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Exiles: A Novel | 
| Author: Ron Hansen
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $23.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 25673
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 227
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 1
ISBN: 0374150974
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374150976
ASIN: 0374150974
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of “elected silence” with an outpouring of dazzling poetry. In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for England and then America. On board were five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck’s laws against Catholic religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the Thames and more than sixty lives were lost—including those of the five nuns. Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen’s gorgeously written account of Hopkins’s life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling. Combining a thrilling tragedy at sea with the seeming shipwreck of Hopkins’s own life, Exiles joins Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (called “an astonishingly deft and provocative novel” by The New York Times) as a novel that dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life and makes it accessible to us in the way that only great art can.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Art's Alternative Reality August 25, 2008
Exiles, by Ron Hansen
I `m excited to review this book, because Hansen has been one of my favorite writers for a decade. His literary interests have been eclectic, and his skill at writing is something of an inspiration. He's moved from literary westerns to medieval religious culture and persecution, to Hitler's Third Reich, and then to a romantic comedy in his previous book, Isn't It Romantic?
Writers who move so nimbly between genres should be praised to the literary heavens but, sadly, Hansen's readers and reviewers do little more than grumble about his genre changes. Which is probably why he hasn't been able to maintain the following his writing deserves.
Exiles is Hansen's first since Romantic, which was published in 2003. If you haven't guessed from the very rough summation of his writing above, Hansen seems fascinated with history as a subject for fiction. And he seems to have a more than ordinary interest in Catholicism as a sub-culture of Western society. With Exiles, he gives us a moment in history, overlain by its effect on European Catholicism, and throws in a bit of literary history in the bargain.
Exiles is really three stories: the life of Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, the wreck of the German ship Deutschland (which carried five nuns escaping religious persecution in Bismarck's Germany), and the poem Hopkins wrote about the event, The Wreck Of The Deutschland.
I hadn't realized how ambitious such a simple-sounding project could be until I began reading the book. And it appears the inherent difficulties in weaving these three themes into a coherent story seduced Hansen a bit as well.
The book begins with Hopkins as a sometime-poet, all-the-time young Jesuit. He reads of the wreck, then reads deeper, probably morbid with fascination about the five nuns' deaths and the details of the wreck. Then he moves to the nuns and their personal histories, alternating huge chunks of narrative about Hopkins. Finally, he presents in dazzling prose the nuns' ill-fated escape from Germany.
Giving the reader such huge slabs of disparate narrative made this reader wonder at Hansen's focus. The book seems to stop and start several times, without a sense of novelistic continuity. It would seem a more coherent story to have braided these pieces in smaller segments.
But not to worry. The second half makes the book worthwhile. His interweaving becomes tighter, and we see the eloquence that first drew me to be Hansen's fan. Some examples--all from his depictions of the shipwreck tragedy-- that wow me:
"The ship had become an island of affliction and torture as a snowfield of sea foam washed over the quarterdeck, stealing whatever it could..."
"The ship groaned in its overweight of water. An injured elephant noise."
"Wind or wetness snuffed five of the six tapers, so that there was only a mist of yellow light in the gloom of the saloon."
Admittedly, Hansen's pushing the envelope here, but it's not purple prose. He uses such narrative moments to amplify the emotional backdrop of the wreck--and they work.
His historical purpose here is clearly to depict Otto von Bismarck's attempted eviction of Catholics from Germany, this setting the stage for the Third Reich's deeper discriminations. If one were to go deeper into Hansen's intent here, one might also sense a feeling of history's vagaries. The unpredictability of life also affected Hopkins, forcing him to work in obscurity (perhaps the way Hansen has). Hopkins' good friend Robert Bridges became England's Poet Laureate, and the preserver of Hopkins' work. Ironically, Hopkins's literary stature grew in subsequent years, while Bridges' waned.
Such is the condition of creative writing: one makes choices that bring fame and fortune in one's lifetime; others, perhaps truer to their art, eschew fame in the moment, only to gain literary stature beyond their lifespans.
It's also interesting to compare the history of the Deutschland wreck to Hopkins' long poem to Hansen's broader account. From such comparison we can only conclude that such fact-based literary perspectives create something separate from history, perhaps art's alternative reality--the one literary theory constantly struggles to explain.
 finally a fiction book about gerard manley hopkins! August 22, 2008
I just finished reading this very interesting book and encourage anyone who loves the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ to read it also. The author skillfully weaves the story of the five German sisters who died on the ship Deutschland with the story of the Jesuit poet, G.M. Hopkins, as he converted to Roman Catholicism, entered the Society of Jesus and wrote an epic poem about the shipwrecked deaths of the five sisters. The author sprinkles in many words or phrases that seem to come from Hopkins' poetic vocabulary and he fleshes out a story that shows the prolonged deaths of the five nuns who were coming to America to avoid anti-Catholic laws in Germany and to ultimately work in hospitals in the Midwest. Obviously, I love Hopkins' poetry and lately, I have become quite interested in Hopkins the person, wanting to know more about him, as he was a literary genius who lived a very obscure and ordinary type of life.
