| A
Hunter’s Confession tells the story of hunting—both
its history and the role it has played in David Carpenter’s
own life, including the reasons he once loved it and
the dramatic hunting incident that made him give up
hunting for good.
Winding
through this narrative is Carpenter’s exploration
of the history of hunting, subsistence hunting versus
hunting for sport, trophy hunting, and the meaning of
the hunt for those who have written about it most eloquently.
Are wild creatures somehow our property? How is the
sport hunter different from the hunter who must kill
game to survive? Is there some bridge that might connect
Aboriginal to non-Aboriginal hunters? Carpenter ponders
questions like these as he describes what hunting has
meant to him and to others throughout history and in
our own time.
Carpenter
beautifully evokes the sensual pleasure of holding a
gun, the inherent spirituality among hunters, the intense
relationship between the animals and their pursuers,
and the transcendent joy of hunting. Finally, he conveys
poignantly how for him animals have been transformed
from objects of hunting to objects of wonder. |
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| 2010
Book of the Year
Saskatchewan
Book Awards
"A Hunter's Confession is a thoughtful
and personal meditation on hunting, hunters and the
relationships among and between people and animals.
It is a beautifully-written and intimate personal journey
through an ancient, complex and persistent realm of
the human experience."
"Less a confession
than a leisurely meditation, Carpenter traces his own
evolution from hunter to non-hunter in a thoughtful,
rather rueful tone. His continued ambivalence about
the pursuit he once loved accurately reflects the sense
of uncertainty many of us feel about situations where
humans and wildlife collide. The absence of polemics
is a big plus. Hunters and non-hunters alike will find
themselves learning from his insights."
"A Hunter's Confession
is not only a book about hunting, but a love story to
the land and the animals that have graced this particular
hunter's life over the past thirty years. It's a bold,
beautiful book, a portrait of a passion.'
-2010
Sask Book Awards- Judges comments on
A Hunter's Confession
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Hunter's
Confession wins Sask. book of year
CBC
news article >>
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"In
walks David Carpenter with his gentle, old-fashioned
memoir of a hunting life. His narrative is told with
comic gusto, his own youth recalled in ... dramatic
fashion.... He realizes he has been, for may years,
an ambivalent hunter. Doublemindedness crept in and
now he aligns himself with how some aboriginal friends
approach the hunt. He speaks of a respect for the kill,
and an understanding between the animal and the hunter
that puts the animal's soul at peace.... Carpenter no
longer carries a rifle or a shotgun ... he gave his
guns away. He still fishes and he will enthusiastically
sit down and eat a meal of wild game shot by someone
else.... Perhaps this is the complicated doublemindedness
he possesses these days. Competing beliefs that, of
course, mirror very closely most of our own less-than-dogmatic
ways in the world."
-Michael Winter, The Globe and Mail, April
3, 2010
full
review
"You
don't have to be a hunter or an anti-hunter to appreciate
this book. You only need to love fine writing."
-
Jake MacDonald, author of Grizzlyville.
"The
most thoughtful and gracefully modulated yet deliciously
ambivalent apologia in defense of hunting I have seen
in print."
-
Trevor Herriot, author of Grass, Sky, Song.
"Carpenter
argues convincingly that a hunter can also be a conservationist
and an environmentalist, and that hunting "can
lead quite naturally to a communion with nature."
Along the way, he provides illuminating background on
the history of hunting, the literature dealing with
the sport, the history of women in the hunt, and the
importance of hunting for native communities. ...What
unites A Hunter's Confession and [his short
stories in] Welcome to Canada is the grace
of Carpenter's prose. Spare and often colloquial, Carpenter's
writing invites comparisons with Ernest Hemingway and
Thomas McGuane, but his voice is his own. Despite the
fact that it is one of the less-travelled areas of our
literary landscape, Carpenter Country is a place well
worth visiting."
-
Stephen Beattie, review editor of Quill & Quire
full
review
"A
Hunter's Confession is Carpenter's third book in
less than three years, following a funny novel (Niceman
Cometh), and a fine story collection (Welcome
to Canada). All three offerings show his keen ear
for vernacular, his robust sense of humour, and his
thought-provoking insight into what it means to be a
member of the human species in today's world. In this
latter regard, A Hunter's Confession belongs
on the same shelf as two other recent works: Winnipegger
Jake MacDonald's Grizzlyville and Reginian
Trevor Herriot's Grass, Sky, Song. All three
remind us city folk that we share the planet with an
amazing array of other creatures."
-David
Williamson, The Winnipeg Free Press, April
3, 2010
full
review
"This
is a generous-hearted book about being awake and paying
attention while we're out on the land--again, something
Carpenter learned from hunting--of treating it as if
it was our own house. And if we don't treat it very
well, we should learn how."
-Bill
Robertson, The Star-Phoenix, May 8, 2010
full
review
"Carpenter's
experiences hunting with his father and later with his
friends are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction
if not irony, perhaps the very essence of the experience
of the hunter who hunts not because he has to in order
to survive, but because he loves to do it.... The trip
one takes is definitely worth the effort, and I shall
reread this book at my leisure and pass it on to my
son, who has been a passionate hunter since the age
of two but is showing signs of the same ambivalence
at the tender age of 23. Perhaps all hunters have a
half-life of two decades. My take on Carpenter's enduring
message is that society eliminates the ambivalence-fraught
experience of hunting at the resource's, and perhaps
even its own, peril."
-Ehor
Boyanowsky, Literary Review of Canada
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