| Title | : | Lost Mans River |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0679403779 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780679403777 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 539 |
| Publication | : | First published October 21, 1997 |
Lost Mans River Reviews
-
“Lost Man’s River” is the second novel in Matthiessen’s Watson Trilogy. But in this 1997 work, he approaches the story from a different direction.
Lucius Watson has heard the rumors about his father: Edgar J. Watson. Could they possibly be true? Was he a pillar of the community, killed by a mob of townspeople because they were envious of his success? Or, was he a cold-blooded killer, publicly executed out of fear for their own safety?
Rooted in the legend of “the Watson killing,” Matthiessen has created a second novel, a loosely structured tale of a son, who wants to know the truth about his lost father. Will he be vindicated by what he learns or frightened? Like “Killing Mister Watson,” this second novel is rich in the detritus of the Sunshine State’s colorful wild past and the people “molded by the harsh elements of the Everglades.” Gator poachers, gunrunners, moonshiners, desperate to hang on to a way of life that was rapidly disappearing.
"A man came in out of the fire mist, crossing the shadow land of the killed woods. He drifted, disappeared, and came again though smoke and blackened thorn, moving from willow clump to bush like a panther traveling across open savanna."
The woods are now killed, and the Florida panther is all but gone.
Matthiessen may be best known for his works of non-fiction (as perhaps, indeed he should), but this proves that he is an equally adept novelist. -
When I travel I see some people in the subway or on a street and I think to myself that I would like to know more about them...where they live...what they like and dislike...and who they mingle with.
This book is a fictional account of such meetings, except these are long lost family members from multiple marriages and illicit relationships from years gone by. Matthiessen is a great story teller and makes you want more. This is not a short book, and the length allows the author to introduce so many characters that it is near impossible to keep up with them all. I did find myself getting lost in some of the more remote characters, but in the end I was able to keep track of the main ones.
I would have given the book another star, but there is some language from some of the colorful characters that made me uncomfortable. -
It is difficult to know how to rate this book. The writing is beautiful and Matthiessen tells a 540 page story mostly through authentic Southern dialogue. On the other hand, the author is maddingly self-indulgent: This story could have been told in half the number of pages and it would have been a better read had he done so.
-
Lost Man's River is Part 2 of the trilogy of Matthiessen called Shadow Country. Part 2 tells the story of Lucius, one of Edgar Watson's sons, in the form of a third person narrative. While initially an alcoholic, Lucius succeeds in righting his life and becomes a PhD and notable historian. He promised conclusions such as:
"Good and evil we known in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably (John Milton - Areopagitica)."
"A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory - and very few eyes can see [its] mystery (John Keats)."
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence. (George Eliot, Middlemarch)."
Without doubt, Matthiessen was successful. My only concern about Lost Man's River is that it bogged down for me in the middle. Lucius is writing the story of his efforts to write a biography of his father. If Edgar Watson wasn't already complicated on his own merits, he marries three times and has two common law wives. As a result, following the names of offspring and relationships is a reader's challenge. But I liked how it flowed ultimately and especially how it ended.
As an indicator of Matthiessen artistic skills in prose, I submit the following example:
"Not until years later, as Lucius resumed Papa’s biography, would these four cane cutters, never accounted for, rise from the abyss of dream memory as wild petroleum seeps up from the earth crust to form strange rainbows on black marshland pools."
Looking forward to Part 3, Bone By Bone, a first person narrative in which Edgar Watson tells his own life story. -
4.5 ⭐️
Book 2 of the Shadow Country trilogy. This one from Lucius one of Watson’s young sons and told in the 3rd person of his life. This is the longest of the 3 books and from what I remember of Shadow Country (the re-worked, re-edited) single volume that came out in 2010 it is a lot. Way too long. There are brilliant pieces in this. And at one point Lucius even seems baffled by all the constant discrepancies in the story of who killed his father (no, not a spoiler). I’m glad I read this. Reading this trilogy in the separate novels just makes me admire Matthiessen as a writer even more. An incredible piece of art.
