Review: Across the Endless River by Thad Carhart

Teaser quote:

He lay in the lightly swaying hammock, suspended between wakefulness and sleep, until one of the words being called by the top watch suddenly separated itself from the others, swooped down, and spoke clearly in his ear, "Land!'

The simple word, so long anticipated, galvanized his spirit and body and propelled him from his berth.

Across the Endless River tells the story of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, son of Sacagawea and her voyageur "husband", at least the author's imagining of his story. Jean Baptiste was born during the trek where Sacagawea aided Lewis and Clark as they crossed the North American continent. As such, Baptiste, as he becomes more commonly referred to, starts his life an illustrious manner.

But it seems his opportunities don't stop there. From his early boyhood, he is welcomed in to Clark's home to enhance his studies. As her grows older he has the benefit of both worlds, the older, Indian world that his mother was a large part of as well as the newer "English" world.

Through his connections he meets many people, including Duke Paul of Wurttemberg, who is madly collecting as many specimens of his North American experience to take back to Europe with him. He requests Baptiste's company on his return to Europe in exchange for Baptiste's help in cataloguing these samples. Not one to turn such an offer down, Baptiste gladly embarks on a new adventure and he begins a new life among Kings, Princesses and many others of the upper or ruling classes.

I can't remember what had originally attracted this book to me and when I read the summary again, was not entirely sure I would truly like it. But I truly enjoyed the book from beginning to end. From the contrast of the quickly changing North American landscape, where the Indians are still following the herds yet settlements and cities are ever expanding, threatening this nomadic lifestyle to that of Europe. The lush, vivid imagery of the untamed plains to the glamour and excess of the deeply rooted, refined European nobility, these differences are highlighted many times through Baptiste's ruminations.

Baptiste's displays a knack, however unintentional, to land himself in fantastic circumstances. He quickly masters new languages, enabling him to assimilate well into other cultures as well as among the different classes of people throughout the story. Though there is some basis of reality, as much can be relied on from historical references, to Baptiste's abilities, Carhart's imagination makes the most of it and weaves a tale brilliantly around these truths.

I think that was part of the power of this story for me; that there was enough of the real man and his life within the fictitious rendering of his time in Europe. It reminded me of times in school, studying the Indian tribes (though mine would have been about the tribes within Canada as opposed to those featured in this story). This book made me want to research the people involved and learn more about them all.

It was a bit inconsistent at times with letters from Baptiste to Clark or Duke Paul's journal entries, as they weren't regularly organized but the content within these entries/letters helped maintain the flow and timeline of the story, so for me it was a very minor issue. Overall, it is beautifully, lavishly written and truly transported me to another time and place. From Carhart's telling, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau is definitely someone I wish I could have met.

Fun historical fact: According to my Google-ing of the history of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, I discovered (from Wikipedia) that he is, in fact, the only infant to ever appear on US currency.
Click here for the Wiki reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baptiste_Charbonneau . That's a pretty prestigious place to hold in history, in my opinion!

To learn more about Thad Carhart, click her for his website ThadCarhart.com

Tuesday Teaser: Nov. 17, 2009

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly event hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.
Here is how it works:
Grab your current read
Open to a random page
Share two (2 or 3) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
Share the title & author, too, so that others can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My teaser quote for this week comes from Across the Endless River by Thad Carhart.

Paul sounded weary, and it occurred to Baptiste that he wasn't happy about returning home after his North American adventure. Fatigue from the voyage was surely catching up to both of them as they entered the outlying districts to the northwest of the capital. Tired as he was, though, Baptiste could hardly contain the excitement he felt at the prospect of reaching Paris, the place whose name in St. Louis meant a kind of earthly heaven.

