Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION HEG | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION HEG | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A novel of immigration and love follows a German man who flees to the U.S. at the start of the century and makes a life for himself, spawning four generations of descendants.
Author Notes
Ursula Hegi (born May 23, 1946) spent the first 18 years of her life in post-World War II Germany. When she tried to ask questions about the war, she received only vague answers and heard little about the Holocaust. Hegi immigrated to the United States in 1964.
Now an award-winning novelist, Hegi is best known for her book Stones from the River. Picked by Oprah Winfrey as a selection for Oprah's highly successful book club, the prequel to Hegi's highly-praised Floating In My Mother's Palm traces the path of average Germans during the turbulent wartime years from 1915 to 1952. Narrated by a dwarf who eventually learned that being different is a secret that all humans share, Stones from the River was nominated for a PEN Faulkner Award and received the Governor's Writer's Award.
Also the author of the books Intrusions, Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, and Salt Dancers, Hegi is the recipient of more than two dozen grants and awards, including an NEA Fellowship and five awards from PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards. She has also written over 100 reviews for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Much as she did in Stones from the River, Hegi creates a social world in microcosm, and, following her characters for almost a century, fashions a saga of hidden loves and destructive obsessions. The fictional German town of Burgdorf, the setting of Stones and Floating in my Mother's Palm, also figures in this novel, the story of a German-American family and their fellow residents in an opulent apartment house set, inappropriately,in a rural community on the shores of New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee. In 1905, Stefan Blau, recently emigrated from Burgdorf, has a vision of a girl dancing in a courtyard (foreshadowing identifies her as his eventual granddaughter, Emma) and resolves to give substance to his dream in a building that he will call the Wasserburg. Stefan's passion for the Wasserburg is also a curse, manifested when both his first wife and his second die in childbirth. Determined not to risk another child, he returns to Burgdorf and marries Helene Montag (sister of Leo, the dwarf Trudi's father in Stones). Helene tricks him and has a child of her own--and survives--but the sibling rivalry among Stefan's offspring, combined with the personality defects they acquire when he reserves all his love for the Wasserburg, will threaten to destroy the family. Hegi uses the story of the Blaus and their tenants and neighbors to examine the social pressures on German-Americans during two world wars, and to contrast the differences in cultural attitudes and behavioral standards. She tends to animate characters in terms of psychological eccentricities (one of Stefan's sons eats compulsively to make up for paternal cruelty; his sister can foresee the future and heal by touching; and the eponymous Emma has the same obsession with the Wasserburg that prevents Stefan from nurturing his family). The eventual deterioration of the Wasserburg symbolizes the family's decay, but the much-signaled curse on the house is finally broken. Hegi's gift for depicting family dynamics and sexual relationships, including the concealed sorrows and tensions that motivate behavior, anchors the narrative, but it is her larger perspective of a family's cultural roots that grants her novel distinction. Agent, Gail Hochman. 6-city author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Minor characters from Hegi's previous novel, the popular Oprah pick Stones from the River (1997), emerge centrally in this engrossing epic story of five generations of the Blau family, from 1894 through 1990. At 13, Stefan Blau leaves Germany for New York, eventually settling in a small lakeside town in New Hampshire. Widowed twice after two brief marriages, Stefan is left with two small children, one from each marriage, and has almost completed building an apartment house he calls the Wasserburg, the most elegant residence in town. He returns to Burgdorf to marry his childhood friend, Helene Montag, the sister of Leo Montag and aunt of Trudi, the central character in Stones. A bride at 32, Helene has long pined for Stefan; yet, as they make their home in America, "a constant shifting between discovery and loss," she is bitterly disappointed in his lack of passion and failure to connect with her and his children. This theme of unfulfilled love permeates the life stories of Helene's two stepchildren, her own child with Stefan, their granddaughter, Emma, and Emma's son Stefan. In time, the once-beautiful Wasserburg becomes outdated, and the sense of community there is lost. Emma must choose between her tenacious will to keep the Wasserburg from crumbling and her connection to her only brother. With the telling of so many life stories, family members at times seem somewhat interchangeable, defined more by events in their lives than their unique internal selves. Hegi beautifully captures a child's perspective, and her enormous talent for detailed and nuanced imagery lends rich substance to this sweeping saga. --Grace Fill
Library Journal Review
Hegi's seventh novel (e.g., Stones from the River; Salt Dancers) is a gripping family epic that spans the 20th century. Beginning in 1894 when 13-year-old Stefan Blau leaves Burgdorf, Germany, for the imagined splendor of the New World, the book charts the twists and turns of four generations. Politics and pathology are central players. Readers will come to know the difficulties of assimilation--a problem heightened by World War II, when German Americans were routinely greeted with derision. They will also meet men and women with a variety of compulsive disorders like overeating and overspending and will witness what it was like for gay men and independent women during the repressive 1950s. Hegi has created a milieu full of sexual energy--the book is often erotic--and has captured both the tension and love endemic to all tight-knit families. Compelling and absorbing, this old-fashioned saga is rife with passion, tragedy, and redemption. Highly recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/99.]--Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
