Exiles

"The great Sicilian mystery writer Leonardo Sciascia once quipped, 'A man who dies tragically is, at any moment of his life, a man who will die tragically.' For the historical novelist, this is a potent proposal—essentially, the dramatic key to a story in which the ending is predetermined and plot twists are not an option. In Ron Hansen's novel Exiles, the dramatic inevitable belongs to the five drowned German nuns to whose memory the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins dedicated perhaps his most important work, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland,' a poem that was neither understood during his lifetime nor terribly well-liked. Returning to the religious territory of his acclaimed 1991 book, Mariette in Ecstasy, Hansen tells the story of the poet-turned-Jesuit seminarian so moved by news of the 1875 shipwreck that he breaks a seven-year abstinence from writing to compose a tribute. Hansen's novel, like the poem it's based on, takes up the dramatic scene aboard the Deutschland, a grisly, slow-motion sequence in which 157 people die from exposure, drowning or battering waves after the German steamship ran aground on a sandbar in the North Sea . . . Hansen's portraits are sincere and affectionate."—Minna Proctor, Los Angeles Times

"Dazzling and beautiful . . . Amazing . . . [It] kept me up after midnight three nights in a row."—The Washington Post Book World

"[An] Elegant, meditative novel . . . [In] the sublime Mariette in Ecstasy, Hansen deftly conveyed the intensity of religious experience that verged on insanity. Exiles, for all its storminess, is a quieter but equally affecting depiction of a spiritually and artistically transcendental life."—The Boston Globe

"Ron Hansen sketches a delicate portrait of Hopkins as he writes the poem, then juxtaposes it with a vigorous picture of the doomed ship's last hours. He brings his usual magic to the task."—Chicago Tribune

"In Exiles, Hansen returns to the spiritual realm, casting back to 1875 and an infamous shipwreck that took the lives of five exiled nuns en route to America—and compelled Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins to break the vow of creative celibacy hed taken when he abandoned literary life for the priesthood, and to write his monumental poem, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.' Hansen's ability to sinuously inhabit the soul of Hopkins as he suffers to find his voice, and attempts to reconcile the world's suffering with the will of God, is nothing short of a miracle."—Vanity Fair

"A shifting, sympathetic depiction of piety and piety's torments . . . a brave meditation on religious experience."—The News and Observer (Raleigh)

"Exiles by Santa Clara professor Ron Hansen is the brave fictional account of the life of English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), and of his writing 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.' The fiction does not deviate from what is known about Hopkins' life, or the shipwreck (1875), but it adds the dimension of a fine novelist's interpretative art."—Michael D. Langan, The Buffalo News

“One cold night in December 1875, the German steamship Deutschland ran aground in the Thames estuary in England, and more than 60 people died, including five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarcks laws against Catholic religious orders, were on their way to begin a new work in Missouri. This tragedy captured the imagination of a young Jesuit named Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he began working on a long poem, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland, that would help catapult him long after his death into the upper echelons of British poets. In Exiles (his seventh novel), Ron Hansen imagines the lives of the five nuns and Hopkins and draws on themes of faith and identity. He paints these characters as exiles in their different ways as they struggled to follow their vocations. As he did in his first two novels, Desperadoes and The Assassination of Jesse James, Hansen combines meticulous historical research with his novelist's skill at creating character and drama. Clearly he is most absorbed with Hopkins, the sensitive and eccentric seminarian who abandoned his literary career to pursue the priesthood, to whom Hansen gives the most pages. Yet his accounts of the five nuns, about which ‘very little is known, he writes in ‘A Note on Sources, are where the novel comes most alive. As readers we are drawn to these obscure German women who come out of ordinary homes yet are drawn to the religious life. And we are moved as they face their deaths on the ship when 'forty-four passengers and twenty crew . . . died between five in the morning on December 6th and sunrise on December 7th' . . . Once another seminarian looks at the poem Hopkins is working on (‘The Wreck of the Deutschland), and he fails to understand Hopkins elaborate use of meter. Hopkins says: 'I shan't publish it. The journals will think it barbarous.' The other asks, ‘Why write it then? and Hopkins replies, ‘Why pray? In that short scene, Hansen captures not only Hopkins struggle but the struggle of many artists who feel compelled to do what they do, even if no one acknowledges it. As is usual, Hansen's writing shines . . . By the end we grieve Hopkins short life and sense of exile as much as we do the nuns' deaths. And this novel sends us to the poems, to those pioneering works that altered our sense of language and its possibilities.”—Gordon Houser, The Wichita Eagle

"In Exiles, novelist Ron Hansen imagines the collision of piety and passion, sensuality and asceticism, hope and despair that caused a revolutionary new poetic rhythm to break through the self-imposed silences of a Jesuit seminarian named Gerard Manley Hopkins. Obsessed by the drowning death of five shipwrecked Franciscan nuns in 1875, Hopkins produced his masterpiece, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland, one of the holiest terrors in English poetry. Succumb to the poem's spiritual undertow, and ponder the dark uncertainties of faith."—O, The Oprah Magazine

"One of our finest novelists . . . Hansen conveys a man conflicted by his callings as both a spiritual vessel and a full-blooded artist."—Entertainment Weekly (