To this I say: God bless the authors who write long sentences where only 3 are needed to complete a paragraph, therefore a whole thought! (Okay the early 1800's language of the book might be catching up to me, lol)

I hope you emjoyed my teaser;-)

Author Article by Thad Carhart

Imagining the Past in Paris

By Thad Carhart,
Author of Across the Endless River

To walk in Paris is to walk through multiple layers of the past, more than 900 years of built history that awaits any stroller. Having lived here for twenty years, I've seen the city change with new roads and bridges, new museums, new rows of apartments. And yet the deep respect that Parisians have developed for what they call their patrimoine, their inheritance, ensures that old buildings are regularly restored and preserved, integrated into the flux of daily life. The look of the city changes subtly, as it has throughout history.

The biggest transformation in modern times was simply the cleaning of the stone edifices of central Paris, initiated in the 1960's by de Gaulle's Minister of Culture, André Malraux. No change could have been more surprising, or more deeply satisfying. When I was a very young boy living in Paris, I was convinced that all of the buildings were made from the same stone, black as night and so softened by centuries of wood and coal dust that the surface was a felt-like matte whose edges looked as if they would soon crumble. This was the "atmospheric" Paris of all those voluptuous black-and-white photos (what blacks and grays there were on every side), the ponderous Paris of Buffet prints and countless tourist posters.

Then the government started to clean the major monuments one by one -- Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre -- and the transformation was shocking, almost troubling in its strange newness. The buildings of Paris weren't black after all, but very nearly . . . white! It took almost two decades of careful cleaning and restoration, but Paris emerged from the process the albino twin of its former self. To appreciate the contrast, buy a vintage postcard aerial view, dating from 1970 or earlier, at one of the bouquiniste stalls along the banks of the Seine, then compare it with the present-day aerial shot: the era of dirt and grime looks like a photographic negative of the light and airy Paris that current tourists will recognize as the "real" Paris.

Walking, however, reveals just one facet of the landscape. Recently, in researching a historical novel, I needed to imagine Paris as it would have appeared in the 1820s. The first stop for any such endeavor is the splendid Musée Carnavalet, the Museum of the City of Paris, whose collection documents in elaborate and fascinating detail every step of the city's past. As I consulted paintings, prints, and manuscripts, many of the differences were obvious: in 1825 the Champs-Elysées was already a broad, fashionable avenue, but the Arc de Triomphe did not yet grace its rise; the Eiffel Tower wouldn't appear until 1889; and, of course, Beaubourg, the Pyramid of the Louvre, and the Grande Arche, all sturdy Paris fixtures today, would only appear within the last four decades.

Another clear difference was the absence of cars, though factoring them out mentally also involved imagining the presence of horses . . . lots of horses. As I examined the numberless paintings at Carnavalet, I thought a lot about the look, the sound, and the smell of tens of thousands of horses plying the streets of Paris close to 200 years ago. Merely disposing of their manure -- and Paris was very well organized in this department -- was a Herculean task daily. And, just as in our day, when playboys often drive Porsches and tradesmen more likely use vans, the paintings reveal fancy thoroughbreds ridden solo by dandies, sturdy draft horses pulling huge wagons, and bony nags hitched to battered carts.

Perhaps the biggest surprise that comes with seeking the past in the Paris landscape, especially after examining the documentary record, it to realize how little the scale of buildings has changed over the centuries. With two exceptions on the Left Bank (the Tour Montparnasse and the university's Tour Jussieu), no high-rises spoil the illusion in the center of Paris that the modern age has yet arrived. Individual facades, a modern infrastructure, and hordes of cars all tell a different story, but the look and feel of many quartiers -- the Marais and the Latin Quarter are simply the best known examples -- would feel appropriate to a Parisian of the early nineteenth century. This tenuous, heady relationship to the past is often seductive, and yet it can also feel weighty, old-fashioned, and artificial. How long it can prevail in the face of change is anybody's guess.

©2009 Thad Carhart, author of Across the Endless River

Author Bio

Thad Carhart, author of Across the Endless River, is a dual citizen of of the United States and Ireland. He lives in Paris with his wife, the photographer Simo Neri, and their two children.

For more information please visit http://www.thadcarhart.com/