I read this one when it first came out, and went to hear him read. He is one of the great public readers, giving the impression that he is speaking directly each person in the room.

Flesh and Blood is another masterful work by Michael Cunningham, an incredibly gifted writer. Last year I read A Home at the End of the World, the author’s first novel. I absolutely loved it. Though I have not read his Pulitzer Prize winning The Hours, I have seen the movie based on the book several times; it is one of my all-time favorite films. This book written between the two others just mentioned is nothing short of superb.

The novel told from the third person POV chronicles three generations of the Stassos family beginning in post-World War II America. Constantine Stassos, a Greek immigrant, marries Mary Cuccio, a striking young woman of Italian heritage. Early in their marriage trouble develops and Mary soon feels she has married below her station. Things rapidly spiral downward in their relationship. They have three children. Susan, the oldest, like her mother is very attractive; ironically she pays a heavy price for her natural beauty. Her father has the disturbing habit of touching her often and for too long, suggesting sexual cravings for her. While outwardly she seems the most conventional and successful of the children, below the surface she is quite unhappy. Billy, the brightest of the three, has a stormy relationship with his father even as a young boy; their relationship becomes especially ugly when he announces he is gay. The younger daughter Zoe is wild, rebellious and reckless. It becomes obvious she is destined to have a troubled future. Add to the mix the romantic relationships of the adult children as well as the next generation of the Stassos family, Ben and Jamal. Each character adds further depth, darkness and occasional humor to the story. Especially memorable and endearing is Cassandra, a drag queen and Zoe’s close friend.

The story takes place over nearly five decades, from 1949 through 1995. In addition there is a three page snippet of Constantine’s childhood at the beginning as well as a two page conclusion that looks to the distant future (2035). The two brief chapters act as interesting and effective bookmarks for the main story.

Cunningham covers a broad range of issues in the book: a heavy-handed patriarch, an aloof mother, love, death, infidelity, incest, child abuse, drug abuse, kleptomania, generational tension, homosexuality, AIDS, self-mutilation, class conflict, and so much more. I like many people have often thought that I came from a dysfunctional family. The Stassos family takes that concept to a whole new level.

Cunningham is a master of prose, creating rich, complex characters and vivid images with his words. The tone of the book is one of melancholy and tragedy. There are no real villains or heroes but rather a cast of characters all with their own flaws. The book took me a longer than normal time to read not because it was dull or difficult. Rather I was captivated throughout the story and hated coming to the last page. I wanted to savor the work and not rush through it. I look forward to reading more of Cunningham’s works. He has quickly become one of my favorite authors.

Very well-written. Some parts feel like try-outs for 'The Hours' and 'By Nightfall', and that's probably what they are; it makes me want to read those two again.

Las sagas familiares son mi punto flaco y además ésta está muy bien escrita.
Con este escritor cuesta al principio porque los personajes no son nada atractivos, pero sus historias enganchan "de lo lindo".

If I'm counting correctly, this is the tenth one-star rating I've made recently. Others have been one-star or star-and-a-half. It would appear I hate reading. I do not! I've just picked books I wound up not liking.
Trigger warnings: domestic violence, incest, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, cheating, incest between first cousins framed as sexual experimentation, death of a parent, racism, suicide by drowning, a dozen pointless explicit sex scenes
SPOILERS. This was required reading in one of my college English classes. I was sixteen, and the professor said, "If you're in my class, I view you as an adult. I will treat you as an adult. We will be reading books with adult content in them." Every single book we read had graphic sex scenes and violence within families, or in one case discord within a marriage and the accidental death of a child as a result of roughhousing with older children. My professor was a conceited, arrogant weirdo. He picked these books out. I suspect things about him, now, as an adult. It's been half my life ago as of this writing, but I'm wondering. He liked to be listened to, but not have discussions. Unless it was to steer someone to his POV. The class sat in a circle and analyzed this book the closest out of all the books he'd assigned. If someone seemed uncomfortable with the repetitive, gratuitous sex scenes, he'd shame them in class at length. I found the scenes exciting at the time. I didn't have a lot of life experience. Now, as an adult, I wondered how I'd interpret the book.

The story being told in this book does not really begin until page 270 (yes, two hundred and seventy) or so. Zoe, a woman dying of AIDS, is co-parenting her son with Cassandra, a woman the author refers to as a drag queen but I interpreted as a trans woman. The author mentions House of Xtraveganza in his dedication, which is a ball house and is examined at length in the documentary "Paris is Burning," which is a fantastic film. Cassandra could be either. I'm still going back and forth on it. Cassandra was my favorite character. Zoe is close to her brother Will, who has been secure in his homosexuality for years and fallen in love at thirty-five. I mention his homosexuality because the book makes such a goddamn big deal about it. The previous 270 pages could have been used as filler paragraphs, chapter transitions, and a few sentences here and there: references to their violent, tyrannical dad, their klepto, high-status mother, their dissatisfied sister who is cheating on her husband, who she literally married right out of high school. But this is written as a family saga, so it's gonna drag...on and on...I'm realizing I don't like family sagas.

"Behind Closed Doors" by Susan Sloan had its first hundred pages as backstory, too, and did a better job of it. It also had family violence as a major theme, and a few sex scenes, and cheating, and the characters were also Catholic, and it was a family saga. So, on the surface they had several things in common. Back to this book. The sex scenes in this book are repetitive, explicit for no real reason, a huge turn-off, and add nothing to the story. Nor do the repeated domestic violence scenes. The incest doesn't add anything, either. Cunningham spends pages and pages on these three themes, when a paragraph here and there would be much more effective. The prose is incredibly flowery and purple. There's tons of useless narrative passages that increase as the book goes on. It's like the author didn't know what to do, so he padded out his word count.

