Book review: A River Runs Through It made me cry
I finished reading A River Runs Through It last week. The prose — written by Norman Maclean in his ’70s — is so powerful and poetic, it halted me on several occasions. The ending made me cry.
Among other things, Maclean dishes advice on faking it until you make it: “Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to be perfect,” he writes. Or as his brother Paul often said, “Gentleman, you can’t catch fish with flies in the air.”
Maclean also takes aim at modernization: “What a beautiful world it was once… You could leave beer to cool in the river, and it would be so cold when you got back it wouldn’t foam much. It would be a beer made in the next town if the town were ten thousand or over. So it was either Kessler Beer made in Helena or Highlander Beer made in Missoula… What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis or St. Louis.” (NOTE: You can replace the word “beer” with just about anything. Nostalgic.)
But my favorite passage was this: Continue reading…