By making heard voices from the Russian wilderness, Patterson makes visible the wilderness of the world. Patterson shows that the problem of meaning in human life is a problem of homelessness, that the effort to return from exile is an effort to return meaning to the word, and that the exile of the word is an exile of the human being. Thus he pursues the connections between exile and identity, identity and meaning, meaning and language. Novels you can devour in a few hours Impossible to stop reading. By 'exile' he means not only a form of punishment but an existential condition.ĭrawing on texts by such familiar figures as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, and Brodsky, as well as less thoroughly examined figures, including Florensky, Shestov, Tertz, and Gendelev, Patterson moves beyond the political and geographical fact of exile to explore its spiritual, metaphysical, and linguistic aspects. LIGHTNING-FAST STORIES BY JAMES PATTERSON. Why does it happen? What does it mean? And how are we implicated?ĭavid Patterson responds to these and related questions by examining exile, a primary motif in Russian thought over the last century and a half. David Wolfes life is approaching an exhilarating peak: hes a successful San Francisco lawyer, hes about to get married, and hes being primed for a run for. Refugees and fugitives, the disillusioned and disenfranchised grow in number every day.

I always anticipate Pattersons novels and this was well worth the wait. As with Pattersons novels on abortion and gun control, this novel takes a very difficult topic and renders it infinitely readable and understandable for everyone. No one in the modem world has been spared the encounter with homelessness. Both sides are portrayed with great emphasis on the violence and futility suffered by both sides. Yet in modem life there is an experience common to all that threatens the very basis of community-the experience of exile. The life of a human community rests on common experience.

Exile patterson novel