Darlington's Fall
A novel written in verse chronicles forty years in the life of naturalist Russel Darlington, from a seven-year-old boy chasing frogs in an Indiana swamp in 1895, through college and marriage, to a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman.
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The hero of this one-of-a-kind novel is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero. We meet him in the year 1895 - a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp. And we follow this idealistic, appealing man for nearly forty years: into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling marriage; across the Pacific, where on a tiny, rainy island he suffers a nightmarish accident; through the deaths of friends and family and into a seemingly hopeless passion for an unapproachable young woman.Darlington's Fall is ultimately a love story. It is written in verse that - vivid, accessible, and lush - imparts an intensity to the story and its luminous gallery of characters: Russel's rich, taciturn, upright, guilt-driven father; Miss Kraus, his formidable housekeeper; Ernst Schrock, his maddening, gluttonous mentor; and Pauline Beaudette, the beautiful, ill-starred girl who becomes his wife. Leithauser's embracingly compassionate outlook invites us into their world - into a past so sharply realized it feels like the present.
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