Dandelion Wine (English and French Edition)Audiobook

Most of my exposure to Ray Bradbury has been via his more genre-oriented fare - an area which I tend to prefer to nostalgia and overly poetic prose about small-town America - and so I've been putting off Dandelion Wine for a bit now, expecting to bounce off of it given my aforementioned aversion to its topics and mood. And yet, despite those misgivings, I couldn't help but find myself caught up in Dandelion Wine, which has an odder spirit to it than I expected, mixing its sepia-toned memories of a long-forgotten summer with glimpses of magic and even some horror, as Bradbury makes use of a lot of his previous written stories (including "The Ravine," which I always liked) to create a vivid summer via a collage effect of interrelated - and unrelated - tales. I didn't know that Dandelion Wine was a fix-up novel when I picked it up, and oddly, that would have made me more inclined to pick it up; what it means is that Bradbury is ever drifting here, mixing and matching stories without worry about pigeonholing himself beyond "summer through the eyes of children in the early 20th century." Maybe that means memories of the past through an elderly general; maybe that means an unlikely romance separated by a generation; maybe that means a serial killer in the outskirts of town; and maybe it just means the departure of a close friend without warning. Somehow, it all works, and while the prose is a little heavy-handed when it comes to the poetry, it all works and creates something (to steal a descriptor from a friend) "utterly lovely." Nostalgia may be a toxic impulse, as John Hodgman says, but there's also something beautiful about being reminded about the limitless possibilities of youth, and if Bradbury is a little syrupy at times, it all still works and gives you something whose charm and simplicity is hard to not be won over by.

Ray Bradbury August 22nd 1922 - June 5th, 2012 When Ray Bradbury died reactions came from everywhere including from President Obama. Surprising to me, few mentioned the one of his works that meant so much to me and affected my life so deeply. While he was most known to the general public for his science fiction, I found his mostly autobiographical novel Dandelion Wine to be the most impactful. At the same time it best illustrated Bradbury’s incredible command of the language, his ability to stir the imagination, and the way in which he could open windows on life.

I couldn’t count the number of times I would reread a single sentence and become overwhelmed with admiration and envy at how he used words to create images in the mind’s eye. All this was particularly on display in Dandelion Wine and its sequel, Farewell Summer. For Bradbury, it couldn’t be just water. “Nothing else would do but the pure waters which had been summoned from the lakes far away and the sweet fields of grassy dew on early morning, lifted to the open sky, carried in laundered clusters nine hundred miles, brushed with wind, electrified with high voltage, and condensed upon cool air. This water, falling, raining, gathered yet more of the heavens in its crystals. Taking something of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south, the water made rain and the rain, within this hour of rituals, would be well on its way to wine.” Essentially, Dandelion Wine is the story of a summer in the life of a twelve year old boy as he comes to understand what it means to be alive. But it is also a time capsule for the year 1928 of life in a small town when everyone’s world was much smaller and more compact. There is horror, love, comedy, wonder, nostalgia, and human relations. Bradbury could find unique ways to describe them all.

I first read Dandelion Wine in 1957 when I wasn’t much older than Douglas Spaulding, the central character. It helped me put life in perspective as I was leaving high school. I read it the second time in the early ‘80s when I introduced my daughter to it. Kelly and I sat on our front porch swing one warm summer evening and I read aloud to her the story of Bill Forrester and Helen Loomis. It was all I could do to finish it and when I did we both had tears streaming down our cheeks. Such was the power of imagination and Bradbury’s ability to stroke it to life using just words.

I read it the third time in preparation for reading the sequel, Farewell Summer, written 55 years after Dandelion Wine. Like a fine wine, it had only gotten better with age. Appropriately, Farewell Summer was given to me by Kelly and I read it on summer’s eve 2012. It was the perfect beginning for yet another summer.

In both books the ravine in Green Town, Illinois, based on Waukegan, Illinois where Bradbury grew up was a central feature. I couldn’t resist going to Googlearth to see if the ravine was real. It was. And, it is still there even after Waukegan had changed from a small town to a satellite of Chicago. I was pleased to simply find I could locate it. But when I zoomed in and highlighted the little tree symbol I found the ravine is now Ray Bradbury Park. Perfect!

Dan Winters June 29, 2012

Ray Bradbury is usually one of my October go-to writers. To sit by an open window on an autumn evening reading Something Wicked This Way Comes is to experience a literary overdose; a sensory explosion of leaves, skies, and enchantment. Prior to reading Dandelion Wine, I had no idea Bradbury could weave this sort of magic during the hot, stifling summer months.

Reading Dandelion Wine was not so much about reading about the impressions one hot summer left on a sensitive, young Illinois boy, but more about reliving the experiences and impacts hot Virginia summers left on young Terry Ferrell. The further I read into the novel, the less I saw of the excitable Douglas Spaulding. Instead, I saw 12 year old me running through the pages with blades of freshly mowed grass sticking to wet toes, while finding magic in every branch and twig in the little woods beside the house. Douglas's grandfather transformed into my grandfather, taking me on rides on the back of his tractor to feed the cows and collect the hens' eggs. Douglas's summer traditions and memories became my own recollections.