Onto book 3, Bone by Bone. -
Sequel follows "Killing Mister Watson" with the story of his son, Lucius, trying to find out the truth of his father's life and death. He does...but he must be about 80 years old when he does. Time passes very slowly in the SW Florida everglades country and somethings are best left alone.
I give it only three stars because it is a 350 page story but it takes the author 500+ pages to tell it. I also had difficulty with the chronology of the story. Some of the characters witnessed the death of Mr. Watson in 1910 but the narritive takes place sometime after the Viet Nam war and I found it hard to believe that they were still taking such an active part in the events of the story at what must be a very advanced age after living on moonshine and enduring the harships of such a hostile environment. Apart from that, it was a very good -- but dark -- story and a good follow-up to Killing Mister Watson.
The last book of the trilogy is "Bone by Bone" in which Mr. Watson tells his own story. The first book of the trilogy stuck with me for over 15 years before I went back and read the 2nd. I may wait a while again before I take on Watson's own narrative. I am a fan of Joseph Conrad and some of his dark stories but I need to step away from Mr. Watson and his "heart of darkness" for a while.
By the way...Matthiessen re-wrote all three of these books into one volume under the title "Shadow Country" and won the 2008 National Book Club award. Also, if you really get hooked by this story...there is a song titled "E. Watson" by The Decemberists that was included on one of their albums. -
Sawgrass, shell hammock, tree line, sun, water, sky, wall of clouds on the horizon, mangrove. As reader I stood in the middle of this, lost, peering in every direction for rescue. That's not to say I didn't like it--I did. Matthiessen's a wonderful writer, able to describe landscapes, the movement of birds, wind on the water poetically, able to detail characters and their motives clearly. Give yourself some time when you read him--you'll be impressed. But there are too many characters. It's a simple story too slowly revealed by a Babel of voices. The reader badly needs a genealogical chart to help organize and keep straight the characters and families involved. The concerns of the novel are those of Killing Mister Watson, the trilogy's 1st volume, retold in several roundabout ways. And his great epic themes are preswnt: an Eden, good people plagued by a Satan figure, a paradise doubly tainted by the spill of evil and by the despoilization of modern progress. But it's too long. Confused, lost in the channels and tidal flows of plot and character, I stared at the horizon, eager for the novel's end. Last year Matthiessen published his one-volume revision of the trilogy as Shadow Country. I feel sure it gives his narrative the trimming and streamlining and improvement it needs. Later in the year when I read Bone by Bone, the 3d volume, I know I'll dangle a lifeline into that paradise so I can pull myself out.
-
This is the second book of an amazing trilogy set in south Florida by an important American author -- the author was so deep into this story that he rewrote the trilogy into a one volume version, Shadow Country, which won the National Book Award in 2008.
The first volume of this, Killing Mr. Watson, is told from multiple viewpoints, the second volume is follows the life of Mr. Watson's third son, Lucius, as he attempts to puzzle out the character and life of his much loved father. Was Mr. Watson the killer many people said he was? Did he deserve his "execution" by some men of the community?
Lucius loves the natural world and Indian history of south Florida and I enjoyed the stories of the Everglades as it was in the early days of the plume and alligator hunters. But the author's time scale is off in this book . . . the story is set in the 1960s, years after the area has become a national park, yet Lucius is thinking about the time his father spent there (1890-1910)and finding many people with memories of those days. One feels sympathy for Lucius but he's not a man of action so the story seems to drag. This book needed editing but still is very worth reading. -
I really tried to stay with this book, reading almost half way through, but it just didn't go anywhere for me. I kept wondering where the story was going. It just didn't come together for me.
I have to get into the main characters for a book to keep me captivated. Again, this didn't even come close. -
This is the 2nd in the Shadow Country trilogy. I enjoyed it as much as the first (Killing Mister Watson). Good writing with a wonderful sense of character and place and SW Florida history. It’s long with lots of characters and relationships to keep straight so it’s a commitment, even as an audio edition. In this 2nd volume, one of Ed Watson’s sons, now middle-aged, sets out to write a biography of his father as a pioneer of the Everglades and to find out whether he had killed all of the people he’d been rumored to murder. Looking forward to eventually reading the 3rd book.
