When Mountains Walked

by Kate Wheeler

Book Overview

From the author of the critically acclaimed story collection NOT WHERE I STARTED FROM and a Granta Best Young American Novelist, this much anticipated debut novel takes readers to opposite ends of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395859913
• ISBN13: 9780395859919
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

can we make meaning?

Kate Wheeler's character Maggie is determined to make meaning in a world where there are those who suffer and those who are indifferent to suffering. She sees a world of great failures and small successes, in which the distances between daughter, mother and grandmother, between rich and poor, between sick and healthy, between the hunter and the hunted appear nearly unbridgeable. Nearly, but not quite. This is a first novel and suffers from many of the usual faults of first novels. There's a certain amount of wandering in the plot. But Wheeler's characters are complex, fully human and definitely not the kind you'd expect in a made-for-TV movie. Her ability to set a scene is, well, gorgeous. She interlaces stories and relationships deftly.And Maggie, poor Maggie? Does she make meaning? I think so, but you'll have to decide for yourself. I look forward to Wheeler's next novel.

A Great Story; A Gorgeous Psychic Landscape

I savored When Mountains Walked over the course of a summer to allow plenty of time to wander Kate Wheeler's exquisite psychic landscape. The juxtaposition of Althea's and Maggie's stories makes the novel fairly vibrate with emotional intensity. The dimensions of the story are amazingly complex but never confusing, one startling event resonating with another--the death of Althea's child, Maggie's wish to have a child, the conflicting claims of two men, the political and economic drama unfolding in a Peruvian village. I'm in awe of Wheeler's talent for creating characters who play out these interwoven levels with an urgency that accelerates all the way to the book's very satisfying ending. This is a book ambitious in scope and significance--geopolitical and mythic at the same time. The entire world of this novel is a feast for the senses as well as the heart. Wheeler is an elegant writer who attends to the deepest questions of how we are to negotiate desire. For a sense of her range, from the mysteries of love and spirit to the pizzazz of her wit, also read her collection of short stories, Not Where I Started From.

Approaching a consciusness of our own

Unlike a laser beam, focused on the myopic eye, but rather like the dispersed light that grows out of the dawn, two books published in the recent past in Boston by Houghton Mifflin promise the rebirth of a clarity of national vision, knocked out of focus by World War II. The near defeat of the Americanist movement and its promise of hemispherical democratization slowly had given way to the Latin American movement and its concept of socialism and revolution, Marxist style.Now, once again, we find ourselves approaching a consciousness of our own. Awakened and stumbling on the road, author Jeffrey Meyers in 1997 produced his work Robert Frost: a biography (see customer review). Nevertheless, it is Kate Wheeler who urges us toward the path less travelled.As though they were fragments of a Freudian analysis, the elements of Wheeler's novel, WHEN MOUNTAINS WALKED, manifest themselves as the effort to put in focus, to relate adequatly the key parts of a renewed and renewable Americanist dream: a common image of social justice and politicial equality, grounded in an encounter with models of our own.Let's take a closer look at three important signposts: (1) the female sojourner as protagonist, (2) the image of the Black Rainbow and (3) the theme of one woman engaged simultaneously in sexual relations with two men. An encounter with Maggie, Wheeler's heroine, sparks a flame in the mind of the informed reader, leading consciousness backward in time to the 1920's and the appearance on the literary scene of Kate, the sojourner/revolutionary creation of D. H. Lawrence in his classic THE PLUMED SERPENT. Roaming in a field of memories, one soon comes upon another giant of those times: E. M. Forster, his novel A PASSAGE TO INDIA and a sister sojourner, apparently the precursor of Wheeler's Althea. So it is that today When Mountains Walked (in Peru a reference to mythic time) slowly finds its place in a wider historical context and an ambivalent conept of Angloamerican literature.Viewed from a perspective both Latin American and Andean, Wheeler's novel represents an important step towards the formulation of a contemporary statement of Americanist concepts of aesthetics and communication. On the one hand we find the use of the Black Rainbow image as a literary theme, first touched upon by Arguedas, who judged its source, the poem INKA APU ATAWALLPAM, to be post-Inka. Later, in the 1980's in an international congress held in Lima, Lopez Baralt refuted this judgment and stated the poem was written in the 18th century. The ground of her thesis was twofold:linguistic analysis and visual semantics, taken from historical sources, both writen, drawn and painted.During her stay in Lima, in a radio interview with well-known peruvian critic Hugo Salazar del Alcazar, Lopez Baralt had occasion to recite the poem. That is how peruvian painter Lucy Angulo became sensitized to the theme, introduced to the painting genre by Fernando

a real sense of dislcation

When Mountains Walked is rich with place-related details so exquisite and a real sense of what it means for people to be dislocated, what it means to be a stranger, an alien, both in time and place. Although the novel sags and a bit boring in the middle, it is nevertheless a fine literary achievement, capturing the experiences of the 'locals' where the strangers, especially Maggie, (the lead character) find themselves either redeemed or doomed.

A captivating and important novel

Kate Wheeler is a superb writer. Her first book of short stories is exquisite and When Mountains Walked, her first novel, is a great achievement. She creates a crisp picture, and her characters are amazing -- led by her female protaganist, Maggie. Maggie is strong, smart, and sensual -- a true modern heroine. The relationships that Wheeler builds are fascinating and truthful. I strongly recommend this book for people who want to read about "real" people, whose thoughts and actions can provide insight into our own lives.