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    Legends of the Fall
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    Legends of the Fall
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    Legends of the Fall
    Ebook294 pages5 hours

    Legends of the Fall

    By Jim Harrison

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    [Legends of the Fall] may well be the best set of novellas to appear in this country during the last quarter century.” Robert Houston, New York Times Book Review

    New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison is one of America’s most beloved and critically acclaimed writers. Now available in eBook for the first time, the classic Legends of the Fall is Harrison at his most memorable: a striking collection of novellas written with exceptional brilliance and a ferocious love of life.

    The title novella, Legends of the Fall”which was made into the film of the same nameis an epic, moving tale of three brothers fighting for justice in a world gone mad. Moving from the raw landscape of early twentieth-century Montana to the blood-drenched European battlefields of World War I and back again to Montana, Harrison’s powerful story explores the theme of revenge and the actions to which people resort when their lives or goals are threatened, painting an unforgettable portrait of the twentieth-century man.

    Also including the novellas Revenge” and The Man Who Gave Up His Name,” Legends of the Fall confirms Jim Harrison’s reputation as one of the finest American voices of his generation.

    Editor's Note

    Book club pick…

    Former NFL quarterback Andrew Luck selected “Legends of the Fall,” a collection of novellas, to kick off 2020 for his book club. All three stories in this compilation are linked only by men who follow their own moral codes and march to the beat of their own drums.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateDec 20, 2013
    ISBN9780802192219
    Unavailable
    Legends of the Fall
    Author

    Jim Harrison

    Jim Harrison is a poet, novelist and essayist. His trilogy, The Legend of the Falls, has been adapted for film.

    Read more from Jim Harrison

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    Reviews for Legends of the Fall