Matthiessen wrote about this book in an author’s note to SHADOW COUNTRY, the single volume version he’d intended for what became a trilogy: “...the ‘trilogy’ solution never fulfilled my original idea of this book’s true nature. While the first book and the third stood on their own, the middle section, which had served originally as a kind of connecting tissue, yet contained much of the heart and brain of the whole organism, lacked its own armature or bony skeleton; cut away from the others, it became amorphous, reminding me not agreeably of the long belly of a dachshund, slung woefully between its upright sturdy legs. In short, the work felt unfinished...”.
I agree with this assessment, which I read several weeks after finishing this 2nd volume. I had actually been aware of feeling suspended, that I couldn’t just read the first 2 books of the trilogy, that I felt almost compelled to read the 3rd in order to feel I’d read a complete work. I had not felt that way upon finishing the 1st volume; I could easily have stopped then but decided to continue working my way through the trilogy because I liked PM’s writing and I was curious what he had done with volumes 2 and 3, knowing at the time that he had intended the work to be a single novel, not a trilogy. -
I listened to this using the RBdigital app on my phone and when I accidentally went from somewhere in chapter five to chapter eleven I discovered I didn't care enough about the story to find my back.
It's an okay story, great if you want a sense of post-Civil War Florida. If I come across a print copy I would probably pick it up again. -
Neither as concise nor as powerful as “Killing Mister Watson,” this story of Watson’s son, Lucius, is still deeply imagined and richly detailed, if also slow and over-populated. Matthiessen is a beautiful writer, but LMR meanders and the social commentary feels forced. As much as I admired the ambition, the novel was a chore to finish. High marks as art, lower marks for storytelling, maybe?
-
"Killing Mr. Watson" was a five star book. Period.
"Lost Man's River" is a climb up and down the fictional family tree of EJ Watson, with no apparent plot; you need a scorecard to keep track of all the people and their relationships. I got about 20% thru it and had to give it up. It was just a horrible and taxing read. -
A pandemic may have been the wrong time to read this book for me. It has all of Peter Matthiessen's mastery of language but grew tiresome as he interviews family member after family member trying to determine whether his fictional father was a serial killer or a nice man.
-
👍
-
This might have ended up getting better but I couldn’t finish it. It was just monotonous and boring.
-
I'm a big fan of Mattheissen, both is fiction and non-, but this one was really strange. (Granted, I didn't red the first part of the Watson trilogy.) There is essentially no plot, just an aggrieved son trying to salvage his murdered father's reputation. The theme is memory and how fickle it can be, plus an examination of what is "truth."
Lucius goes from faulty informant to faulty informant. Too many characters and their connections just confused me. I wish he's just taken NO for an answer--no, E.J. wasn't the saint and innocent you are desperately trying to make him into. Still, this is also an historical novel about the early 20th century Florida cracker pioneers ekeing out a living in the swamps, bootlegging, poaching, farming and fishing. Oh, and killing each other!
When the national park came in in 1947, an all-out range war broke out with the Park Service and the backwoods families.
Matthiessen's elegy for the Florida that disappeared with the draining of the Everglades is very evocative. I also enjoyed his rendition of the dialect.
Note: The rebound of the American alligator is one of our greatest ecological success stories. Ditto for egrets, which plume huinter decimated before Audubon convinced women to change their hat styles. Males were killed in breeding season for their head plume "nuptial plumage." But a drive through Big Cypress today shows both species thriving. -
There is a reason the Goodreads blurb for this book starts by praising Matthiessen's other works.
Killing Mr. Watson is a great read, and
Far Tortuga is in my top 10 of all time. This follows the child of Mister Watson as he seeks to find the "truth" about his father. Was Watson a deranged killer, a man defending his homestead? Was he killed by a righteous mob, or heartless lynchers?