From a traditional reader's standpoint, this is a wonderful novel and one that should be added to your summer reading list. I'll even go far enough and suggest this novel deserves a place on the shelf right beside The Cather in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, and maybe even more deservingly so. Bradbury constructs passages and events that make all of us feel like a twelve year old boy in the summer of 1928. It is this ingenious construction and combination of syntax, symbols, and senses that the novel almost warps from a novel into a carefully and intricately laid map of suggestions guaranteed to lead the reader back to their lost and maybe slightly forgotten summers of youthful magic.

Upon reading the very last sentence of this novel, I had tears in my eyes. The type of tears that are little bittersweet, wet flecks of crystal, maybe chipped from a hot July ice block, that come from when you are reunited with someone you have not seen for years and are then forced to say goodbye again all too soon. Like the first day of a new school year, the goodbye you thought you had an endless summer to put off saying comes quicker than you ever thought possible. But, in the end, you are glad you had chance, no matter how short.

...The trigger phrase for one of the most haunting sub-stories in this work of genius. I haven't read the book in years, but I have just ordered it from Amazon.com.

Gabriel Bernstein has got it. It is perfect. Ray Bradbury is a beautiful writer, whose very reverence for LIFE itself is a joy to behold.

The sheer quality of the reviews for this masterpiece tells you something about the kind of reaction that the average reader has had. It touched them. It reached them, in a way that few things ever do. Transcendent is certainly the word to describe the experience I had with this and other Bradbury books - the breathtakingly original The Halloween Tree being another must-have.

In the section I referred to in the title of this review, a young man meets an elderly lady in an ice cream parlor/store and they are both triggered by the phrase "a dish of lime vanilla ice". The inference is that they are a pair of star-crossed lovers, who either have been a couple in the past (in another life) or will be in the future, in a time when a young boy meets a young girl in a similar setting, and they re-experience this magical, soul-triggering phrase...

As a writer myself, I can appreciate the sheer magic that Bradbury shoe-horns into every paragraph. The warmth, the humanity, the feeling of just being glad to be alive in order to savor every sunrise, every cold winter's morn, the sound of the crickets, the smell of the apple blossom, the rumble of an old Ford, the impossible sweetness of that heart-stopping first kiss...

I live in a small town myself, and ordering books and CDs is a frustrating task. I cannot thank Amazon enough for being my lifeline to so many modern works of genius, such as this and indeed any other book my this true Modern Master.

By the way, Doug Spaulding is a combination of Bradbury's middle name Douglas and his father's surname, Spaulding (his mother was Bradbury).

I simply cannot recommend this highly enough.

DANDELION WINE is first and foremost the story of a 12 year old boy discovering that he is alive. I was lucky enough to read this gorgeous, perfect novel, wrapped in a library's dandelion yellow hardcover, the summer of my 12th year, in the small town of New Haven, Indiana, probably wearing my own pair of Red Ball Jets or Keds, lying in my living room as usual, curled up in a chair with the screen door open to let in the blustery summer wind and sun, with the lush green Indiana grass blowing in waves just outside. I understood what Bradbury was saying at age 12, an incredible thing in itself, since the themes here are fairly grown-up. Essentially, this book is about a boy flooded with the sudden realization of his own "aliveness", and never has a child's experience of innocent living been so perfectly, passionately illustrated. Douglas Spaulding lying in the grass, or feeling the keen pleasure and pain of carrying heavy laden buckets of self-picked berries out of the woods while the handles crease the insides of his hands. Douglas Spaulding discovering the wonder of a Number Two pencil, and the joy of rising early in the morning to watch his town come to life with the sunrise. Douglas Spaulding discovering that nothing makes a boy fly weightless through his summer vacation better than slipping his feet into the cool, cloudwrapped heaven of a new pair of tennis shoes. I found this book, at age 12 and several times since, to be an experience ranking with the most important books about human life that I have ever read. Bradbury sees so much, and conveys the experiences so clearly that one knows what Douglas and Ray know by the end. This is a book about passion and joy and being fully alive from moment to moment. It is a sonnet to and affirmation of childhood and innocence of such persuasive power that it has become a key volume of my core library. I don't expect everyone to have such a trascendent experience in the reading, and not everyone is fortunate enough to read this book at as perfect a moment as I did. But it is undeniable in its power and equal to the greatest work Ray Bradbury has produced, in my opinion. I was fortunate enough to meet him and thank him for it while at college. But this book has meant more to me than I could tell him. Give this to a boy you care about, or read it to evoke, soothe and elevate the child in you. It is pure poetry, Bradbury at the height of his powers, written with genius, on the vital topic of the nature of life. I can only say Douglas Spaulding has never left me. You may find him equally provocative.