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Summary
Summary
"Exuberant...Unforgettable." THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Lucy Marsden, is narrowing in on her 100th birthday. She had been married to her husband William More Marsden since she was fifteen. But Willie, a veteran of the Civil War, never recovered from his youthful foray into battle, and more importantly, the loss of his closest friend. And the stories Lucy has to tell of the war, Willie, her life with him, and the tales she heard from his one-time slave Castalia, call to mind a time and a place, a history and a legacy that is not soon forgotten, and a call to justice that never should be. "An old-fashioned book-lover's novel." CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Author Notes
In 1966, as a conscientious objector faced with possible charges of draft evasion during the Vietnam War, Allan Gurganus found himself on a four-year tour as a message decoder on an aircraft carrier. While at sea, Gurganus, who had studied to be a painter, developed the idea for his first successful novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) after reading an article that described how Confederate veterans were granted pensions in the 1880s, making them prime marital candidates for much younger women. The novel features Lucy Marsden, a feisty ninety-nine-year-old North Carolina widow, and spans the 1850s to the 1980s.
Gurganus's subsequent books include Blessed Assurance: A Moral Tale (1989), The Practical Heart (1993), and Plays Well With Others (1997). He has written a number of short stories that have appeared in periodicals such as Granta, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper's, and Paris Review, and in books such as The Faber Book of Short Gay Fiction (1991). Eleven of his short stories are collected in The White People (1991).
Gurganus was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1947 and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College (B.A., 1972) and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop (M.F.A., 1974). He has taught fiction writing at University of Iowa, Stanford University, Duke University, Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has had his paintings displayed in many private and public collections.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Ninety-five-year-old Lucy Marsden tells of her marriage at 15 to 50-year-old Civil War veteran ``Captain'' Marsden, who, permanently traumatized by events he witnessed, makes a lifetime career of reminiscing about the conflict and collecting weapons to memorialize it. PW concluded that, despite some overwritten sections, this long novel is ``an unforgettable reading experience.'' Author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A long (720 pp.) first novel--partly grand entertainment, partly hobbyhorse--about a century-long battle between the sexes. Told mostly as oral history, it's occasionally garrulous, but it's also full of lore and a voice at times worthy of Eudora Welty. Lucy Marsden, born in 1885 or thereabouts, tells the tale at age 99 from Lane's End Rest Home, and she takes the book's epigraph to heart: ""Myth is gossip grown old."" In rhythm with Lucy's memory, the narrative meanders between war stories, family conflicts, rest-home instances, and rudimentary feminism. Lucy was the child bride of Captain Willie, a media-stop (oldest Civil War veteran) in modern times. Willie, crazed from the War, never got over the death of Ned, a beautiful boy, so Lucy's marriage chronicles a lifetime of abuse--until she wins a death-struggle and kills a nearly senile but still-cagey Willie. That climax takes a while to reach, however, for Lucy delivers many other richly told stories: Willie's war anecdotes, as well as a more grandiloquent version of the War told to Lucy by a classroom teacher; Willie's mother ""Lady"" Marsden's story (Yankees bum down her mansion and freed slaves loot it); the epic tale of ex-slave Castalia Marsden, ranging from Africa and slave ships to a present-day kinship with Lucy; the story of Lucy's nine children and of her own growth into liberation and feminism (""Males are frailer and shorter-lived and overly talented at the pride that depresses""); and a host of other tellings, usually in Lucy's gossipy dialect. A Disneyland for Civil War buffs--in a modernist version of Gone with the Wind--that's sometimes tedious but more often panoramic and moving. Either way, it announces the arrival of a genuine talent--one who seems to specialize in excess. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Ninety-nine year old Lucille Marsden, confined to a charity nursing home in North Carolina, is an American cousin of Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle. Lucy tells the story of her marriage to ``Captain'' Will Marsden, ostensibly the Civil War's last survivor, whom she married when she was 15 and he was more than triple her age. She also tells about her husband's experiences in the war and after, the burning of her mother-in-law's plantation by Sherman's men, and the abduction from Africa of a former Marsden slave, midwife to Lucy's nine children as well as her best friend. But this novel is less about the War Between the States than about the war between the sexes. And, like Finnegan's Wake , it's also about how history is recorded and about how lives are turned into stories. Lucy's voice casts a spell as enchanting as Scheherazade's; a first novel to be slowly savored and richly enjoyed. BOMC selection.-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
