The Forest

A Fable of America in the 1830s

By: Alexander Nemerov

Narrated by: Clarke Peters

Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

This audiobook narrated by Clarke Peters shares a vivid historical imagining of the lives of individuals—from painters, poets, and politicians to enslaved people, artisans, and travelers—in the early United States

Set amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters—such as Thomas Cole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner—are well-known, while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs.

The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths or go their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For Alexander Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions of the people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

©2023 Alexander Nemerov (P)2023 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“This is a wonderful book, Sebaldian, digressive, moving and shocking and beautiful. It is an extraordinary achievement.”—Edmund De Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

“The Forest is a series of richly imagined, gemlike tales that capture the worlds of nineteenth-century Americans. Born of tactile sensations and inspired by nature, this is literature as a kind of cultural history. Nemerov has forged a new genre of writing, prompting us all to think about the hidden fictions within our own efforts to reconstruct the past. Reading this extraordinary book made me love the nineteenth century anew.”—Angela L. Miller, coauthor of American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity

“Nemerov is the consummate poet of the past, steering history writing in a new direction through the power of his language. His images come from art history, popular culture, and history, but many are borne aloft only through the visual suggestiveness of his descriptions. A bold and successful experiment in American studies.”—Michael Ann Holly, author of The Melancholy Art

"Nemerov writes with a poet’s precision and wildness. He tells the stories gently and quietly and ferociously all at the same time. This is a whole breathtaking world conceived through the presence and specter of trees. In the end, one might just say that this book is a prayer.”—Kevin Quashie, author of Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being Black

Disappointing

This book is a series of vignettes about characters in mid-19th century America, very loosely tied together by the theme of trees. The vignettes are interesting, and well-written, but the book doesn't cohere as a narrative or develop its theme. The audiobook is not helped by the editorial decision to treat the material poetically, so it is read in a declamatory style, with drawn-out diction and falling intonations, that doesn't really work.

Not suited to audio?

Reviews and an author interview made this sound so intriguing. Alas, with its scattered nonlinear narrative I just can’t follow it in this format.