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Nov. 6th, 2002 01:28 pmAs I predicted, it is taking me quite a while to finish -The Vision of Emma Blau.- This is not to say that it's not a good book, it just doesn't move at a very rapid pace.
It's interesting that I compared the book to Allende and Garcia Marquez, because the more I read, the more the similarities strike me. As with -The House of the Spirits- and -One Hundred Years of Solitude,- Hegi is relating the story of family that stretches across several generations. In the beginning of the book, the story is primarily about Stefan Blau. Now, nearly 400 pages into it, the main characters are his granddaughter and great-grandson. Hegi is wonderful at characterization, and she has done a great job of bringing all these generations of people to life, but for some reason I am left wondering why exactly she has bothered. It's the same question that I was left with after reading -House of...- and -One Hundred Years...- I guess that perhaps I prefer a book that is set in one particular time at people's lives, something with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. These huge family epics seem to start in the beginning and then go sprawling forever through the middle, never really coming to an ending point. I mean, if Hegi is going to tell me the life stories of Stefan Blau and his wife, and then tell me the life stories of all of their children, and then tell me the life stories of the children's children, then why should she ever stop? Of course, I haven't finished the book yet, so Hegi may prove me wrong, but novels of this type never seem to have a particularly satisfying conclusion, rather they seem to simply peter out for no good reason after the fifth or sixth generation.
I don't mean to imply that I don't like any book that is concerned with anything beyond the here and now. I simply like a book in which the plot is more clearly defined. In all three of the books I mentioned above, the plot seems to be nothing more than the families that are the books' subjects. I prefer books in which the events a related by something stronger than the fact that they happened to the same person. Take a book like Jane Smiley's -A Thousand Acres,- for example. It's the story of a family, and it certainly delves back into that family's history, but the action of the book all takes place within the space of a summer. All of the exploration of the characters' back-stories is done with the clear intention of showing how the events of that summer spring from the history of the previous generations who have farmed the same land. That book offers what seems to me to be a much more compelling method of telling this kind of epic familial story. Jane Smiley gives readers a riveting present and uses that present to divulge the past, whereas Ursula Hegi just lays everything out in chronological order from beginning to end. Neither method seems like an inherently better way of telling a story, but Smiley's method just works better for me for some reason.
Of course, we'll have to see if I change my mind about all this once I've finished -The Vision of Emma Blau-...
It's interesting that I compared the book to Allende and Garcia Marquez, because the more I read, the more the similarities strike me. As with -The House of the Spirits- and -One Hundred Years of Solitude,- Hegi is relating the story of family that stretches across several generations. In the beginning of the book, the story is primarily about Stefan Blau. Now, nearly 400 pages into it, the main characters are his granddaughter and great-grandson. Hegi is wonderful at characterization, and she has done a great job of bringing all these generations of people to life, but for some reason I am left wondering why exactly she has bothered. It's the same question that I was left with after reading -House of...- and -One Hundred Years...- I guess that perhaps I prefer a book that is set in one particular time at people's lives, something with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. These huge family epics seem to start in the beginning and then go sprawling forever through the middle, never really coming to an ending point. I mean, if Hegi is going to tell me the life stories of Stefan Blau and his wife, and then tell me the life stories of all of their children, and then tell me the life stories of the children's children, then why should she ever stop? Of course, I haven't finished the book yet, so Hegi may prove me wrong, but novels of this type never seem to have a particularly satisfying conclusion, rather they seem to simply peter out for no good reason after the fifth or sixth generation.
I don't mean to imply that I don't like any book that is concerned with anything beyond the here and now. I simply like a book in which the plot is more clearly defined. In all three of the books I mentioned above, the plot seems to be nothing more than the families that are the books' subjects. I prefer books in which the events a related by something stronger than the fact that they happened to the same person. Take a book like Jane Smiley's -A Thousand Acres,- for example. It's the story of a family, and it certainly delves back into that family's history, but the action of the book all takes place within the space of a summer. All of the exploration of the characters' back-stories is done with the clear intention of showing how the events of that summer spring from the history of the previous generations who have farmed the same land. That book offers what seems to me to be a much more compelling method of telling this kind of epic familial story. Jane Smiley gives readers a riveting present and uses that present to divulge the past, whereas Ursula Hegi just lays everything out in chronological order from beginning to end. Neither method seems like an inherently better way of telling a story, but Smiley's method just works better for me for some reason.
Of course, we'll have to see if I change my mind about all this once I've finished -The Vision of Emma Blau-...
