A Three-Strand Rope: A Guest Post by Leif Enger
From his remarkable debut, Peace Like a River, to his brand new novel I Cheerfully Refuse — check out our fabulous Book Club edition — Leif Enger has captured our hearts and filled our bookshelves. In his exclusive essay below, Enger writes about the inspiration behind his latest and what led him to write it. Here’s Leif, in his own words.
Hardcover
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I Cheerfully Refuse (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
I Cheerfully Refuse (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
By Leif Enger
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$25.20
$28.00
A big-hearted, hopeful novel that’s part adventure story, part love story, and a delight to read. The dialogue, characters and sense of place are unforgettable. Not to be missed by fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility or Station Eleven.
A big-hearted, hopeful novel that’s part adventure story, part love story, and a delight to read. The dialogue, characters and sense of place are unforgettable. Not to be missed by fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility or Station Eleven.
The three-strand rope comprising this novel begins with Lake Superior. In the mid-1990s I was invited to crew for a week on a small sailboat in the Apostle Islands, off Wisconsin’s south shore. Though born and raised Midwestern I’d never really glimpsed Superior’s power and intensity – it makes and sustains its own weather, is given to abrupt fearsome storms and impenetrable fogs. I remember waking in a misty anchorage with the conviction that the distant past was awake in the shoreline trees and prowling for breakfast. Later that day, peering down through the shallows at the bones of a century-old shipwreck, I had the disturbing thought that those blackened timbers were instead from some future calamity. Like a minor deity, the Lake will casually play with your perceptions and is as full of revelations as any mythology you can name.
The second strand of this tale was dread – in particular the dread sparked by a news story, once the territory of ideological fringes, of yet another public school district being torn apart over materials offered in its library. I forget which books were under suspicion – take your pick – but will always remember the tone of the combatants: their harrowing, take-no-prisoners, holy-war language has become wearily familiar. This narrowing of rhetoric into enraged tribalism has plentiful mirrors in the culture: the embrace of conspiracy and rejection of provable fact; the inexorable upward movement of resources to the powerful; the shrinkage of arts and letters in public education – as if delight, expansiveness, and imagination were threats to human stability and not foundational attributes of a healthy civilization.
And so the third strand emerged directly from the second, as a necessary counter and remedy. Into my early notes stepped a bibliophile – a librarian and bookseller like many I’ve known – whose love of literature becomes increasingly and unstoppably joyful as the world declines. The more ignorance flourishes, with its attendant cruelty and violence, the more devoted she becomes to the idea that so long as people read, they will dream; so long as they dream, their humanity cannot be extinguished.
Mystery, dread, and hope – these are the three strands of this particular rope. As every sailor knows, strong ropes make swift voyages. With ropes you weigh anchor, hoist sail, and lash your provisions into place. The wind freshening, you reach for yet another rope. You double it in your fist and haul back with everything you’ve got – the sail tightens, and the boat leaps forward.