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Epicurus.com - At Weddings and Wakes
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $11.90
Your Save: $ 2.10 ( 15% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385319850
ISBN: 0385319851
Label: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Manufacturer: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 1998-01-12
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
Release Date: 1998-01-12
Studio: Dial Press Trade Paperback
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Editorial Reviews:
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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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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not for everyone
Comment: This is the third McDermott book I've read (Charming Billy and Child of My Heart) and the first one that I didn't absolutely love. The writing is beautiful, but the lack of anything remotely resembling a plot made it a bit of a slog for me. Rather than rely on a through line, it read like a family scrapbook taken in a very particular place and time.
As usual, I found the characters well drawn and slightly mysterious, with the exception of the mother whose unhappiness I can only say must have been genetic.
Still a fan of McDermott's. There is no doubt she is hugely talented.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Couldn't finish it
Comment: I was on a plane trying to read this and instead picked up the airline magazine. I typically enjoy books about Irish families but this one didn't develop characters that I could become interested in. After half way through the book, I just gave up. I normally have a hard time not finishing a book but I didn't regret it. The style just wasn't for me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Pointless and plotless
Comment: I wish I could get those three hours back, even if they were spent driving. The story is told as seen by three children who apparently have no names, as they are always refered to as "the boy" or "the older girl". The book is constantly jumping around chronologically so you never know where you are, and you have to wonder why the author bothered writing it, as there is no plot. Save your money!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Like Monet
Comment: More like a Monet than a photograph, McDermott's, "At Weddings and Wakes" reveals its beauty by memory impressions rather than by the harsh black lines of plot. No less lost than others who have written here in the ebb and flow of the timeline, I, however, trusted the author. And soon I was intermixing with the memories of the book my own childhood memories - and identifying, in the moment, with the joys and tragedies of this family. I dare suggest any who read this book, liking it or not, will find themselves remembering family stories of times past - memories happy and sad, with characters tragic and heroic and possibly rethinking them in the light of McDermott's graceful treatment of such moments. It was an exquiste read. That is, for those who are comfortable with impressions leading you to see clearly the beauty in life's tragedies and joys, as like a Monet painting. But if you need/seek/want the clarity of a photograph for beauty - skip this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Proust in the Suburbs
Comment: Reading At Weddings and Wakes is like sharing a dream. Events are described with a crystalline clarity and tone perfect attention to detail, allowing us to be swept into the experience without knowing a lot of history of the characters.Even the names of the people appear only incidentally later in the book. The book unfolds slowly and almost cinematically as three children accompany their mother on a trip to Brooklyn to visit their grandmother and aunts. The pacing of the book is languid and deliberate. Characters appear and disappear, we hear snatches of conversations and recollections of past events. I love McDermott's language and though I am a fast reader, she forces me to slow down because each word is important. I am in absolute awe of her ability to tell a story, without resorting to conventional plot devices. I was so totally engaged with the characters and the situation, perhaps because it so closely mirrored my own experience growing up in an Irish Catholic family. Yet I believe the book transends the particulars of place as it addresses the central issues of life: joy and tragedy, our inability to let go of the past and our need to enjoy the moment. Through the eyes of the children we understand how events become experience, as they observe adults who seem mired in their histories, unable to find joy in the moment and move forward.
The love the children share with their favorite aunt,May, the only adult, apart from their father who is actively seeking happiness and finding joy, is palpable. It is so finely rendered that it brought back in a piercingly acute way, my own feelings for beloved and now departed family members. Other reader reviews makes it clear this isn't a book for everyone, but I will never forget it.
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