This House Of Sky: Landscapes Of A Western Mind (1980) - Plot & Excerpts
One of the best reads I've had in a long time. Touching, brilliantly and vividly descriptive. Ivan Doig's words are textures, fabrics. You are transported through time and place to his memories, his fantastically detailed memories, reaching back to six years old, his mother's tragic early death. Doig and his father and grandmother are a somewhat unlikely trio, but their lives are filled to the brim with Montana, ranching, growing up, and endless copious amounts of love and tolerance.This story touched me strongly. Mainly, in particular, due to Doig's interactions with his father. His father was a good man, a lifelong smoker and occasional drunk, but a hardworking, self-taught man who transferred his skills to his son, encouraged him in his schooling, always trusted him and knew when to be cantankerous. Bluntly put, Doig's father was a simple man. And herein I was touched. Doig loved him with all the love a heart can muster. Theirs is a truly special bond, between Doig--a future writer with a gorgeous touch for expression and an envious vocabulary, but a person that Doig Sr. just plainly saw as his son--and his father--a simple man who worked all his years as a ranchhand and ranch manager, a man who can be numbered hundreds of thousands of times over, a man who would be forgotten otherwise. A simple man, but a remarkable man. Doig spectacularly captures this soul, along with his grandmother's near-equally amazingness. There is palpable love here. Plain relationships that are familiar to us all, but that we envy regardless. These are everyday, American, western relationships, yet they're also universal, spreading, ignorant of boundary. Captured here is the true heart and soul and *meaning* of what it is to be family. To stick together.Tale upon tale, this book will always haunt me. It has inspired me like nothing since probably Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire. As a father, I strive now, harder and more conscious, to pass along that which is worth passing along, to be a father work remembering--simple or not. To love love love.--- ---"Life was to be lived as it came. If it came hard, you bowed your neck a bit more and endured." (116)"Memory is a kind of homesickness, and like homesickness, it falls short of the actualities on almost every count." (239)"the contant clasp of keeping me at your side, whatever the place or the hour or the weather or the mood or task or venture" (273, said regarding his father and his childhood)
Have your read the novels of Ivan Doig – those, such as The Whistling Season and/or Dancing at the Rascal Fair? If you have and enjoyed his writing, then I believe you will enjoy this too. I would recommend reading the novels first. These novels are really not novels! One comes to understand as one reads about Doig’s and his father’s and his maternal grandmother’s life, as they are presented in this biography, that his fiction talks of his own true life experiences. In his novels you get a tightly woven plot line with the extraneous information removed. You get a good story. Here in the biography you get all the details that lie behind the scenes that you remember from the stories. Many of the places and events and prime forces (weather, park authorities and ranchers) are common to both. The setting of the novels feels so genuine since it is anchored to real life events. This book goes one step deeper. It is primarily about three people and their relationships with each other: the author, his father and his maternal grandmother. His mother died when he was very young; the role his maternal grandmother played is unusual. The feelings these three people harbored is perceptively and honestly portrayed. Again, real life is often more strange than fiction. I found the relationship between his father and his maternal grandmother ….well, you have to read the book to understand it!Warning: if you do not enjoy Ivan Doig’s novels, you will not enjoy this book. For me, Doig’s portrayal of teachers is the high point of his writing skills, probably because he himself is no rancher, no homesteader, no sheep herder. He was a man of books. I listened to the audio book. The narration was fine. Not exceptional, not bad, just fine. The vocabulary used is that of Montana ranchers. I didn’t understand every word, but certainly got the gist of it just fine.
What do You think about This House Of Sky: Landscapes Of A Western Mind (1980)?
Ivan Doig grew up in Montana. In this book, he talks about his experience growing up there. He tells about the severity of life there in general, and, more specifically, about the severity of his life growing up. Of course, having graduated from a college in the same Big Sky Athletic Conference as are the Montana universities, I was familiar with the terminology, big sky. And I was familiar with Big Sky Country. That, of course, was Montana. His title --- this house of sky --- relates, I think, back to that.I think Doig does a great job in capturing the Montana countryside and the lifestyle of a great number of white people who settled Montana to live off the land in telling the story about himself. Of course, it's a story about him, his parents --- mostly his dad, because his biological mother died when he was just a boy --- and his grandmother.Of course, it gets cold in Montana and the land isn't as productive or as fertile as it is in the Plains states or in the interior valley of California. Montana is a demanding place to grow up in, and Ivan had a demanding family situation.Let me quote from the book to give some flavor of it:Those first seasons of following the sheep, my parents kept with them in their daily sift through the forest a cat, an independent gray-and-white tom they had named Pete Olson. Somehow, amid the horses and dogs and sheep, and the coyotes and bobcats which ranged close to camp, Pete Olson rationed out his nine lives in nightly prowls of the mountain.Hopefully, the foregoing captures to some degree the ambience of the place Doig describes and the color of the people involved in his life.There are similes and metaphors galore with such color and texture that exceeds my ability to describe: he grins like a jackass eating thistles, parents behave down toward us as if they are tribal gods, as old and unarguable and almighty as thunder, those sheep were so hungry they were eatin' the wool off each other.Mostly though, the story is about the boy, Ivan Doig, growing up and learning to love his way of life, the land, and most of all the people that sacrificed so much for his benefit: his grandmother and his father.
—Walt
Ivan Doig's memoir of his young life in Montana is one of the best books I have read. I am traveling to Montana soon and thought I would read this before I go. Doig is one of my favorite authors and I wanted to visit some of the sites and see scenery found in his books. His characters are always complex, interesting and "salt of the earth". In Sky, Doig writes of his father and Grandmoher who raised him. His Dad was a ranch hand and Grandma was a crew cook. My Dad, Mom and Grandparents were farmers who lived close to the earth. They worked hard and expected little back. Like Doig, I was one of the first to go to college and my parents did whatever it took to make that happen. He ends the book with the passing of his Dad and Grandma. He spoke to my heart with this chapter. This book is a treasure.
—Kathy Halsan
Like "Angle of Repose", this western epic has pitched a barbed-wire fence at its entrance, daring the reader to get at the bounty within. "Angle"'s fence was the self-pitying diatribes that one had to grimace through to get to the rich descriptions of mining life in the last half of the 19th century. "Sky"'s barrier is the language of the author. Doig starts his book with difficult-to-digest semantics, possibly an attempt to meld the Scottish and Nordic language patterns of the book's characters. Not nearly as fun as Yoda's cinematic turning of a phrase. But once past this stilted and awkward narrative, the words flow much more easily, providing the author's delicious recollection of his hard-scrabble youth spent ranching in Montana in the mid 20th century. For example, his take after one blizzard: "In the fresh calm, wood smoke climbed straight up from chimneys, until it appeared as if the fat gray ribbons were dangling all the town's houses down into a bowl of snow." Like a hybrid of Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. Don't be put off by the literary hazing at the beginning, just keep reading.
—Yarak12065