Years after I read this book for the first time, one passage in particular continued to stay with me. I had associated it with this book even after I'd largely forgotten the book itself. There is a...sad beauty, I'd describe it, to the sentence, "When the time came to start hating them...Andrew would be the last." (Cunningham 339). I'd looked forward to that passage for that one sentence, and was utterly dismayed to not find it in the book for awhile. I'd begun to think it was in another book altogether when wham, I turned a page and there it was! What delight, at realizing this was the book that had it. I kept reading because I wanted to finish the book. For some reason, Ben dies by drowning, with the implication that it's better to be dead than not heterosexual? WOW. A Bury Your Gays, Teenager Edition, written by a gay man who's won awards for his writing. I know of several out gay men who have this trope in their writing, but it's so harmful and stupid. And Ben was in an incestuous relationship with his cousin Jamal? Seriously WHY. I was so glad when the book ended.

I found this book quite depressing. I don't know if it's caused by the writing style or the characters personalities, but something made me so sad and uncomfortable reading it. I like the story though, even if it's disturbing and sad, sometimes a bit strange I'd say, especially the way the characters perceived, viewed and reacted to others, how oftentimes selfish and ruthless they were, not particularly in their behavior, but rather in their thoughts. Seldom, it was hard to read, because I couldn't help but think "Are people really like this? Are we truly so greedy and egoistic?" or "Is life supposed to be like this? So hard and unkind?" But now as I'm writing this, I'm finding answers to my own questions when I think about caring and loving people, that no, of course not, it's just the characters in this book. But still, it was a tough book sometimes due to this.
On the contrary, the idea of the plot really sparked interest in me, since it's about immigrants, life from scratch, several generations and family life. Even if there's a complete downfall of what was at the beginning whole. Because of this, it reminds me a lot of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, but that book was way more positive and joyful, even despite all the struggles. I understand that it's unreal that their lives would be a fairytale, I wouldn't like it that way anyway, but it was too tragic for me in Flesh and Blood.

A series of short series about the people of Black Rock, NL, a mining town, and the often disfunctional lives they lived. Michael Crummey was born in Buchans, an actual mining town and has probably drawn on happenings from his boyhood there and in Wabush on the Labrador coast, which still has active mining.
My goodness, he sure knows how to draw the reader into his characters. At times I felt as though I knew them personally.
Another good read and more to come.

I’m a sucker for family sagas, especially if they span decades and feature a gay son. This one, however, takes the cake. I devoured it, was gasping for breath at times, and sobbed like a child at the end. Not bad for my first Michael Cunningham. 10 stars.

I remember loving this book. I still wasn’t prepared for how much I would love it the second time around. I devoured it. I breathed it. And I am writing this, having spent the thirty minutes since turning the final page wracked with howling sobs. Not because it’s a sad book, mind you, though it has sadness in it. These were tears for the blinding beauty of this book, and all the blinding beauty in the world that it reflects. The beauty of hopes and disappointments, prides and shames, triumphs and defeats, loves and hates, joys and angers, lives and deaths.

These characters, man. I would like to write about them, but they are all so starkly, defiantly alive… just like no two real people are exactly alike, and no real person can ever be neatly described, so do the members of the Stassos family skirt comparison or definition. No doubt they would sneer at anything I’d have to say about them as mere condescension.

I shall have to be satisfied with this: The lives lived within this book are among the most beautiful, quietly heartbreaking of stories, ones I will undoubtedly return to again and again throughout my own life.

Addendum: Mary, the matriarch, is still my favorite of them all. Her shoplifting as a cure for housewife boredom and dissatisfaction, her reluctantly bonding with with Cassandra the transvestite (my second favorite character) over makeup advice, and her being fine with her husband’s affair until she finds out that the woman in question is fat, upon which she has a complete meltdown… Maybe one my favorite characters in all of fiction.

I feel like A Lot Just Happened and I Do Not Know what I think abt it

Een schande dat ik het zo lang in de kast heb laten staan, want helemaal mijn soort boek! Familierelaas, heel gelaagd, kleurrijke personages en een verhaal dat nooit verveelt. Merci dat ik het mocht lenen, Teun <3

В аннотации сказано, что одни герои книги почти не меняются, другие - меняются самым разительным образом. Кто эти другие? В этой книге почти ничего не меняется и почти ничего не происохдит, за исключением нескольких трагических событий. Мы год за годом следим за жизнью этой семьи, и они остаются верными тем самым себе, которых автор описал в первой четверти романа. Упертые, совершающие одни и те же ошибки, идущие на поводу своих зависимостей и расстройств. И это конечно релистично. Семейная сага о среднестатистической семье.
Проживают они будто в вакууме. Фоновых событий в мире и США нет совсем. Говорится пару слов о вещах, с которыми столкнулись члены семьи: расизм, гомофобия, СПИД, экономический кризис. И это тоже реалистично. Никому нет дела до того, что его не касается.
Но весь это релизм катастрофически скушен. Это запечатленное время в не лучшем своем проявлении. "Как тебе удалось прожить столько лет без водостойкой туши и чувства юмора? - спрашивают одну из главных героинь. А мне какого слушать 100 летнюю историю семьи, в которой нет ни толики юмора...