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W E D N E S D A Y
The rural South will never recover from the PR damage done by James Dickey‘s unforgettable novel, Deliverance, in which “civilized” men are cast into a wilderness populated by hostile human creatures. Dickey replays that theme in To the White Sea, a novel about a World War II gunner shot down and forced to use his Alaska-learned survival skills to stay alive in bomb-torn Japan. The novel is full of classic Dickeyan moments—such as the protagonist’s transcendental realization, while holed up in a Japanese sewer, of how the hunted animal feels about the hunt. For the first time, he writes, “I knew how the marmot feels when he makes it to his hole, how the badger feels, how the snowshoe hare feels when he understands that the color that’s been given him is right, that it works…that nothing can get him because nothing can find him.” Dickey reads from the novel at 7 p.m. at Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. FREE. (202) 364-1919. (Liza Mundy)