About book For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down (2000)
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down was another novel we read in my seminar class this year, and was my first DAR (David Adams Richards) novel. I KNOW. I don't know how I am Canadian, not to mention a Maritimer, and even worse a New Brunswicker and have not read anything by DAR, (though thankfully I'm not from the 'chi). I blame my French heritage.(For those of you who don't know, DAR=pretty big deal here)Anyway the novel basically revolves around the memories and statements of various people about this one guy: Jerry Bines, who may or may not been involved in a scheme involving a trailer tractor belonging to Bines's relative and ultimately resulting in his imprisonment. And throughout the novel the various characters debate and draw forth different ideas and images of who Bines was as a person. In a way it reminded me a lot of my history research class (Exploring History) in my 2nd year at university. I know this sounds odd, but in that class we read a piece on an example of oral history. In this particular event a village believed that two separate events, the death of a young man and a revolution, were causes and effects of one another even though historical evidence suggested otherwise. The result was a communal memory that tainted the original events, and in many ways For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down reminded me of this event. Because throughout the novel they are so many sides to Bines that never show us the real man, and instead are all part of this oral, communal memory of the man that is truth and not truth at the same time. And I mean, besides the fact this is definitely a different way of writing a novel, I really liked how DAR indirectly talked about the idea of memory and its fluidity, and how it shapes our own perception of our history as well as perception itself. As a novel For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down is an interesting experiment revolving around the idea of memory, and is an easy read about the nature of humanity. One of the things I (and our class) had a problem with is the portrayal of feminism within the novel through one of the characters. The character, a mother deluded by what she believes was incestuous sexual abuse both on her person, and later her daughter, is a anti-violent feminist who rallies against her husband and uses Bines's relationship with his abusive and mentally unstable father in continuing to rally against violence. Her beliefs, both about the nature of her own relationship with her father as well as her daughter's with her husband, and Bines's with his, are sadly wrong and taken out of context, and thus allow DAR to make a statement about the institution she's representing. This is something, as a class, we had a problem with because it didn't allow for any positivity, and basically condemned the social aspects this woman was representing as being corrupted by her own delusions and perspectives. On a personal level, I both enjoyed and didn't enjoy For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. Its prose, as a result of being an oral piece, was confusing and for about 1/3 of the way not only did I have not idea what was going on, I really didn't care to know. The characters were probably my favorite part of the novel as DAR provides a well balanced and varied cast that even though he doesn't focus on them too much, are still fleshed out enough to feel real. The plot is fairly bare as the majority of the novel mostly deals with memories and switches between the past and present.All in all, For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down was an interesting novel about the nature of identity and how it can become skewered through the memory of others. While negative in terms of its insights on the ideas of institutions, the novel as a whole is definitely something to be read, not only by Canadians, but for a global audience as well. At its core, after all, the novel is about people and how we shape the world we see around us. 3/5
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