A much more painful, terrifying, beautiful, TRAGIC 'Little Women.' It is a car crash you just can't tear yourself away from. Undeniably alluring - just as all things taboo are. Love it.

This had a lot of wonderful thoughts, but I got bogged down and don't think I'll finish it. I liked the characters and the "mystery" but honestly, it was too long. I may scan the rest. I need to move on. If it takes me 2 weeks to finish something, something is wrong.

This book drove me absolutely batty. I spent nearly 75% of it wandering "what exactly is the point" and then - wham - book 8 comes along and knocks me for six. This is definitely a book where the author is playing the long game and only in retrospect can you truly appreciate what unfolds. Grumpy making but in the most satisfying way.

I loved this book when it first came out in 1997 and just read it again. It’s possibly my favorite book of all time. The characters are all brilliantly drawn with all their foibles exposed. I love that their perceptions of themselves and others change over the course of their lives. The story is definitely twisted but even with fewer horrors, it would be a rich and eloquent story of one family’s experiences. I’m a little confused about how Teresa fit in and why it was important for Frances to have Ginger’s child. I can’t wait to see the play in 2023 although I’ve always thought it would make a better movie than a play.

MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees was the third book I've started after a recent trip to an English-language book store, and the sort of book that makes you resent the ones you started earlier for delaying your beginning. It's beautiful as an intellectual work; rending as an emotional one. The finish comes like the crescendo of a favorite melody, familiar while always feeling magically new. For reasons I can't quite identify I want to describe it in terms one would use to review a bottle of wine--a good one. There are sour notes—incredibly sour ones, in fact—and moments of sweetness one would ordinarily think of as indulgent, even sentimental, but the proportion and pacing of the story is so perfectly balanced that what seem, when first read, truly burdensome weaknesses become, when resurrected in final reflection, considerable assets and a demonstration of the author's range.

I have previously called Ian McEwan's n  On Chesil Beachn something of a victory lap—an author deliberately taking the unlikeliest components for a beautiful tragedy and announcing "watch this"--but Fall on Your Knees outdoes McEwan on that score, at least for me personally. It tells the story of a discrete and single family, adds a lens of race and ethnicity through which to view their story, steers them directly through events of almost unbearable sadness, and sums at the end (in the paraphrase of one of the back-cover reviews) as a tale of sisterhood. Each of these I would ordinarily hate, or at least resent, as a reader, but through the absolute mastery of her characters, plot, and especially style, MacDonald fits them together into something wonderful. No word does it justice short of "sublime," and I'm probably leaning more towards "exquisite."

An interlude: I've read perhaps half a dozen books recently that took an explicit interest in questions of race in America, from the perspective of the white American. Fall on Your Knees takes place in Canada, not too far from the border with Maine, and the characters are sort of white? mostly? at least they think so, but we'll lump it in for the sake of simplicity. In each case the white characters confront the existence of racism, which of course exists in their country at that time (that's called realism!), as it emerges from the mouths of characters the reader is led to think of as their peers, summed up when someone speaks a word, with no evident hesitation or consciousness, that white Americans of the present age have been taught is never to be spoken aloud. At which point the narrator recoils quickly, with a tidy summation of their disapproval of "that word," in order to assuage the reader's fear that they're reading a book not just nominally on the topic of racism, but about racism. Their horror is explained silently, naturally, because the characters never ever speak up, saving their disfavor to be communicated only to the late-20th century readers they know will agree with them. Not everyone's Atticus Finch, but everyone's Scout, at least. I don't have a larger point about this, other than to say it happens so often in literature that it's almost surprising to realize that racism really did exist, given as it was only ever other people who were racist. But there you have it.

(Hey, I'm no better. You're not going to seeing me use the word I'm talking about in a believable situation, either. I can't even bring myself to call it anything other than "that word.")

Let's consider that word, too: Mastery. It's the sort of praise one expects to be unavoidably diluted through overuse, the sort of word one wants to use but finds too hackneyed and instead reaches for the thesaurus, or else grasps about to invent a new phrase, as-yet undiminished by familiarity. Certainly the original meaning of "masterpiece" has been lost to seas of cheap praise. But mastery still retains some kernel of what I'm intending here (if possibly by means of unintended, adult-themed channels). Namely, I mean the absolute control over every moving part, the deliberate perfection achieved either through unimaginable genius or near-unbearable discipline. Whichever is the source of MacDonald's work, the result is a tidy, substantial work of literature and an example of writing wherein the authorial style is always exactly right, as it courses through a really rich and textured stretch of narrative geography. Never indulgent, it reaches as much a height as perhaps irreverence, or whimsy; and although it lingers at time in hollows of despair, it never succumbs to melodrama or sentimentality.

Not that I know, of course, but I suspect that MacDonald's effort is more of the latter sort, resulting from discipline. The amount of time it must have taken MacDonald as she patiently repolished every corner and surface book, to consider each sentence, each questionable word or incompletely-considered image, even without thinking of the time to write it in the first place. It's just an unimaginable effort, especially as the book is a dense 500 pages, by my estimate averaging 400 words a page, or approximately twice as long as the 300 pages x 350 words that seems to be the standard for paperback fiction these days. It's a real book: moving, substantial, and satisfying. Truly phenomenal.