    4/5

    219 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      These three short novels each describe tumultuous and often violent changes in men's lives. Harrison excelled at portraying full-blooded characters, richly detailing their lives and circumstances.
    • 4/5
      Two of the three short works in this collection, "Revenge" and "Legends of the Fall," were rendered into film, though neither film did the stories justice. I don't number this book among my favorites, but Jin Harrison is definitely worth the trouble. Everything I've ever picked up by him has been pretty good.
    • 4/5
      Early and excellent Harrison. Revenge and Name are good stories and a story like Legends is the reason I read fiction. So many diffenet strings an so many different levels that I can't quite describe except the feeling that the story should have been longer.
    • 4/5
      Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison follows the life of Tristan Ludlow, the only brother of three to survive the Great War physically intact. His younger brother, Samuel, the apple of his mother's eye, dies in France while his older brother Alfred is wounded in an accident and sent home before he reaches Europe. Tristan survives physically but emotionally he never fully recovers. He escapes an asylum in France, where he is sent after scalping six German soldiers, and takes up work as a weapons smuggler for the English spending the next several years at sea. He travels the world, winning medals from the English while smuggling various types of contraband for his own profit. Years later he returns to his father's ranch to find that his brother has married the wife he abandoned. Alfred ends up a senator for Montana; Tristan remarries and takes over running the family ranch. Things go very well for everyone for a time. He is deeply in love with his new wife; they have several children; he makes his father's ranch a success.Returning from a trip to town with his wife's shopping and with several carloads of newly illegal whiskey Tristan is stopped by federal agents along a narrow stretch of road. The agents fire several shots into the air and calmly inform Tristan and his men that they will have to surrender the whiskey they are smuggling. Then they all see that Tristan's wife sits dead in the front seat of the car; a bullet ricocheted from somewhere into her forehead. This second round of loss moves Tristan to another round violent revenge and to life on the run as an outlaw smuggling whiskey.Tristan faces severe loss several times throughout the novel. Each time he is aware that the person killed, his brother, his wife, is the better person, that he is the one who should have been taken. This compounds his sense of loss and complicates how the reader judges his reaction. His brother dies an innocent, a life wasted in a battle that was never his. The same thing happens to his wife; that her death is accidental does not lessen it's impact. (I gasped when I read it.) Tristan is far from perfect to begin with and I doubt his life would have been exemplary under the best of circumstances, but the events of the novel make it difficult to judge him harshly. He is a very attractive hero/anti-hero to begin with; that the reader sympathizes with him even as he makes mistakes is no suprise.Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison is novella length by it's events and it's impact carry the weight of a novel. I'm giving it four out of five stars and a very strong recommendation. I've not seen the movie, and judging from the cover artwork on my movie tie-in edition I don't think I care to. The characters in the novella are as real to me as they could get. Seeing them acted would lesson their power in my memory
    • 5/5
      In the three novellas within this collection, Harrison displays a great eye for craft, building stories that climb and convey familiar forms while defying them, with Revenge being the case in point as a Western with unconventional turns and resolutions. His protagonists are masterful character studies, with all of their internal woes and joys dissected while still seamlessly integrated into the overall narrative of a story. Harrison has an eye for rich detail, which he never allows to become a detriment to his creating gripping and memorable stories.
    • 1/5
      Awful. Just absolutely awful. Legends of the Fall is my favorite movie by far, but this was the worst book I have ever read. I read the main title first and it was so bad I couldn't read the others. The only reason I finished the story was because I love the movie so much that I just KNEW it was going to get better. It didn't. The author rambles on ridiculously long, and there is no dialogue. It is also quite different from the movie in many ways. I have NEVER been so disappointed.
    • 3/5
      Collection of three novellas, two of which have been adapted for the screen. About ten pages into the first novella, Revenge, I thought the storyline seemed familiar so I checked Harrison's biography. Sure enough, it had been adapted in 1990, starring Kevin Costner and directed by Tony Scott - not a good proposition. Cochran, a retired fighter pilot and keen tennis player, develops a friendship with Tiburon ("Tibby"), a Mexican businessman, who though legitimate now has a very shady pass. He has also has a very beautiful, and much younger, wife, Miryea. Before you know it, Cochran and Miryea are head over heels in fall (a point Harrison keeps making - there was never been a love like this before), which makes Tibby unhappy. He subtlely warns Cochran off but the American is too much in love to listen to anything. so Tibby extracts revenge for this betrayal - Cochran is beaten up and left for dead; Miryea is scarred, shot full of heroin and sent to a brothel (though later moved to a convent). Of course, Cochran doesn't die, he is found and nursed back to health by a mission doctor and a simple Mexican and his daughter. Now he wants revenge. On his way down to Mexico, he helps an ailing horse trader sell a thoroughbred, keeping the money after his travelling companion dies. He then calls in some favours, ends up in Durango posing as a movie producer, and getting new a sidekick in a wily Mexican. Eventually, after a few people get their comeuppance there is a showdown between Cochran and Tibby; followed by a tragic ending. If this had been written in 1958, or even 1968, it would have