Finding Caruso

by Kim Barnes

Book Overview

Seven years separate Buddy from his big brother, Lee, but the boys have always been close, comforting and protecting each other as their father-defeated by poor land and hostile weather-sank deeper... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0399149678
• ISBN13: 9780399149672
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Putnam Publishing Group
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.6"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

losing your way and finding your heart

Finding Caruso is a rare find - a book that carries you with it using both empathy and a clear hard eye on its characters. This book about two brothers, told by the younger brother Buddy, is about things lost along the road to growing up - in this case a literal road out of the shack in Oklahoma where the two brothers lived with a drunken abusive father and a shadowy suffering mother whose only offering is extra sugar in their tea when they suffer a beating, a heartbreak, a loss. Lee's way with a guitar and the ladies may take the brothers to LA and success some day, but this book is about the long stop the two make in a logging and mill town of Idaho. But as the title implies, this book is also about the things one finds even as one is letting things - and people - go. Loss is not simple, nor are the bonds that hold the brothers together - bonds that are at some times too binding and at others too loose and at times, all they have in the world. An older beautiful woman named Irene threatens to come between, as does the potential for Lee to be a big star and move on from the people in Idaho who have given them a start in life - the bar owner and bartender and band. When Irene chooses younger Buddy over Lee, it allows Buddy to see himself for the first time as someone with other options than playing the role of baby brother, of being a nobody son of a drunk farming cotton in the dust, destined to dead end jobs and deadened loves. For the first time he considers not just a limited life in which he must hide but a world in which he can act and grow. But her love is complicated by a hidden past, including an Indian friend accused of murder of a woman in Lee's band.The progression of the tale is masterly - supple language combines with hard luck to create a story that draws one in. Buddy and Lee are characters we care about and believe in, even when we can see them hurting each other or acting foolish. Even their blindness to their own actions rings true. Minor or side characters are, with a few rare exceptions, fully drawn with a few lines or actions, so that one can almost smell the combination of stale smoke, Jack Daniels and soured dreams on the page. Irene is presented as the most complex character and is a bit more problematic. Her dialogue is far more stylized than the others, which marks her clearly as an outsider, but I often found trying to hear someone speak like that in my head would ring flat and affected. Her beauty and mystery attract Buddy, and provide much of the emotional heart of the story, but some of her actions towards the end feel forced into the plotline. Her character as written is both compelling and incomplete. This first time novel by memoirist Kim Barnes is a real find!

See how it all connects

Literary novels don't usually have horses on the covers, though sometimes they do. This one does. Exceptional literary novels don't usually feature both country & western music and opera, but this one does. And this literary novel is one of the most carefully structured and beautifully written books you will read this year. Guaranteed. Buddy Hope has fled Oklahoma, where his father's drinking and abuse has finally resulted in a car crash that has killed him and his wife. So orphaned, Buddy, who is 17, and his brother Lee, who's 25, set out for the West, for anyplace other than where they've been most of their lives. Anything's got to be better than what they've known so far. That they wind up in a north Idaho mill town, where Lee, with his skills at the guitar, his fine voice, and his way with women, attains something like happiness (though with Lee you can never tell; if you're not happy in your heart, you're probably not happy in your skin)is no more than dumb luck. But sometimes dumb luck's the best kind. Especially, as it turns out, for Buddy. Buddy is at loose ends. He's smart, sensitive, feels like something's wrong, but all he knows is Oklahoma wretchedness and little else. He lives with Lee in the back room at the Stables (based on a real and REAL hot bar/nightspot in the 50s in N. Central Idaho), sneaks mistake drinks and walks in the canyon. He's bound for a mill job, maybe. Or worse. He's bound for the kind of oblivion his father perfected into misery. But into Buddy's life and into Snake Junction comes Irene Sullivan, a red-haired, stop-traffic beauty (if you get through this novel and you're not in love with Irene, talk with your doctor about . . . well, watch TV. You're hopeless) who's maybe twice Buddy's age. Irene's running from her past too, but unlike Buddy (and Lee) she's also sure about what matters in life--love and honesty and fairness. That's what she gives to Buddy: a real life. A life beyond willful redneck ignorance; a life where things like wine, opera, and fair play for people who aren't white is exactly the way it should be. She helps Buddy find Caruso--the singer and the horse. She helps him be the man who can be, not the man the world will allow. She's also the hero of this book. It's Buddy's version of the story, but Irene is the moral and ethical (and sensual) center of the book.This story of Buddy, Irene, Lee, and the others in Snake Junction, as well as the voice it comes to us in (which is beautiful and skillful) is Buddy's. The whole novel comes to us as Buddy's memory. He's an older man doing the telling. And the skill with which he gives us the story has everything to do with what Irene gave him when he was 17. For if you can see there's a world where doing the right thing matters (even sacrificing what you care for most in the process), then when you decide to tell your story, as Buddy does, you'll want to do it as carefully and passionately as Caruso sang an aria, as Hank Willi

Finding Kim Barnes

This is a beautiful book: the writing is stunning, always smart and always insightful. And it is a great story, the story of a young man whose love affair with an older woman provides him with a way to live the rest of his life. It's a book about choices and possibilities. It's a book about doing the right thing and believing that it matters. It's a book that shows us, and Buddy Hope, its main character, that there is a way to be a happy, ethical human being in this complicated, often unfair, but beautiful world of ours. FINDING CARUSO will often leave you breathless. You might cry as you read, but you will also surely laugh. And you will not likely read a better novel any time soon.

Finding Kim Barnes

This is a beautiful book: the writing is stunning, always smart and always insightful. And it is a great story, the story of a young man whose love affair with an older woman provides him with a way to live the rest of his life. It's a book about choices and possibilities. It's a book about doing the right thing and believing that it matters. It's a book that shows us, and Buddy Hope, its main character, that there is a way to be a happy, ethical human being in this complicated and often unfair world of ours. FINDING CARUSO will often leave you breathless. You might cry as you read, but you will also surely laugh. And you will not likely read a better novel any time soon.