 Dive into these Deep Spiritual Waters with a Master Storyteller July 16, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Reading Ron Hansen is diving into deep waters. I've been recommending his novels for a number of years and occasionally readers return to me frustrated with some of his tougher novels like the provocative, "Hitler's Niece."
"Hitler" isn't a great first choice for most readers. One woman who started there told me, "I think you're mistaken about this guy. I couldn't finish his Hitler book and I'll never read another one."
Ever since Brad Pitt starred in the movie version of Hansen's "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," I've encountered the opposite problem. That movie was so slow that people are leery of a novelist who they suspect may be - well, boring.
Quite the opposite. Some passages in Hansen's books are downright page turners, including portions of this new novel about the 19th-Century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose life is changed when he learns the news of a tragedy at sea.
Here's the key to Hansen's novels: Themes in his overall body of work are like literary demonstrations of Frederick Buechner's central theological affirmation: Fundamentally, we tell our stories because we have a deep yearning to participate in a far greater story. Whatever terrible secrets we think we are concealing, we soon discover that they weave themselves into this far, far larger narrative. And, in telling those stories, ultimately, we find ourselves in a community not only with other storytellers, but with the ultimate Storyteller.
That's the best recommendation I can give to Hansen's work. And also, it's my suggestion on how to read Hansen. Start with this fascinating new novelized slice of biography. This tale from the life of Hopkins, the hauntingly eloquent 19th-Century Catholic poet, is a perfect Hansen theme (and Buechner fans would argue a subject that's resonant with Buechner's central themes as well).
Hopkins' complex poetry has inspired countless men and women for more than 100 years - and yet his own troubling search for faith led him to make some strange decisions in his life. Plus, the water metaphor in this review is appropriate, because this novel also explores the spiritual impact of a famous shipwreck that killed a group of exiled German nuns. The wreck had an indelible impact on Hopkins' life and, through him, it now echoes through Hansen's novel to have an impact on the larger world even to this day.
But don't judge this novelist - or his life's cycle of stories - until you've paddled around in his waters for a while and sampled more than this single book. For further swimming, I would strongly recommend "Atticus" and "Mariette in Ecstasy."
 Like reading boring history. July 6, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
The idea for this book was great, Hopkin's creation of The Wreck of the Deutschland but Hansen wrote it as fiction and it read like a boring history book. It was missing all the messy details of people and life. There was no reason to really care about anyone. He also committed the sin of telling instead of showing. Example: "Hopkins was a marvel to his students." Okay, how? What did he do? Why should I care? Some of the writing was over the top as well, here's an example: ". . . wisteria, flowers, stalks, and stems - all long and lovely and lush; the world full of juice and joy." I read a review of Frey's new book and it was described this way, it "brims with facts but is lacking in credible fantasies, the failure is artistic." When I read that I felt like I was reading a review of Exiles.
Answering the Call June 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Ron Hansen's Exiles is the achingly beautiful story of the intersection of the lives of six religious exiles, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the 19th century Jesuit poet and five German Franciscan nuns. Hansen outlines the backgrounds of each of these six and details how they carried on their lives both in the world and later as members of their respective religious communities. The ever so human face of each character is revealed in ways that both move and deeply touch the heart of the reader.
The lives of Hopkins and the five nuns run parallel courses as they have taken on similar journeys. All six renounced their own ambitions and made the decision to respond to "God's Will" by going wherever they were sent, and doing whatever was requested of them without question, under "Holy Obedience". This obedience to the "Will of God" as expressed in the decisions made by their superiors cost them their very lives, in more ways than one.
Hopkins left his family, his friends and his home in England in obedience to his Jesuit superiors. Ultimately, he renounced his very humanity in order to answer God's call, as he heard it.
During a period of religious intolerance in Germany, the Franciscan nuns, members of the Salzkotten Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, left their homeland and set off aboard the steamship Deutschland for the United States. They planned to go to Missouri to assist with the running of a daughter house of their religious community. They never made it.
The sisters, along with more than 60 other passengers, lost their lives after the Deutschland ran aground on a sandbar at the mouth of the Thames River in early December 1875.
After reading about the wreck of the Deutschland and how the cold cruel waters snatched the lives of these religious women and the other passengers, Hopkins was inspired to commemorate this tragedy by writing the ode "The Wreck of the Deutschland". Prior to this, he had given up writing poetry, something he loved. He felt that time and energy spent composing poems, detracted from living out his vocation as a Jesuit. By renouncing that which he loved he also renounced that which both enlivened his spirit and enriched his teaching. Hopkins was a brilliant eccentric who didn't quite fit the Jesuit mold. Had his life taken a different turn, he may have experienced a joy he only could dream about.
Hansen's stirring tale of these six religious seekers is truly a treasure. It is gloriously written and profoundly moving. Perhaps we can all identify with being exiles in some sense, leaving the loved and known behind, in response to a spiritual call.
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