In many ways, despite Cunningham's insistence on describing beauty, this is not a pleasant book to read. It is full of untold conflicts and incomprehensions, and it ends in deaths. There is a lot going on, a lot of it very familiar territory for this sort of book; the portrait of members of a family over 45 years, between 1949 and 1995 (with a prelude in 1935 and an epilogue in 2035).

The structure of the book (more or less one chapter per year, though some years are ignored and others have several chapters) makes it a succession of slightly disjointed moments with the characters feeling separate from each other despite being members of the same family, and incapable to truly connect (although we are told love is present in the mix).

And I found myself alienated too, not really able to connect with the characters or be bothered by what happens to them, a feeling that was reinforced by the length of the text and its tendency towards meaningless verbiage in the indulgent descriptions of fanciful feelings and impressions experienced by the characters. Because of this and the vast amount of practical information Cunningham has decided to leave out, I often wasn't clear what characters felt about themselves and about each other.

And yet, after nearly 500 pages, it sort of ends up making sense, though it is not really clear what Cunningham wants to say. Reading all those words does pay off in the end but not in a terribly satisfying way. Approach cautiously.

Een familiegeschiedenis die mij, afhankelijk van het hoofdstuk/personage/jaartal, wel of niet kon boeien. Maar eigenlijk vaker niet dan wel. Het is eerder een 2,5 dan een 3 denk ik. Maar vooruit, het is een zonnige dag dus laat ik het naar boven afronden.

2024: It did not take me 15 years to reread this. Only two. Haha. That's how good this book is. I knew when I reread it in 2022, that I wanted to teach it again should I ever teach the American Novels course again. So I did. And students loved it! I had an email from a student who wanted more books like it recommended to her, so I of course obliged.

This book is just so beautifully written. Cunningham is just one of the best writers working today. I think he's so underrated too. The Hours won the Pulitzer but then he just quietly faded from the mainstream again. But his work is still so good.

This re-read, I really liked Zoe. I originally found her to be sort of dull, but I think her characterization is so subtle, and there's something about her I find so captivating. She reminds me of my brother at certain moments and then of my mom too. I don't know. She feels familiar.

Cassandra is still fabulous. I feel like I've met Cassandra. I love the mother-daughter relationships she creates with Zoe and, to a certain extent, Mary. At times she feels a little bit like a caricature, but I think that's just her drag queen persona, perfectly wrought by a writer who's clearly known a Cassandra too.

I'm uncomfortable with the fat-phobic remarks regarding Magda. I can't tell if that's just a sign of the times (the 90s were fat-phobic as hell), Cunningham's own fat-phobia coming through (possibly as body dysmorphia is common in the gay community), or if it was an attempt to characterize Constantine, Will, and Susan, and their need to fit in to certain ideals (the American Dream, etc.). Whatever the case, I hated it.

2022: This book is still magnificent all these years later. I first read this in 2005 or 2006 at the recommendation of a close friend. I had seen The Hours and then read it but I was unprepared for how much BETTER this book is than Cunningham’s most famous work. The language is gorgeously wrought. The opening chapter remains one of the most memorable in my reading life. I still love Cassandra and want her in my life.

This time around, I don’t hate Constantine. I understand his motivations a little more than I did when I first read it. My heart hurts for Ben and Jamal. So much pain and loss.

Damn beautiful writing. Still one of my all time favorites. I’m so glad I reread it. Maybe in another 15 years I’ll pick it up again.

It had been a long time since I had read FLESH AND BLOOD, though Cunningham remains one of my favorite authors. I remember enjoying this book the first go around - but loved it this time. Immensely engrossing and satisfying, no one delves into the minds of his characters with such poetry and insight as Cunningham. And this epic family saga is perhaps one of his most underrated novels. Read it!

Cunningham sempre com tramas elaborados, em redor do mote "personagens e as suas vidas".

A trama gira em torno das várias gerações (ao longo de 100 anos) de uma família; os seus dramas, vivências, dores, medos, incertezas, fragilidades, raiva, amor, sexo, doença, morte... e os que partilham das suas vidas.

Um mestre da escrita crua, despida de "salamaleques" (por vezes, doses maciças de realidade), a entrar-nos, sem pudor, portas adentro!

3.5 Stars

Michael Cunningham's novel Flesh and Blood is the multi-generational chronicle of the Stassos family. He begins with the mismatched couple of Constantine and Mary and gives them 3 very complex children that they don't understand. All of the members of this family are frequently alienated from each other. Susan, Billy, and Zoe eventually leave home and try to figure out who they are outside of their dysfunctional family. And Susan and Zoe each go on to have a son.

Cunningham's writing is beautiful and is full of wonderful sentences and phrases:

"She understood the absorption and the urgent, almost bodily hunger for time, simple uninterrupted time in which to work."

"raised on a thrift hard as bone"

"Sometimes the things he heard himself say didn't match what was in his heart."

