Cheap Faraway Places (Book) (Tom Spanbauer) Price

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Customer Reviews of Faraway Places

Nothing is what it seems to be. . .
This book is for just about any only child growing up in the 1950s on a small farm in the middle of nowhere. It captures the inner world of a boy entering adolescence, with a strong religious upbringing, no extended family or friends, four miles from the road to town, with nothing but a drying-up river running nearby and flat land in all directions. Jacob, the central character of this short novel, spends his days alone with his wondering mind and vivid imagination, poised between his dreamy mother and his rough father. As if to fill the void of the family's routine, isolated existence, in which a trip to the Idaho state fair is a highlight of the year, an intense and violent melodrama unfolds around them and draws them all into its vortex.

The title is from a Perry Como recording of the period, and that softly romantic song and singer represent the untroubled surface of a time marked also by McCarthyism, racism, and social hypocrisy. Spanbauer pulls out all the stops as his young hero discovers both the fierce ugliness and the hidden beauty beneath his schoolboy illusions. In the end, after bloody fistfights, hard drinking, domestic abuse, bestiality, killings, a lynching, and arson, a very different song, the Ventures' rock and roll classic "Walk, Don't Run" is playing loudly on a car radio. Finally, the reader is left to wonder how much this coming-of-age story is itself an illusion filling the fevered imagination of a lonely farm boy. I recommend this one for anyone who believes that nothing is what it seems to be.

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A minor masterpiece
"Faraway Places" is an excellent introduction to the novels of Tom Spanbauer, author of "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon" and "City of Shy Hunters," the first of which is a bonafide classic and the second a grand failure. "Faraway Places" is a much shorter work than either of these, and its economy of style may surprise fans of Spanbauer's later books. However, there is a treasure-trove of riches crammed into its 124 pages, not the least of which is the poetic quality of its prose. "Faraway" is the coming-of-age story of Jacob Joseph Weber, a thirteen-year old who, once he witnesses a murder, finds out that the world is a much different place from the one his father has imagined for him, on their lonely Idaho farm. It is a story of violence and betrayal, but it is also the story of forbidden passion and the possibility of something beyond the mundane reality of day-to-day existence. It is also the story of incredible loss: "I would have liked to have slept and dreamed dreams with Geronimo. But he was already too far away." This is a novel rife with metaphor and symbolism that rewards rereading. You may understand Jacob, or Haji Baba, as he renames himself, better once you've read Spanbauer's other two novels, but "Faraway Places" stands on its own as a brilliant indictment of a time (the 1950s) and a place (the American Heartland) and of a self-serving philosophy that, ultimately, is built on a lie. "Everything is an illusion," Mr. Energy tells Jacob, in the course of an eventful trip to the Blackfoot State Fair. But it's the reality that cuts to the quick of Jacob's heart.

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Lovely!
Jacob Joseph Weber is 13 years old, and his eyes are seeing things in ways he's never seen them before.

In 125 pages, Spanbauer tells the story of Jake's journey from boyhood to manhood in a time and place where being a man seems to mean making all the right mistakes. Jake sees truth in places his father no longer can, but in the process of opening his own eyes, he may be helping his father see, as well. See the cruelty of his assumptions, the reality behind the illusions that are all around.

"It was all an illusion, like Mr. Energy, that magician at the Blackfoot State Fair, said. Everything was an illusion according to him. I used to get scared at night just thinking about it: what if everything -- everything that was familiar to me, everything I knew -- was an illusion and what I was really doing was hanging in thin air, like the earth was hanging in thin air, like I could see the moon hanging up there in the sky, a round ball just out there with nothing solid to hold it in place." (p. 13)

This is Spanbauer's first novel and is a lovely introduction to his writing, his mind, and his style. It's a quick read without some of the difficulties of "The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon," but still an elegant look at a moment in a boy's life when he shrugs off the cloak of childhood and does what comes next.

Rumor around Portland has it that this book will be re-issued later this year.