been a western - the lone gunmen out for revenge against the evil landowner/businessman/whatever. The concept of revenge is slightly different however - a western hero would never seduce the villain's wife before he was dead: in this version, the hero wants revenge for punishment for doing something wrong in the first place. Where westerns move from the wilderness to civilisation, this novella seems to become an anti-western, moving from civilisation to wilderness but inevitably it too ends up in civilisation - the showdown between the two antagonists is not settled in a hail of bullets but a few words: they apologise to each other. Both men have outgrown their simple need for revenge to a more complex form of acceptance. (The people that are killed are given no inner life, they are just thugs, unable to develop beyond this). Miryea, on the other hand, doesn't grow, she withers and dies. To be more precise, she pines herself to death. But we always knew she was going to die - once her beauty was destroyed, and her body defiled, there was no place for her in the future - an icon of love cannot be a damaged woman in this world. The second novella, The Man Who Gave Up His Name, is arguably the best story in this volume. Nordstrom, a rich successful businessman, suffers a midlife crisis resulting in him wanting to leave his job, giveaway his money and disappear into the masses. It's a fairly conventional plot and done at length (the dirty realists, Ford, Carver, Wolff, who had just published roughly around the time of this publication would have covered the same ground in a fraction of the page count) but succeeds where the others fail in the character of Nordstrom. All the main characters in these stories are too perfect - handsome, successful, cultured, loved by women, looked up to by men - but Harrison produces a more believable figure in Nordstrom; despite zipping around the country in chartered Lear jets we can empathise with his doubts and fears. What Harrison can't do is leave Nordstrom an ordinary man - near the end of his story he gets involved with criminals and then proves his toughness. This just undermines the credibility of the story - it's as if Harrison doesn't trust his readers, or himself, to accept an ordinary man. The final novella, and best known piece, thanks to the heavyweight film adaptation starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, is the title story. Legends of the Fall is nominally the story of William Ludlow, a rich successful rancher, and his three sons (Alfred, Tristan, and Samuel) but is really the story of the middle son, Tristan. Tristan is the wild son, raised as much by Ludlow's old Indian scout, One Stab, than Ludlow himself; Alfred is the conversative son who ends up in politics, while Samuel is the weaker clever son, who is killed in WWI. In the space of 70 pages Tristan manages to become a WWI hero, go mad with grief and start scalping German soldiers, desert and flee to Cornwell where he meets his grandfather, who teaches him how to captain a ship. This leads to smuggling and a gun-running mission for the British for which he gets the VC - which is a joke and proves Harrison did no research on the British military. After a few more adventures he settles down with the daughter of his father's headman, only to become bootlegger after his wife is accidentally killed by lawmen looking to stop bootlegging, which results in a dispute with Irish gangsters, the conclusion of which results in his exile from the US, and effectively concludes the story except for a short epilogue wrapping everything up. (The tale even has another doomed woman - Susannah, Tristan's fiance, who eventually marries Alfred but slowly goes mad due to her continued love for Tristan).As you can see, this tale has spills and thrills, action and adventure, all compressed into a few pages. It reads like the fully fleshed outline for a full novel, or the plot for a film, or, most of all, like an upmarket pulp tale. Tristan is the literate son of the pulp heroes - handsome, rugged, tough, an expert at everything he turns his hand to, but essentially moral at heart. It's all good, (mostly) clean fun. I'm not sure what to make of Harrison from this book - he has a big reputation in certain circles in the US but the stories contained herein don't live up to that. They are enjoyable, with the exception of Revenge which is just a little silly, and are relatively well-written, though Harrison does have an issue with telling the readers, rather than showing then, but they lack depth that would raise then above that level. (Harrison does go for an emotional punch here and there but it's all a bit over-blown and maudlin). On the basis on this work it is easy to see Harrison as the heir to Hemingway with his slightly over-the-top masculine heroes - men's men, a-hunting and a-fishing, a-fighting and a-loving - although Harrison does have an acceptable style for most modern readers. His female characters are barely there at all - women who can't live, and literally die, without the love of the right man; sex objects; plot catalysts - it is an attitude that seems incredible for a modern piece of literature. I will read Harrison again - (virtuall) every writer deserves a second chance and I did enjoy this book on one level but was disappointed on a few more.Enjoyable action fiction, disappointing literary fiction. (For men only?)
    • 4/5
      First two stories were ok. Legends of the Fall is best work. Great story, just like the movie.
    • 4/5
      1. easy to figure out the title but 2 + 3 have no idea what the titles mean.
    • 4/5
      This book is listed as one of the books that a male needs to read. Yes, OK. the three novellas,, Revenge, The Man Who Gave Up His Name, and Legends are each memorable in their own way. They're all about revenge of one sort or another...growing up too. Sometimes, that took a whole lifetime. The three stories were good ones and I'd look for more Harrison.
    • 5/5
      And here comes my midlife crises - this is one of those books that reads very differently as young man vs when re-read in your 40s. Ooof.
    • 4/5
      One of my all-time favorite movies - was surprised to discover this was a novella (compiled with two others). The expanded story holds true to the basis and surpasses it. Do enjoy his prose though - ...he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.Interested in reading his later work.