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Chargement... Lying With the Dead (édition 2009)par Michael Mewshaw
Information sur l'oeuvreLying With the Dead par Michael Mewshaw
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Lying with the Dead is another very good novel by an author I have missed along the way. Michael Mewshaw has a wonderfully engaging style of writing that makes the reader look forward to every page. The story is as fascinating and timeless as Aeschylus' trilogy, The Oresteia. Themes of love and hate, envy and compassion, dominance and submissiveness, humor and pathos, and death and endurance unfold in lyrical sentences not unlike those of the author quoted in the novel, William Faulkner. Three sibling narrators with very different points of view alternate describing with unique insight the action centered on their mother. My favorite was Maury, the ultimate survivor in his own world of self-protective rituals and limited understanding of the motives of others. Though he lacks the worldly sophistication of his brother and the religious confidence of his sister, Maury's understanding of life is more natural and existential than his siblings. This is another fortunate selection of a novel (5 stars) that allows me to add the other 10 novels by this author to my reading list. Similar to Maury, I just need a palm-size house where I can look into the window and see where I sit in my chair to read. If you can just see clearly and concretely inside something, especially yourself, the lies of others can't defeat you or give you a legacy of poison in your blood.
Mewshaw’s interlacing of viewpoints freshens this overworked family-reunion terrain, minimizing the anticlimactic thud of his characters’ closeted skeletons.
In this novel, Greek tragedy meets a dysfunctional family from Maryland, revealing how time and place matter little when it comes to the implacable logic of the darkest human emotions. A family matriarch--half Medea, half Clytemnestra--calls home her three children, who take turns narrating the story. Quinn, the wonder boy who has become a successful actor in London, must fly in from England, putting a new love interest and a career-boosting role in a BBC production of the Oresteia on hold. Maury, whose life is defined by his Asperger's and a terrible crime committed when he was a teenager, rides in on a bus from his quiet, impoverished life out west. Candy, the eldest at fifty-five and the only one still a devout Catholic, is already in Maryland, where she takes care of her mother and dreams of retiring to North Carolina with her boyfriend. Once the family is reassembled in the childhood home, the pieces of a dark puzzle come together over brilliant and witty exchanges. Mewshaw invites us into the heart of a family dynamic, exploding prejudices about love, religion, and murder. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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The narrative alternates among the three voices of the siblings, but, because there’s little difference between Candy’s and Quinn’s voices (Maury’s Asperger’s makes his voice a bit more distinct), much of the effect is lost. Further, depicted as unrelentingly abusive and selfish, the mother has few redeeming qualities and forms an unconvincing emotional center of this novel. Mewshaw’s real strength is in writing credible dialog. At least half the book (and probably more) is straight dialog, which keeps the pace lively and engaging. Although lacking depth of characterization, Lying with the Dead is an entertaining and quick-paced family drama.
This review also appears on my blog Literary License. ( )