INSPIRED BY ALASKA
Author Tanyo Ravicz skiing
Born in Mexico City, brought up in L.A., Tanyo graduated from Harvard University in 1984 and eventually wound up in Alaska, homesteading on Kodiak Island.
Alaska is a huge and humbling place of simple but boundless fascination, of mystery and unfinished creation, and although Tanyo Ravicz didn’t set foot here until he was twenty-five, the place has held an off-the-road, over-the-horizon attraction for him since grade school.
In his writing, the settings are often Alaskan, not only in the natural surroundings, but, crucially, in the story lines which the settings make possible. Alaska has fundamentally conditioned Ravicz’s style of realism.
Don’t tell…but Tanyo is addicted to Alaska.
Although he didn’t set foot in Alaska until he was twenty-five, the place has held an off-the-road, over-the-horizon attraction for him since grade school.
The Confessional
We asked & our authors answered…
Tanyo has been known to…tell a lie if the truth is meaner
Things Tanyo likes…tandoori red, scents of rose and orange blossom, anise, pistachio, sound of skis in snow, breaking waves and murmuring voices, bare feet in the moss, blue notes and firm ripenesses, a berry bursting on the tongue, birdsong
He’ll never get caught…having nothing to write about but the angst of being a writer having nothing to write about in a world that doesn’t give a rat’s whisker whether you write about having nothing to write about or not.
A favorite/line expression and where it’s from: “If you can take it you can make it.” Unbroken
Alaskans You Most Admire: Sydney Laurence, Norman Vaughan, Howard Rock
Favorite Alaska places: Chena River, Kupreanof Peninsula, Alyeska
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Description
This book, says Ravicz, is more than an adventure novel or a study of an obsessed character. It’s the human personality under every kind of duress, physical, emotional, social and spiritual. Poverty, immigration, and the harshness of the labor market are constant realities. But Florentino is not only brutalized by events–he is victimized by his own illusions. Ultimately what he seeks–a priceless wild mushroom growing in the heart of a desolation, a gold for the gilded 1990s–isn’t attainable. What he may recover, if he survives, is self-acceptance and a more forgiving vision of the world.
A MAN OF HIS VILLAGE occupies the epic terrain of the West, from the borderlands of California to the strawberry fields of Oregon, from urban Seattle to rural Mexico, from the crowded slums of Tijuana to the isolation of the Alaskan bush. This is a novel of pride and redemption, the voyage of a passionate soul out of innocence across a continental landscape of exploitation and betrayal.
Sneaky Peek
Alaska! His nostrils swelled in the salt air. One more job, then home for certain. Twenty dollars an hour! Think what that means. The sun never sets, she says. I’ll pick forever. It’s an opportunity. It’s what I came north for. You’re not perfect, Florentino, not by any means, but this will make up for things. And you deserve it, you’ve worked hard, it’s your due. Thanks to God, hm?
Mushrooms! Calculations of profit went ticking through his head that night, and his elation didn’t so much keep him awake as it made sleep unnecessary.
