Sacred Time: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Talking Confusion
Review: "Sacred Time" is a story spread over three generations and begins in a Bronx neighborhood. It is read by three different people. When I learned that, I was hesitant about listening to it. The first reader was male and the story was about a boy growing up in a dysfunctional family. He has to share his room with twin cousins, girls, when their father is sent to jail for stealing from his employer. The story continues with daily life and troubles of two families sharing life under one roof.

When the second reader, a female, took up the story, it jumped in years and location. The story became focused on the mother instead of continuing with the son as the first reader had. There was no warning or lead-in to this shift in the story. I was completely lost for the first half of a tape. When I finally "caught up" with what was happening, I had questions about what had happened when the first reader was reading the story. What happened to the "flying twin"? What happened to the friction between the mother and the aunt?

While this is a story that ranges over three generations, the jump from one time to another with no warning really put me off. I was no longer able to follow the story as well as I wanted. It does show what can and does happen to people and families when one decision is made over another. It shows how lives change by these decisions. Unless you are good at listening "between the lines" and like stories that jump around, I would not recommend that you listen to this tape.

Rating:
Summary: A beautifully crafted novel
Review: I always read the Amazon book reviews but rarely write them myself. After reading the previous reviews, I feel compelled to voice another opinion on this book. Having read all of Hegi's work, I was eager to read her latest novel.Until the end of the first chapter, I was very disappointed. Being written from the point of view of a child, the ideas and writing seemd sophmoric and completely unlike the poetic and meaningful writing of Hegi's previous novels. The dramatic end of the 1st chapter changes all of that & signals the thrust of the rest of the book which is the life of a family as it moves through time from several of its members' points of view and how it is shaped & impacted by a tragedy. Hegi is a master of manipulating the tools of story telling and in her past novels she employs various interesting writing techniques to try to approximate the changing and often abstact nature of experiencing life. This book is no exception. She jumps ahead several years as she switches from chapter to chapter and to the point of view of another family member. Some things are made clear while much is left unsaid. This book does not proceed in an orderly fashion from event to event so it may unsettle some readers . But one of Hegi's greatest strengths is her abilty to portray the thoughts and emotions of her characters as a person really experiences them: in flashbacks,in snatches of rememberances, in emotional reactions. She is also very gifted at presenting a single happening from so many different points of view thereby really giving one a more complete understanding of an event's true impact. Reading Hegi is like looking at a character's family photo album and reading his/her journal. It is raw life stripped down to it's true nature & presented in a profound and poetic way. The point of this novel is the impact a single event can have on a family and its subsequent generations & how people are shaped by the forces of time, events and our interactions with one another. In order to capture such an unwieldy subject matter she has pared down her narrative to it's emotional essence. It's an absolutely beautiful novel. I have only a few pages left and I don't want it to end. If you are the type of person who enjoys looking at another person's family photos you will love this book. I cannot imagine having the genius to write this well.

Rating:
Summary: elegantly simple and triumphantly natural
Review: Ursula Hegi opens her novel Sacred Time with deceptive simplicity: the first paragraph contains only one sentence, "That winter of 1953, stenciled glass-wax decorations appeared on nearly every window in the Bronx, and Uncle Malcolm was sent to jail for stealing stamps and office equipment from his last new job." The same bare elegance runs throughout, somehow creating a subtly complex and motivated story out of clear, uncomplicated prose. The novel has the impact that it does because Hegi selects the perfect words, constructs layers of rich atmosphere, and forces the reader to fill in not only sundry details, but major plot points as well--she tends not to finish one subplot until long after several new ones have started, which results in a novel that is truer to life than the books whose chapters each contain a perfect capsule of introduction, rising action, climax, and dénouement.
A novel that spans three generations and two continents could easily become stretched, with too few delightful specifics and too many underdeveloped story lines. Hegi does a good job, however, of making Sacred Time fill out its expansive framework, partly by letting all the stories grow naturally out of previously-recounted events. Her multiple narrators echo each other in their own words, and stories that are only hinted at in some chapters burst into full and satisfying bloom in later sections. By combining this intriguing structure with effortless prose and delicious details, Ursula Hegi creates in Sacred Time a novel that is as compelling as it is thought-provoking.
At under 250 pages, Sacred Time is a fairly quick read, but make sure to have some cannelloni or calzones on hand before you start, because it will be as hard to resist your cravings for the traditional Italian fare that appears throughout as it will be impossible to put the book down before reading the last, triumphant sentence.