Requiem by Fire: A Novel

by Wayne Caldwell

Book Overview

Charles Frazier called Cataloochee, Wayne Caldwell's acclaimed debut, "a brilliant portrait of a community and a way of life long gone, a lost America." Now, in Requiem by Fire , Caldwell returns to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400063442
• ISBN13: 9781400063444
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.2" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Outstanding

I have sat in the fields in Cataloochee Cove and hiked to the graveyard above the church. I have visited the few remaining cabins and have stood silently in the old school house. Mr. Caldwell once again brings the cove alive with a great novel that is hard to put down.

Requiem Captures the Soul of the Mountains

In his second novel, Requiem by Fire, Asheville native Wayne Caldwell continues to plough and sow and carve and create his own literary landscape, in the way that Faulkner did with his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, or Ellen Gilchrist did in her early stories of Uptown New Orleans, Pat Conroy with coastal South Carolina or, dast I say it, Thomas Wolfe with Altamont/Asheville. In Caldwell's case, it is the Cataloochee Valley of Western North Carolina, in Haywood County. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Caldwell's novels are set, Cataloochee was a thriving small farming community. It was a lovely if isolated hemlock-, maple-and pine-rimmed valley, set among 6,000-foot peaks. Cataloochee today is the North Carolina side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park's answer to Cades Cove, only more remote and harder to get to. In Requiem, Caldwell's mountaineers, at the time when the U.S. government was buying up property for the new national park, are wrestling with the decision of whether to take the money and move out of their Edenic valley, or, paradoxically, to stay and watch it return to its state of natural grace. Fire starts and ends the book, the first fire a surprisingly practical way to improve the education of the children of the valley; the last fires to purge evil from the valley and perhaps to light the way to an old mountain man's ultimate reward. In between there is fire every page or two - a Home Comfort cook stove, a lesson on how to build a fire in a fireplace, a discussion about the virtues of different kinds of firewood. Plotting is not Caldwell's forte. Requiem by Fire, like his Cataloochee before it, is essentially a collection of character sketches and vignettes, woven - or, rather, patched - together into a quilt we can call the Cataloochee design: cantankerous old Silas Wright, the disgustingly evil Willie McPeters (a character never better named); the tragically mated Jim and Nell Hawkins; and Aunt Mary, who jaws with the spirit of her dead husband, Hiram. But that doesn't matter. What Caldwell does is much more important than plotting. He has captured the soul of the mountains and put it on paper forever. Caldwell respects and reveres the language of the mountains. Every chapter is a thesaurus of mountain expressions. He's probably the only serious writer in America who knows that in the Southern Appalachians a dope used to be a Coca-Cola. I once did a guidebook to the Smokies, but I only know Cataloochee in a superficial way. I went back there a few days ago, to see the old deserted farmhouses in the spring and the elk grazing the new grass in the low pastures. Like us, the elk seem to enjoy staying down where it's flat and where there's plenty of food to eat. I communed with an old bull elk that was hanging out, all by himself, in the yard of the Palmer House. At Cataloochee I read some of the last chapters of Requiem. It moved me deeply. I'm putting this novel and Cataloochee on

Great Book!

This is a wonderful book. After reading Cataloochee I was eagerly looking forward to Requiem by Fire. I wasn't disappointed. Mr. Caldwell definitely makes you fall in love with the characters. You laugh with them and cry with them. I could see the mist of the mountains in my mind's eye. I am so sorry for the sacrifice of these people and so grateful at the same time. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a sacred place. Bravo!

Great book

This book takes you back in time to mountain life at its best - and worst. Caldwell can turn a phrase - the book is at times poetic - and the characters are beautifully crafted. I felt like I actually knew them. I found the story historically informative and a delightful read.

A first rate follow up to Cataloochee

I read Catalochee immediately after it was published and was sad to see it end. Rarely does a book have that effect on me, so imagine my surprise when I was told of the sequel! Mr. Caldwell gives each of his characters life and wit and as I was reading, I felt as if I was standing in Cataloochee, where I visit often. His references to Waynesville, Canton and Asheville, where I make my home, are an added delight. When visiting Catalochee, Cades Cove or Roaring Fork, I feel like the homesteads I walk through when I am there are the same as those in the book. Silas is just around the corner, I'm sure! This book has a weight of its own as I am torn between enjoying the beauty of Cataloochee and knowing that homesteaders were torn from their homes to make way for the Park. What Mr. Caldwell shares as fiction is so easy to believe as fact -- the characters will change you and the way you view the beauty that is Cataloochee and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Mr. Caldwell, please write your next book soon!