[Ed.n.: I posted the text below when I was about halfway through.]
[Not through with it yet, but an observation in medias res: A "how to write fiction" book I read recently made the point that a good story looks like the branches of a tree as it goes from trunk to leaflets, or if you like of a maze that forks only in one direction, that as the reader progresses forward, many different choices or directions seem possible, but that looking backward, in retrospect, from the ending back towards the beginning, only the particular route actually taken seems real, that what actually happened seems in hindsight inevitable. This is by way of preface to the following: wow has MacDonald learned that lesson well. Hints of character developments planted earlier now seem so obvious, whereas when I read them the first time they were almost too subtle to be noticed. A read that is at all times pleasant, rewarding, ... (I don't know a word that means what I'm trying to get at by saying "nourishing" but doesn't make me feel like a jerk in so saying) that at times reaches heights that are astonishing, sublime.]

This is a complicated book and I have a lot of feelings about it. It's very tough read, with a lot if terrible things done by terrible people to decent people. But even the terrible people are mostly fairly complex.

There are a couple of things that happen that I think were supposed to be shocking surprises. One big plot point I guessed fairly early on. This is a dark family, they don't have an easy life, some of the characters think they're good and doing right but don't (although Mercedes does redeem herself at the end).

I really liked this book but I can't say it was an enjoyable book because it's fairly heavy. But it's a really good book .

This might be the best book I've ever read. It's a big book, exactly as big as it needs to be to tell this multi-generational, multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-sexual, multi-gender story. It's about identity, about who we are in the world and especially who we are in our families. The roles we play, the things we know, the nature of truth, the people we love and protect and hurt.

The characters are so well conceived and developed...they stayed with me long after I finished reading the book.

I first read it about 25 years ago. Recently I attended the ambitious 6-hour play at the NCA, and decided to read it again. This time I listened to the audio book while out walking over many hours and days. The author narrated it and she's really a terrific narrator with her expressive, versatile voice and insider knowledge.

I highly, highly recommend this one. It was way ahead of its time when it came out in the late 90s and it still feels relevant.

VIDEORECENSIONE: https://youtu.be/jSVYEzkk7OY

«I cattivi non sono cattivi davvero, e i nemici non sono nemici davvero, ma i buoni non sono buoni davvero, proprio come me e te.»

Ho finito poco fa questo libro, che ho lasciato nella libreria della me adolescente per anni e anni senza leggerlo, dopo averlo acquistato a un euro in un mercatino.
È un libro sconvolgente, un libro che non ha paura di affrontare determinate tematiche, senza mai scadere per questo in un linguaggio volgare o rozzo, senza stigmatizzare i personaggi e le personaggie per le loro azioni, che affronta il '900 in una maniera luminosa, variegata.
Ci troviamo su di un'isoletta canadese, della quale vediamo letteralmente sorgere la sua cittadina a partire da tre casette, qui Materia - di origini libanesi - e James - di origini irlandesi - si incontra, la loro passione è così travolgente da fare piazza pulita di ogni altra persona sul loro cammino, da questo matrimonio nasceranno tre figlie: Kathleen, Mercedes e Frances. Queste tre sorelle sono a loro volta delle persone appassionanti, ognuna con una personalità fortissima e che viene ben delineata all'interno delle pagine, anzi plasmata, vediamo la genesi di ogni persona e ne affrontiamo i più reconditi sentimenti e risentimenti. Il libro affronta il multiculturalismo, il razzismo, tematiche queer sempre con uno stile incantevole.

I don't hate it. I made it up to 120 pgs. I just don't want to continue. A lot of unhappiness and overall despair. Maybe it's the timing or the need for an exciting escape. I'm just not in the mood for deep thinking.

Absolutely loved it. The central characters were wonderful, the story lines with them and how they interacted with one another at home with their parents was fascinating and the introduction of the other people who moved in and out of their children's and parent's lives was great.

Disturbing on so many levels. I really don't understand why it was/is so popular. I just couldn't get past all the incest and abuse, and the only reason I finished the book was because I kept hoping that something good would happen.

They’re all dead now.

Waarom boeken over vrouwen nogal vaak een spuuglelijke pastelkleurige illustratie of wazige foto op de cover krijgen, is mij een compleet raadsel, dus de kans is groot dat ik dit boek nooit zou uitgekozen hebben mocht mijn schoonzus dit boek niet meegebracht hebben met de melding “ik denk dat dit iets voor u is.” Ze had overigens helemaal gelijk.

Toegegeven, deze lang uitgesponnen familiesaga (er moeten meer lang uitgesponnen familiesaga’s in de wereld zijn! echt!) met sterke doch bizarre personages bevat wel erg veel drama, maar de meubels worden gered door de fantastische en bij momenten originele schrijfstijl (die eerste zin alleen al! en bij uitbreiding dat eerste hoofdstuk!), het feit dat de hoofdpersonages en hun onderlinge band zo goed uitgewerkt zijn en het feit dat al dat drama voortspruit uit iets dat in het begin van het verhaal benoemd wordt, en dus niet louter drama omwille van drama is.

Het is een boek dat groeit naarmate het zijn geheimen prijsgeeft, en dat bij mij evolueerde van een typische drie naar de verdiende vier sterren. Aanrader.