Into the Forest

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Evan Rachel Wood on Into the Forest and Revolutionary Roles for Women", Time, 21 July 2016 , retrieved 4 May 2023 While I can appreciate what the author was trying to accomplish, setting a (post)apocalyptic story in a place far away from society, as opposed to in the middle of a city where the end of civilization is much more obvious, it was handled clumsily. The prose, while it does have a few good lines, is for the most part overwrought and sometimes even seems full of itself. While I can understand that the story is supposed to be the journal of a booksmart 17-18 year old, it was hard to stand it for an entire novel. The way that the sisters are able to suddenly discover and develop wilderness survival skills on their own with nothing but the help of a dry plant identification book is just silly, and the ending, where they decide to burn their (admittedly already falling apart) house down and go live in the woods is hopelessly immature and doesn't seem to be that well thought out considering the rest of the book is trying to subvert the kind of hopelessly optimistic fairy tale narrative that it turns into. There are some rather strange happenings and a rather dreary feeling throughout. This was an odd read I must say but I could not get into the book no matter how I tried. And I did try. Roman surprenant de Jean Hegland qui interroge avec intelligence et finesse la fragilité de notre civilisation : UN CHOC !

Into the Forest". TIFF.net. 2015-07-24. Archived from the original on 2016-07-16 . Retrieved 2015-09-19. Of the children, only Miriam remembered Rochel. But as time passed, her mother’s form and figure faded even further until all that remained with tactical clarity were scattered scenes from the funeral, the feeling of hands and arms lifting her up so she could see above the mourners. But even those memories were devoid of the palpable sting of loss; the connection to Rochel became ever more remote. Whether Miriam was ultimately the product of a too-lenient single father or if she had inherited her self-guiding streak from her mother was something no one, least of all Miriam, could ever really be sure of. But the elder Dworetsky daughter, who made a regular habit of defying convention, would soon provide her father with plenty to worry about. Into The Forest is admirably defiant of many tropes that spring up in most apocalyptic stories, emphasizing its small character moments over large dramatic ones. Even the fact that it takes place in the forest gives it more of an Into the Woods vibe, visually and thematically, than, say, a Mad Max one. When it does require some scenes to move the plot along, these tend to be not nearly as compelling as the quieter scenes, like when the sisters decide to get drunk, or watch videos of their parents. This is where the main interest and heart of the film, and of director Patricia Rozema, seem to be; everything else is texture, although the texture set by the visual and musical tone provides an appropriate feeling of balance being lost. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze used the word ‘rhizone’ which maps onto the literary concept of intertextuality. INTERTEXTUALITY: A Discussion with Chad Hegelmeyer Gutel was a religious if not strictly devout man. The Dworetsky family observed the Jewish holidays and their corresponding rituals and traditions. Every year without fail, he would take the children to synagogue for the Yizkor memorial services in remembrance of their departed mother. As they got a little older, Miriam and Luba became aware of how the congregants’ glances lingered over them; they noticed how elderly women’s eyes welled with tears watching their widower father and his motherless children. But their pity baffled the girls. “What are they crying for?” they whispered to each other. They understood they had no mother, but their father was doting, Itka was always with them. What, they wondered, could they be missing?

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Reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, Into the Forest is a mesmerizing and thought-provoking novel of hope and despair set in a frighteningly plausible near-future America. In my view, Stewart’s book is the finest work of California sf, and the greatest “apology to Ishi.” Apart from anything else, it is an excellent piece of ecological science fiction—Stewart knew the land, the animals and the natural phenomena, and wrote about the likely consequences of a large-scale disaster more authoritatively than anyone else has done in fiction. “Ecology,” surely an unfamiliar concept to the general public in the 1940s, has become a global buzzword since Stewart wrote about it—not only in Earth Abides but in his more mundane California-set disaster novels, Storm (1941) and Fire (1948), and various other books—and of course it remains an enduring theme in California sf, from Ray Bradbury’s classic The Martian Chronicles (in which California is reimagined as the Red Planet, complete with Ishi-like native inhabitants viewed, as it were, from the corner of the eye) to the two recent trilogies by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Wild Shore (1984), The Gold Coast (1988), and Pacific Edge (1990); and Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996)—the former very explicitly about California history and possibility, and the latter featuring Mars as a California surrogate once more (a few British examples excepted, most of the definitive “Mars novels” in sf have been written by California-based writers). C’est une scène d’une idéalisation assez malaisante, dans laquelle une jeune femme violée par un inconnu dans les bois guérit en faisant l’amour avec sa propre sœur.

Hegland “has the ability to make the giant redwood trees seem palpable, to allow readers to breathe in the smell of the rich humus on the floor of the forest.”

What are the chances that a woman who chooses to save a young boy from certain death by momentarily pretending he is her son, would in a chance encounter reconnect with him many years later on another continent? What are the chances this unexpected reunion would then lead to him becoming her son-in-law by virtue of him falling in love with and marrying her daughter? I never knew how much we consumed. It seems as if we are all appetite, as if a human being is simply a bundle of needs to drain the world. It's no wonder there are wars, no wonder the earth and water and air are polluted. It's no wonder the economy collapsed, if Eva and I use so much merely to stay alive.”