The Cottagers

by Marshall N. Klimasewiski

Book Overview

Cyrus Collingwood, age nineteen, suspects that he may be a genius without a calling. He is a year-round resident of East Sooke, Vancouver Island, and has a natural resentment for the summer cottagers who descend on its rocky beaches. When two vacationing American couples arrive--old friends with a complicated history--they become his obsession. Greg and Nicholas are engaged in an academic collaboration that looks more like competition; Samina and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393330206
• ISBN13: 9780393330205
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Gripping in its subtle intensity.....

I really enjoyed this book; I bought it a day before heading out for a 4 day vacation on the southwest coast of rugged Vancouver Island, exactly where this novel spins its web and sucks the unsuspecting reader in. Maybe it was because I could easily connect with the locale or maybe it was because of the author's use of words but this one was a hit for me. I made it a point to drive through East Sooke and hike through the park to water's edge to "feel" the tensions that must have overcome the characters; Cyrus, Nicholas, Greg, Laurel and Samina on the "fateful day" and in the days following. The beautiful descriptions of beach stones and the topography of Sooke Bay made this read very personal. I wonder how much time the author spent in the area; he certainly captures the beauty, mystery and lore of being "out there". Gorgeous. I would have given this a 5 star had it not been for the last section which was a bit unbelieveable and out of place with the rest of the book. My advice? Go to Sooke, Vancouver Island, BC for a visit.

Not your average book.

Ah Marshall, you can write. Such a pleasure. This is a mysterious novel that is not a mystery novel. The characters are complex and their motivations are complicated. The language is perfectly in tune with the story. It is smart, unflinching, depthful language, without being self-consciously "literary" or in any way jarring. Smart sentences. The book never becomes what you expect it to. In the hands of a much less capable writer this story would have become your average beach read. It is much more than that. It always takes a slightly less comfortable path. There is no real emotional resolution, and the characters do not have tidy bows at the end, which is part of its power. This is a bigger book than you might first think, smarter than you expect, and compels the reader along the less easy path. You "worry" at it after you are done, wondering at the lives beneath the lives of these characters.

Among the best of 2006

An absolutely terrific debut. I sometimes wonder if reviewers are able to recognize when a book is exquisitely written? Because the real achievement here is the writing which is enormously astute and psychologically revealing. There's something funny, evocative or eccentrically beautiful in nearly every sentence. And I don't mean to downplay the story, which is genuinely gripping, or the characters, who feel like real people with real faults and real pathos. Cyrus, who resides at the center of the novel, is a character I won't soon forget. He may be sinister, but the writer inhabits his perspective with such skill and dark irony that I loved seeing the world through his eyes. I was captivated by The Cottagers, but I kept pausing to reread certain descriptions and observations and say to myself...Wow.

strong relationship drama

Nineteen years old unemployed Cyrus Collingwood lives year round in East Sooke on Vancouver Island. He detests the summer rentals though the hot weather invaders are the prime source of income for the locals. Cyrus enjoys being a peeping tom spying on the temporary newcomers and in brazen moments loves to assault their rentals though besides scaring ten years off their lives, he normally does not harm them. This summer he obsesses over two families; married Brooklyn couple Samina and Nicholas and their three-year-old daughter Hilda; and their St. Louis friends Laurel and Greg. He pretends to be their friend by showing them the hidden highlights of the island. However, the brilliant teen reads his guests quite nicely as he realizes there is an undercurrent professional rivalry and resentment between the historian Nicholas, the biographer Greg, and the English professor Laurel as well as realizing Greg is a womanizer. The exotic looking Samina is the one that attracts Cyrus as she does not fit with the others and he fails to psychology profile her. When Nicholas fails to return from a walk, accusations fly everywhere encouraged by sly Cyrus who knows what happened on the solitary beach. The concept that the masks people wear in relationships change when the dynamics between individuals alter which can be caused by an outside party is proven in this tale. The story line is fascinating though the action is limited and the key characters never seem fully developed. Relationship drama fans will appreciate the hypothesis driven plot that unmasks visage armor, but fails to go deep into the psyche of the island visitors or even Cyrus. Harriet Klausner

Evil is Never Broke

Young Marshall Klimasewiski has a bright future ahead of him if his novel THE COTTAGERS is any indication. Summer people are always an interesting subject for a novel, for there is something wry about their privilege and they becomes objects of fascination or contempt for the year-round residents, just ask Nick Carraway from THE GREAT GATBSY. There's something of Nick Carraway in the teenage protagonist of THE COTTAGERS, but here his name is Cyrus Coddington, and the passions the summer visitors unleash have a distinctly Canadian feel to them; Klimasewiski can describe the warm, clammy heatscapes of Vancouver Island as did Malcolm Lorwy and Dorothy Livesay before him. His tragic foreboding is his own. Sometimes Cyrus seems a bit too observant and poetic, but that's the nature of the game. The US citizens who take up residence, the easy life, this particular summer are trying to escape the hell of academia, and one of the couples, Nicholas and his Indian-born wife, Samina, seem bewilderingly adrift on the seas of inter-racial tensions, despite having the bond of a lovely daughter, little Hilda, to seal their union. (Hilda celebrates her fourth birthday, and her parents invite Cyrus to the party.) The other couple, Greg and Laurel, are even more neurotic. Cyrus has a sort of COLD COMFORT FARM fixation on them all, and his strange kinship with these strangers begins to seem more and more weird, especially when one disappears and the other survivors begin wondering, what path took us here to this terrifyingly native place? All of these interpersonal relationships are colored by another character's interest in the personal life of Charles Dodgson, better known to the world as Lewis Carroll, and his possibly demented interest in little girls. Like Henry James, Marshall Klimasewiski knows how to frame a story so that its children, like little Hilda, playing with her crabs, seem terrifyingly in danger even in placid, intellectual surroundings. In some ways I thought, that THE COTTAGERS resembles a modern version of Dickens' unfinished MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, right down to its hint of an exotic India lurking in the background of the visitors, but finished this time, to a perfect patina of loss, regret, desire and dementia. As Cyrus says, "Evil is never broke."