I do not recommend picking this up unless you have read
Killing Mr. Watson. You will be able to follow the story, but it won't interest you. Even having read the previous book, this was a slog to get through. That said, it's Matthiessen, so it is so masterfully written, and the characters so alive, that if you can ignore the minutiae that he gets into you will enjoy it. Those with an interest in antebellum Florida history, as well as how Florida went from backwater/backwoods to the land of strip malls and Disney will find this engaging, especially if you have read Watson. -
***1/2 for the novel, ***** for George Guidall's masterful narration (this novel is about storytelling and therefore should be listened to as an audiobook).
This is book 2 in Mr. Matthiessen's WATSON TRILOGY. In LOST MAN'S RIVER the main theme is Truth or TRUTHINESS: what should we believe is true? Is truth democratic, meaning the belief of the majority trumps the belief of the one? Is a historian's conclusion more veracious than an ancient redneck's eyewitness account of the same incident? Are racists reliable eyewitnesses?
Mr. Watson's youngest son, Lucius, wanders through the everglades 50 years after the murder of his father listening to swamp folk tell the local legends and first-hand accounts of his father's life, his supposed crimes against humanity and his death, hoping to write a factual biography of Mr. Watson. But in his heart Lucius believes his father is innocent of the heinous crimes accorded him and he wants to exonerate his father in his biography; however, in these stories and confessions Lucius hears the truth slowly creeping up on him and it may not be what he wants to hear, and what he believes in his heart and blood may not be strong enough to hide the truth.
My only criticism is that the novel is about 150 pages too long. -
Excellent writing. For me, this is the type of book you read slowly, not the type you cannot put down. I have put it down and picked it up again for about three months now, in between reading other books. Still, I do keep picking it up. It is full of accounts of many different people of an incident that happened in the past, along with many of their extraneous memories of the time, and sometimes it drags on a bit. You wander into someone's house somewhere in the backwoods of South Florida, settle down into a dusty, overstuffed chair with broken springs, and listen to the occupants go on and on about their lives and the sorry state of the local environment, before and since the government took over much of it. The incident was the murder of one man perpetrated by a group of folks--or was it murder, self-defense? Or did the man deserve it? This is what his son, who is now an old man, attempts to discover. Was his father evil or good?
Peter Matthiessen must have known these people well to represent them so excellently. I didn't know them, so I can only imagine, but I did know similar folks from Tennessee when I was young and it all rings true. -
Matthiessen tells a great yarn that holds strong in no small part due to the intimate knowledge of the land, history, creatures, lore, speech, names, and people who inhabit the places he guides the reader through along the way. Stitched into this vivid landscape is a timeless theme of humans struggling with their past, their present, and the truth and myths of both. This theme will cut deep and ring a deep sounding in the heart and mind bays of anyone who has contemplated the contradictory nature of humanity, and in particular one's own part and parcel of it. We are vastly imperfect creatures, but we are beautiful in our imperfection and ugliness, something Matthiessen has distilled with a skill matched by few others.
-
Reading Lost Man's River was like being lost at a family reunion for a fortnight. On and on the old forgotten stories are repeated and repeated with a different slant each time. The writing is wonderful. The locale is memorable. Sometimes I think he went too far with too many characters resulting in a certain lack of focus for the good of the story. Everything was resolved in the last 2-3 chapters. I did like the ending.
-
I really wanted to like this book - but maybe I must give Peter Matthiessen another shot, if/when I can find a copy of The Snow Leopard (the book that was recommended by the person who said Matthiessen was wonderful).
-
I love reading anything by this author. Lost Man's River portrays the life of Edgar J. Watson, who lived in the Florida Everglades at the turn of the century. It was hard to follow at times, but well worth the effort to stay with it. This is a fine book that is the second in a trilogy.
-
Meditation on truth. Very different than killing Watson yet still quite engaging.
2nd reading: whew. Exhausted from a week in the Everglades. Immersive. Good to read it in isolation from other books. Stands better in its own. -
Read my review on Amazon. It's tasty, if I do say so myself.
