The Forest Audiobook By Alexander Nemerov cover art

The Forest

A Fable of America in the 1830s

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The Forest

By: Alexander Nemerov
Narrated by: Clarke Peters
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This audiobook narrated by Clarke Peters shares a vivid historical imagining of the lives of individuals—from painters, poets, and politicians to enslaved people, artisans, and travelers—in the early United States

Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters—such as Thomas Cole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner—are well-known, while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs.

The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths or go their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For Alexander Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions of the people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

©2023 Alexander Nemerov (P)2023 Princeton University Press Fiction Historical Fiction American History

Critic reviews

“This is a wonderful book, Sebaldian, digressive, moving and shocking and beautiful. It is an extraordinary achievement.”—Edmund De Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

“The Forest is a series of richly imagined, gemlike tales that capture the worlds of nineteenth-century Americans. Born of tactile sensations and inspired by nature, this is literature as a kind of cultural history. Nemerov has forged a new genre of writing, prompting us all to think about the hidden fictions within our own efforts to reconstruct the past. Reading this extraordinary book made me love the nineteenth century anew.”—Angela L. Miller, coauthor of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity

“Nemerov is the consummate poet of the past, steering history writing in a new direction through the power of his language. His images come from art history, popular culture, and history, but many are borne aloft only through the visual suggestiveness of his descriptions. A bold and successful experiment in American studies.”—Michael Ann Holly, author of The Melancholy Art
"Nemerov writes with a poet’s precision and wildness. He tells the stories gently and quietly and ferociously all at the same time. This is a whole breathtaking world conceived through the presence and specter of trees. In the end, one might just say that this book is a prayer.”—Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being Black
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This book is a series of vignettes about characters in mid-19th century America, very loosely tied together by the theme of trees. The vignettes are interesting, and well-written, but the book doesn't cohere as a narrative or develop its theme. The audiobook is not helped by the editorial decision to treat the material poetically, so it is read in a declamatory style, with drawn-out diction and falling intonations, that doesn't really work.

Disappointing

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Reviews and an author interview made this sound so intriguing. Alas, with its scattered nonlinear narrative I just can’t follow it in this format.

Not suited to audio?

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The book is a portfolio of short vignettes set in the USA between about 1820 - 1840 plus or minus. It's an odd selection of stories, they don't seem to lead anywhere other than to give a picture of the mindset of the people living in that place and time. No real heavy emphasis on the politics of the day other than a few brief touches on slavery, and even fewer touches white man/ red man relations. Almost nothing on the industrial revolution, gender politics, US relations with Europe or Asia, the waves of immigration, the westward expansion (well, okay, he does touch on Andrew Jackson but not on why he's so important and so polarizing). All these themes are key to understanding this period of history. I applaud the concept behind the book, but was ultimately dissatisfied with its execution. I guess I was looking for a strategy behind the story selection, but couldn't find it.

There are some memorable stories here. The story I can't forget is the mob lynching and roasting of a man who didn't help slave hunters grab a passing runaway slave. The author says some of his stories are fictional, but won't say which ones. I must say that I resent the mixing of fact with fiction unless the author tells us somewhere what is actually true. The idea that you could be hung and burned alive for a crime you weren't even aware you were committing,
when just an hour previously you were peaceably going about your business just like any other day, is horrifying and unforgettable. If the story isn't true, then it's unforgivable to besmirch a peaceable people with the accusation of such a heinous crime.

The narrator has a rich, expressive voice that is a pleasure to hear. My one suggestion for improvement would be to find a way to better indicate when the storyline were changing. The author frequently jumps from one tale to the next, and it becomes very confusing to understand when one stopped and the next one started. Maybe longer pauses between stories to indicate a transition is occurring? I often had to stop and rewind to figure out the last story ended, and how the next story began. This is a narrator's issue, and the editor's issue, to solve.

Somewhat choppy

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