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When a car of inebriated guests from Carmen's wedding hits and kills a girl on a country road, Carmen and the people involved in the accident connect, disconnect, and reconnect throughout twenty-five subsequent years of marriage, parenthood, holidays, and tragedies.
DanieXJ: Both of these Carol Anshaw books take a look at life from a variety of points of view and yet have a plot throughout as well and don't get lost in the philosophizing.
jayne_charles: Not many parallels between these two books plot-wise, but they had a strikingly similar tone and while reading one I was constantly reminded of the other.
I should have passed on this book. I read one of her others a few years back and it was, how do I say it, a little better than this one.
I almost gave up half way through but decided to finish it just to get it over with.
This family was truly the most dysfunctional family I've read about. It started out with one sister's wedding (Carmen) which ended in tragedy with her brother's (Nick) girlfriend driving erratically and then the whole book was one tragedy after another to me. They were all different personalities with issues of their own throughout the whole book. Alice was sort of okay but her on/off relationship with her lesbian girlfriend got a little old and the sex was not graphic but too much for me and I'm not a prude. ( )
Anshaw is a genius at pulling together family and friend strands into a united whole world for the reader, penetrating the depths of all her characters, even the minor ones. In this novel, we meet three siblings - Alice, Nick, and Carmen - immediately after a disastrous drunk and drugged-driving accident, when a little girl is hit and run over following Carmen's wedding. With the tragedy opening the novel, we follow what becomes of those who were in the car and the newlyweds. Alice becomes a famous artist stuck in a bad groove with her flighty, ambitious girlfriend, Carmen's husband eventually divorces her to run off with a missionary, and Nick, an astronomer, has a secret about the accident which sends him over the line into addiction. As the siblings age, the accident's impact reaches into their lives with amazing force, and the reader will ache for their subsequent good and bad decisions.
Quotes: "She was a terrible actress, wooden. Often she appeared stunned by the other actor's line."
"It was not a good situation when the same person provided the pain and the analgesic."
"I don't think he's terribly interested in a tragedy so big that everyone else is in on it. He's a tragedy snob." ( )
I'm struggling to rate this book. I don't know what it was about it but I felt relieved to finish it. Siblings Carmen, Alice and Nick along with a few friends carry a burden. On their wedding night Carmen and Matt watched their siblings departure. They were weaving down the road in a car driven by a drunken, stoned driver with no headlights on. Of course the outcome was disastrous when they accidentally hit and kill a young girl. The book follows the lives of the three siblings over the next twenty five years. Yes their lives continue on but they never forget the child. They all pay a price (although it sounds like a fairly dysfunctional childhood contributed) - Carmen's marriage dissolves, Nick battles addiction and Alice while painting the girl into her art struggles with commitment to relationships. Although well-written, I failed to connect with the characters and their struggles. It has had many positive reviews but I tired of the emphasis on lesbian sexual encounters. I must be getting old... ( )
Carol Anshaw's superb Carry the One opens in 1983, with a wedding and a tragedy in quick succession. The wedding of Carmen and Matt is a pleasantly raucous affair, held outdoors at a bohemian farm in rural Wisconsin. Folk songs are loudly sung, and as a pleasant haze of alcohol and pot permeates the evening, Carmen hopes, with only a little apprehension, "to sit out this early phase of her marriage, the mortifying dances segment".....
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
On the night came undone like a party dress And fell at her feet in a beautiful mess. - "Barroom Girls" Gillian Welch/David Rawlings
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
In memory of Dog Stanley 1948-2004
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
So Carmen was married, just.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The streets along the water slipstreamed with bicycle traffic. --Alice in Amsterdam
She only knew it was him by the way the crowd deferred and dispersed, as though street-sweeping brushes spun in front of him while he moved slowly along the perimeter of paintings. --Alice referring to Kees Verwey, a famous painter, at her museum showing in Amsterdam
She anticipated his worst criticism. She shared the curse of many artists—that praise beaded up and rolled off her while criticism stuck like glue, glue embedded with ground glass. --Alice referring to Kees Verwey
Alice listened to the small echo created by this conversation, the space outside the words that told her she would sleep with this woman tonight. Everything between now and that eventuality was just filler.
