The sojourner
(Book)

In her first novel in more than ten years, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, whose earlier The Yearling has taken its place as a classic in our native American literature, tells the story of a good man: of the influence of his steady, quiet strength upon others, more especially the members of his immediate family, and of what these in turn -- characters less strong and less stable than himself -- do to him throughout the course of a long life. Asahel Linden, a small farmer in one of the central Atlantic sates during the period from 1860 up to the second World War, was a sensitive and thoughtful man -- like all of us a stranger and a sojourner here on this turning planet, like many of us essentially lonely and often inarticulate in his relationships with other. The book opens in Ase's youth, with the departure of his beloved brother Ben, in search of fortune and adventure. Ase stays on the farm with his mother, a woman obsessed by her love for the lively, laughing Ben -- although it is Ase and his wife Nellie who take care of her. Children come, the farm prospers, but still Ase longs for the lost Ben, about whom word drifts back from the West -- from an Indian friend, from the gypsies who camp every year on Ase's farm. As the years pass, the children grou up and leave home, the eldest to go West where he makes a financial and political success of himself by dishonest means. The story of Ase's lifelong quest for his lost brother, of the various subtle betrayals that come to him -- from his mothers, from his wife and from his son, Nat -- and of a strong good man's eventual triumph, on the spiritual plane, over all these defeats, is tole here with the warmth, the power, and the human understanding characteristic of this writer's work at its glowing best. Here is a hero of real stature. The Sojourner is an epic book, a story of the eternal conflict between good and evil and of man's search for his brother, wthich will move the reader deeply and unforgettably.