Cunningham also writes a beautiful death, not an easy feat.

A lot happens in this novel, and a lot of the story is pretty bleak. I see the themes of loneliness/alienation, loyalty, forgiveness, and death.

I don't relate to most of the characters, though I can see their distress and sympathize with them. Cassandra, Zoe's friend, is my favorite and a stand out for me. I can see and hear her as if she is here in the room with me. She is funny and feisty, confident in who she is; and Cunningham shows the scars under the veneer. She is the one character I would love to meet and spend time with.

I am struggling to rate this novel. While I love the writing and was pulled into the story in places, for much of the story I felt like I was at a distance watching it unfold, a problem for me as I like to be immersed in literary worlds. So better than a like and not quite a love for me.

Note to Julie: there is incest in this tale.

Another superbly accomplished novel by Cunningham. Wish I could add more stars. His writing always makes me think of Richard Pryor’s comment about Muhammad Ali. ("He fights so good it makes your dick hard.")

Strange to say, but what I really enjoyed about the book was its structure - the journey from 1935 to 2035 in multiple perspectives. Cunningham writes us an unhappy family being unhappy in its own way but managed to leave me with a lot of compassion for his characters. Clearly, Cunningham loves, loves, loves language. When writing of his favorite topics, sex and death (flesh and blood) his imagery veers close to the territory of magical realism. Very different from the cultural context of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but look for the same themes - the garden imagery, madness, loneliness, forbidden lust, and the whole family saga thing. One Hundred Years of Solitude, however, does not have any spitfire drag queens.

‘it seemed regrettable but right that this plenty he’d created, this magnificence, should take something out of the world. some people found love and an immense comfort. some women went blind, sewing. that was the way of things. matter can’t be created of destroyed, only rearranged. a little more here means a little less over there’.

BREAKING burgerlijkheid is niet zo burgerlijk

This sprawling novel by Michael Cunningham covers several generations of the Stassos family over a period of time spanning a century beginning in 1935 where we first meet eight-year old Constantine working in his father’s garden but thinking about his own garden, a square of powdered granite he had combed into the top of his family’s land. The theme of the land and its bounty is a metaphor running throughout the book. In 1950, Constantine Stassos, a Greek immigrant laborer, marries Mary Cuccio, an Italian-American girl. In the following years, they have three children, Susan, an ambitious but reserved beauty with her own deep secrets, Will a brilliant homosexual son winning a scholarship to Harvard, and Zoe, the wild and bright-eyed child that no one understands. This is backdrop of the family dynamics that play out over the generations as they struggle to come of age amid the changing twentieth century. Over the years as we scenes of the family play out, the cracks begin to show as one is drawn deeper into the perspectives of each character. And as author Michael Cunningham has control of the narrative amid luscious and descriptive prose. There is a lot of subtlety in this many-layered novel that one feels compelled to remain with this “messy” Stassos family, a beautiful book.

n  

”Fat waves rolled lazily up against the Battery, broke blue-black and glittering, with a faint sound of exhalation. The sky over Manhattan held an immense and agitated light, here gray threaded with yellow, there an unsteady, aquatic green. In the harbor the Statue of Liberty held its book as tiny people stood inside its head, looking out.”

n

A kind book. Everyone around is hurting secretly in some untouchable way - let's explore it! Omniscient narrator keeps you well insulated, so that you may see and know supremely, full of mercy. The structure allows for sweet bites of the juicy bits with none of the dull daily rind. Indeed, thanks to Cunningham's intense attention to mundane detail, you extrapolate all the boring beatingless incestless days in between and don't even notice the skipping until you've been in it a while and finally recognize the rhythm. However by the time the grandkids rolled in there was a sense of portents, of things coming home to roost. It got a little pat in parts, both writing- and plot-wise, though both were overall good. Sometimes I got tired of being so self-satisfied with my omniscience.

All that perfectly defensible criticism aside, I have to speak viscerally for a moment because I actually got one - a visceral moment. The ending fucking triggered me. Drowning is the death I fear most, and that scene was well-written. Jesus - let a girl live.

I liked this book, but I kept feeling like I had read it before. Surely, I'm not that addled post-pregnancy, but there were certain scenes that just felt completely familiar whereas I had no recollection of other scenes or characters. I had read & loved The Hours many years ago, and there are similar themes, so maybe that's it? At any rate, the book is well-written as I would expect from Cunningham, but the family's saga seemed to have everything but the kitchen sink thrown in - immigrant becomes successful, marriage, physical abuse, adultery, divorce, sex, betrayal, drugs, the gay son, a cross-dresser with a heart of gold, homophobic father, racist father, tragedy, death, inter-racial grandchild, AIDS, and finally coming to terms. At times, it is a beautiful, intimate portrait of an American family, but the ending felt completely rushed and tacked on to tie up all of the loose ends.