The tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.
Stunning, almost pitch-perfect, with a harrowing tale and beguiling characters ... A rare, remarkable book to be kept and reread — for its beauty of language, its gentle wisdom and its steady, unflagging hope.
Nobody describes profound joy or 'blazing love' with such infectious abandon as Enger, and it’s a pleasure to be back under his influence ... About 80 pages into I Cheerfully Refuse, a grisly murder shatters Rainy’s equilibrium and veers the novel into much darker territory ... This is a book whose margins strain to corral marital bliss and executions, goofy optimism and torture, natural beauty and pedophilia, bonhomie and lynching ... Does the world need a sweet apocalyptic novel? Is such a thing even possible? This doomsday in daffodils will surely exasperate some readers, but for others — myself included — it offers an alluring itinerary toward hope.
Darker than anything Mr. Enger has written to date. The novel conjures a queasy future that cannot extinguish the best in us. As readable as anything he has written, it refreshingly concerns itself less with the miraculous than with what is right before our eyes, even when we want to look away ... Whatever similarity this novel has with other works of postapocalyptic fiction, Mr. Enger brings these two individuals fully and firmly into view—an accomplishment that is beacon enough.
