Back to the start - Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

Train Dreams, the Pulitzer nominated novella by playwright, poet and U.S National Book Award winning novelist Denis Johnson, is the life story of Robert Grainer, a man who ‘had one lover… one acre of property, two horses, and a wagon… [had] never been drunk… never purchased a firearm or spoken into a telephone.’ Born at the end of the nineteenth century and dead a year before the Summer of Love, Robert labours in the American West, cutting timber for railroad tracks and then, when he’s too old for that work, carting people’s possessions around the countryside. The book’s chronology is loose, or, rather, Grainer’s whole life comes at us at once.

Right at the beginning of the novel, and somewhere near the beginning of Grainer’s life, he collaborates in an attempt to kill a Chinese man accused of stealing from a construction site. Upon escaping, the supposed thief curses his assailants, and Grainer spends the rest of his life convinced that his personal tragedies are the result of the curse.