coal Black Horse

基本信息·出版社：Algonquin Books
·页码：224 页
·出版日期：2007年04月
·ISBN：1565125215
·International Standard Book Number：1565125215
·条形码：9781565125216
·EAN：9781565125216
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语

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When Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she instructs her only child to find his father on the battlefield and bring him home.

At fourteen, wearing the coat his mother sewed to ensure his safety—blue on one side, gray on the other—Robey thinks he is off on a great adventure. But not far from home, his horse falters and he realizes the enormity of his task. It takes the gift of a powerful and noble coal black horse to show him how to undertake the most important journey of his life: with boldnesss, bravery, and self-possession.

Yet even that horse is no match for the brutality and senselessness of war, no surrogate for the courage Robey needs to summon in its face. It's in the center of that landscape, as witness to the lawlessness and carnage around him, that he is forced to raise a gun for the first time in his life. When he returns to his mother, Robey Childs will be the best a man can be, and the worst, irrevocably scarred by all he has seen—and all he has done.

When Robert Olmstead published his debut, River Dogs, he was compared to Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane. Since that time, Olmstead has received high praise for all of his work. But it's this book that is destined to become a classic. Coal Black Horse joins the pantheon of great war novels—All Quiet on the Western Front, The Red Badge of Courage, The Naked and the Dead.
作者简介 Robert Olmstead is the author of five previous books and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEA grant. He lives in Ohio, where he is a professor at Ohio Wesleyan University.
媒体推荐 “A spare, classical quest story . . . With a horse like this, you just want to ride, and with descriptive powers such as he displays here, Olmstead makes the ride an exciting one, with just enough lean prose to keep the mystery of an event both in time and out . . . and just the proper amount of sharp description to keep us bound to whatever piece of earth the particular moment of the story happens to be grounded in. . . . An effective mix of stark classic narrative and uncloying nostalgia.”
—San Francisco Chronicle (The San Francisco Chronicle )

“With his lush, incantatory voice, Robert Olmstead describes a boy thrust into one of the war's most horrific moments. . . gorgeous and moving passages”
—Washington Post Book World (The Washington Post )

"Coal Black Horse, Robert Olmstead's magisterial sixth book, is as sensate as poetry and forbidding as any squall, steeped in detail but bound by few storytelling conventions. I wondered, as I read it, if it might be classified as myth....Coal Black Horse is a remarkable creation."
—The Chicago Tribune (Chicago Tribune )

"A powerful, redemptive narrative."
– Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly )

"The Civil War turns a boy into a man in Olmstead's latest novel… [Olmstead] evinces a primordial universe: a time before gods, before mortality, a time in which war is as natural and inevitable as birdsong in the morning…Powerful and poetic."
—Kirkus Reviews (Kirkus Reviews )

A powerful, redemptive narrative. Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weekly )

A spare, classical quest story . . . With a horse like this, you just want to ride, and with descriptive powers such as he displays here, Olmstead makes the ride an exciting one, with just enough lean prose to keep the mystery of an event both in time and out . . . and just the proper amount of sharp description to keep us bound to whatever piece of earth the particular moment of the story happens to be grounded in. . . . An effective mix of stark classic narrative and uncloying nostalgia. San Francisco Chronicle (The San Francisco Chronicle )

Coal Black Horse, Robert Olmstead's magisterial sixth book, is as sensate as poetry and forbidding as any squall, steeped in detail but bound by few storytelling conventions. I wondered, as I read it, if it might be classified as myth....Coal Black Horse is a remarkable creation. The Chicago Tribune (Chicago Tribune )

The Civil War turns a boy into a man in Olmstead's latest novel [Olmstead] evinces a primordial universe: a time before gods, before mortality, a time in which war is as natural and inevitable as birdsong in the morningPowerful and poetic. Kirkus Reviews (Kirkus Reviews )

With his lush, incantatory voice, Robert Olmstead describes a boy thrust into one of the war's most horrific moments. . . gorgeous and moving passages Washington Post Book World (The Washington Post )
编辑推荐 The Civil War has provided the backdrop for several authors in recent years: Michael Shaara, Robert Hicks, E.L. Doctorow, Howard Bahr, and Charles Frazier, to name a few. Robert Olmstead can take his place among the best of them with this stirring tale of a 14-year-old boy's loss of innocence as he follows the horrors of war.

The boy is Robey Childs, sent by his mother to bring his father home from the War. She has "the sight," and when she "sees" that General Thomas Jackson is dead, she tells Robey "Thomas Jackson has been killed... There's no sense in this continuing... This was a mistake a long time before we knew it, but a mistake nonetheless. Go and find your father and bring him back to his home." She sews a coat for him that is blue on one side and gray on the other, tells him to trust no one and sends him off.

He is ill-prepared for all that will happen to him. When his horse pulls up lame, he walks her to the blacksmith, but she is unfit for the task ahead. The blacksmith offers Robey a horse on loan until his task is completed. "It was coal black, stood sixteen hands, and it was clear to see the animal suffered no lack of self possession." Indeed, the horse is more fit to do his job than is Robey. Olmstead creates an iconic horse, but never anthrpomorphizes or romanticizes the relationship between boy and horse. When they are separated, Robey is truly at sea. When they are together, they move as one.

Robey encounters every kind of evil, venality, cruelty, squalor, and depravity imaginable. He is hardened beyond his years by what he sees. There is a battle scene as horrific as any ever written, graphic and frightening. "There were enough limbs and organs, heads and hands, ribs and feet to stitch together body after body and were only in need of thread and needle and a celestial seamstress." Robey is changed forever, but never dehumanized. Olmstead leaves the reader in no doubt about the unconscionable ravages of war; he also shows us the redemption that such suffering can bring. --Valerie Ryan
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly

Olmstead's new work (after Stay Here with Me) is a convulsive, bloody Civil War tale that tracks a boy's search for his father on the battlefield at Gettysburg. At 14, Robey Childs is on the cusp of manhood when he sets off from the family farm at his mother's behest to find his soldier father and bring him home. A sympathetic farmer loans Robey an uncommonly beautiful and sturdy black horse. On the road, Robey passes carts carrying the maimed and dead, and bands of Native Americans and runaway slaves. A chain of horrific trials begins for Robey when a man dressed as a woman shoots him and steals the horse. He's taken prisoner as a suspected spy, witnesses a girl's rape and is caught up in a carnage-drenched raid. However, he survives the attack, is reunited with the stolen horse and sets out again, days later finding his father on the battlefield, mortally wounded. Robey can't save his father, but he can try to save the raped girl, Rachel, from further violence. His return home and his testimony to what he saw forms a powerful, redemptive narrative. (Apr.)
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