At Weddings and Wakes [ペーパーバック]

Exploration of the make-up of the family and the cycles and bitterness and tenderness which move them, forms the main theme of this novel from the author of "The Bigamist's Daughter" and "That Night", a National Book Award nominee in 1987.

Telling a story through the eyes of children is a tricky business, which is that much more proof of what a magician Alice McDermott happens to be. At Weddings and Wakes, her engrossing portrayal of love and tragedy in an Irish-Catholic family, takes us along with the kids as they accompany their mother on weekly visits to a world of memory and recrimination in the family's old Brooklyn neighborhood. An exquisitely executed little novel that masks all its hard work and complex structure behind finely wrought lace curtains of craft.
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"You only see your relatives at weddings and wakes," says a character in McDermott's delicately nuanced, elegiac and emotionally charged new novel (after That Night ), but the three Dailey children do not realize the significance of the remark until, three days after their beloved Aunt May's wedding, the family reassembles at her funeral. This latter occasion, alluded to throughout the narrative, is the only dramatic incident in this work--and it takes place offstage. Indeed, the story may seem too leisurely and uneventful, until, on completion, the reader experiences the catharsis that good literature provides. This meticulously observed evocation of a close-knit Irish Catholic family is seen through the children's eyes, registering the confusion and dawning knowledge which with youngsters try to understand adult relationships. Two sisters and a brother, they go twice a week with their mother from their home in Long Island to Brooklyn, where their mother's stepmother and three unmarried sisters live. Gradually the children comprehend the personality differences and tensions among the Towne sisters as well as their mother's dissatisfaction with her marriage. Gradually, too, they realize with joy that their middle-aged aunt, a former nun, will marry mailman Fred. In the time frame of one year, McDermott foreshadows and looks back on this event, while creating a world as exact as a documentary film and as lyrically imagined as a poem. A formidably gifted prose stylist, she can make each sentence a bell of sound, a prism of sight. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --このテキストは、絶版本またはこのタイトルには設定されていない版型に関連付けられています。

Scenes of a family unfold through childrens' eyes in Alice McDermott's extraordinary novel. Here, among family rituals and relationships, love and longing, recriminations and regret, an Irish-Catholic family comes vividly, brilliantly to life.

Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. Lucy longs for the ineffable as her sisters grapple with alcohol and absolution and her mother wrestles with the past.

Aunt Veronica, with her wounded face and dreams of beauty, drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, an acerbic student of elegance, sips only from the finest crystal as she sees Aunt May, the ex-nun who has vowed to find happiness, blossom with a late and unexpected love....

And the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family: "...like the dead, their presence would be all the more inescapable when they were gone."

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"A haunted, troubled, beautifully articulated journey into the past."--San Francisco Chronicle.

Sipping effortlessly between past and present, between memory and observation, At Weddings And Wakes tells the story of three generations of an Irish-Catholic family through the eyes of its younger members.

"It's hard to lift your eyes at the end of the book... you'll find yourself reading every word of Alice McDermott's new novel, not because it's complicated but because such wonderful things happen deep inside the senteces."--Newsweek.

At once a haunting evocation of life's inexplicable calamities and a magical celebration of childhood and familial love, At Weddings And Wakes transforms every experience into the heroic and the universal. It is a testament to the remarkable gift of a literary master writing at the peak of her story telling powers.

"A brilliant, highly complex, extraordinary piece of fiction and a triumph for its author."--Chicago Tribune.

"A haunting and masterly work of literary art."--The Wall Street Journal
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"A haunted, troubled, beautifully articulated journey into the past."--San Francisco Chronicle.

"It's hard to lift your eyes at the end of the book... you'll find yourself reading every word of Alice McDermott's new novel, not because it's complicated but because such wonderful things happen deep inside the sentences."--Newsweek.

"A brilliant, highly complex, extraordinary piece of fiction and a triumph for its author."--Chicago Tribune.

"A haunting and masterly work of literary art."--The Wall Street Journal
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Alice McDermott is the bestselling author of Charming Billy, A Bigamist's Daughter, and That Night, a 1987 National Book Award Nominee. She lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.

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