Alice saw the standard equation of attraction had been altered for her. Not only would she not have to hang her own paintings anymore, she would no longer have to rely on her own charms. From here on, for a time anyway, her name alone would be enough to slide her into the beds of admirers. A flinch of sadness caught her.
He stopped and for just a beat, they were both listening to the same soft ocean of fiber optics. --Gabe and Carmen
A face forged in the fire of too much bad experience. Fights, lost jobs, accidents with machinery, domestic disputes. --Terry Redman
He stood in a whippy wind, watching a darkening sky, a spring storm fast approaching. He understood that by taking this, his second punch from Terry Redman, another extremely small adjustment, a minute recalibration had occurred in an as-yet-unsolved equation. This must have been what he came for. --Nick
The neighborhood used to be a hodgepodge of dilapidated frame houses and low brick factories with vague industrial activities, and was farther west than anyone lived, anyone she knew. In the past few years, though, it had become fashionable. Architects had revamped the industrial buildings into studios, yuppies had bought the houses and renovated them with narrow-board siding and Victorian gingerbread trim. All she had to do to become hip was stay put and get the right siding. Sort of how staying in exactly the same position politically had moved her from liberal to radical. She had left the moving to others. --Carmen
The plane was made of metal the thickness of a license plate.
In order to keep liking Nick (as opposed to loving him, which was non-negotiable), Alice sometimes had to look at him obliquely, or with her eyes half closed, or through a pinhole in a piece of cardboard. Straight on would burn her retinas.
If war was a happy thing, it would be like this. Even as they were going to sleep, late crackers were still popping sporadically, the last kernels in the bag of microwave popcorn.
Romance no longer looked like so much fun, more like a repetitive stress injury—beginning with Maude, but by now also including all the failed and pathetic attempts to replicate that constellation of emotion with someone else. --Alice
By mid-afternoon, Carmen was sifting the text for the subtext. "We're through the information-gathering part. The information is now in. Now they're shaping this for our consumption, imposing a story line. The brave passengers taking the last plane down in the field. The firemen rushing in heedlessly, answering their call to duty. And pretty soon, they'll get the president ready for his close-up to congratulate us for being Americans. This huge unprecedented, unmanageable mess, all the complexity behind it—they're already starting to manage it. They're making a theater piece out of pure horror so we can watch the unwatchable then get back to the mall." --regarding the 9/11 terrorist attack
Silence settled on them like a pall. Inside the din of the bar, the silence at the table entered the realm of negative sound.
"It's as easy to commute between New York and Tucson as Chicago and Tucson," she told Maude. They talked like this now—gorgeous, decorated lies spilling from their mouths as they waved at each other from farther and farther off. --Alice and Maude
"Excellent upgrade. Self-regulated morphine drip," he reported. Then tapped the control clutched in Loretta's hand. "A person could get a little trigger-happy." --Nick
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
"There. You're okay now," she said, then into the phone, "No, I was just talking to someone here."
When a car of inebriated guests from Carmen's wedding hits and kills a girl on a country road, Carmen and the people involved in the accident connect, disconnect, and reconnect throughout twenty-five subsequent years of marriage, parenthood, holidays, and tragedies.
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I should have passed on this book. I read one of her others a few years back and it was, how do I say it, a little better than this one.
I almost gave up half way through but decided to finish it just to get it over with.
This family was truly the most dysfunctional family I've read about. It started out with one sister's wedding (Carmen) which ended in tragedy with her brother's (Nick) girlfriend driving erratically and then the whole book was one tragedy after another to me. They were all different personalities with issues of their own throughout the whole book. Alice was sort of okay but her on/off relationship with her lesbian girlfriend got a little old and the sex was not graphic but too much for me and I'm not a prude. (