Jane HamiltonRezensionen

The right book during a tragedy

While reading this book, my house burned down. Nothing was left, including this book. Several days after the tragedy I went to the public library and took it out. My whole perception of the book changed. Hamilton really touched my soul with the story of a husband and wife who lose every thing, and try to rebuild.

Well written book but to depressing! This could be anyone’s true story!

I'm not sure how to feel about this book. I was transfixed for the first 50 or so pages by both the story and the style of writing. It was like reading the diary of a 12 year old; not very challenging, but amusing and slightly insightful. Then the narrator gets older (and older) and continues to write like a 12 year old. After a while the constant changes in tenses and dumb stuff she says starts to get annoying. I kept wondering if anything was going to happen, if any of the characters were gonna make me feel anything. Eventually, with about 35 pages left, something happens that made it interesting again for a few pages. Then it goes right back to boring.

The Book of Ruth won awards, so I guess some people thought it was good. It wasn't the worst way to pass a couple of days while I was at home sick with covid, but my life would have been perfectly fine without ever having picked it up

Sad story written in first person. Ruth tells about her young life, raised to feel stupid and unable to live life on her own.

I can't believe this was published in 1988 and I never read it! While sad and often depressing, this became a unique insight into Ruth's world. A completely disconnected mother, an aloof and distant brother she could not relate to, and a sad case for a husband makes for quite the family dynamic. Life is a continual struggle for Ruth and she sees no way out of it. The smallest things gave her the most happiness. We should take nothing for granted.

This book was good but not great; it always seemed like it was on the verge of something but never getting there.

I think it would make more sense to read this later in life. Having read it during my senior year of high school, I wish I would have read it later.

I will probably give this a go again in a few years.

Achingly like life, Hamilton writes of pain with beauty. While depressed by the tragedy Alice unwittingly generates for herself and her family, I kept reading; I admit I wanted closure, am slightly compulsive about finishing what I've started, but also found the prose fluid. The story unfolds in a way that allows readers to feel many of the surprises and shocks as the characters themselves do.

Such a frustrating read! I felt so deeply for all of the characters and wanted so badly for things to turn out differently and for the characters to find their way out of the traps they lived in! I cried for them all and it left me feeling helpless.

56964

Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Minor recall only."½

Even though I enjoyed this book, I gave "the Excellent Lombards" three stars, because it was kind of even how much I liked and how much I didn't like.

What I liked:
* The point of view. Choosing Francis Lombard as the narrator gives us a wonderful chance to understand how a farm kid reasons. It makes the novel more interesting.
* The author did thorough research and the farm issues were very realistic.
* Short chapters that stuck to one theme.
* Sense of humor

What I didn't like:
* The main character was sometimes too much obtuse. When she got older she naturally would have come to understand why the farm needed to change. As the book went on I liked her less and less.
* Loose ends were tied up to fast in the end. Other issues like Frances' attitude toward aunt May Hill don't get developed any further.

Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it. Content to spend her days planning capers with her brother William, competing with her brainy cousin Amanda, and expertly tending the orchard with her father, Frankie desires nothing more than for the rhythm of life to continue undisturbed. But she cannot help being haunted by the historical fact that some family members end up staying on the farm and others must leave. Change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance, and college applications shake the foundation of Frankie's roots. As Frankie is forced to shed her childhood fantasies and face the possibility of losing the idyllic future she had envisioned for her family, she must decide whether loving something means clinging tightly or letting go.

I loved this book. That is all.

Adult fiction. A woman obsessed is a dangerous thing, apparently. I'm not sure what to think about this book, actually--it's pretty strange.

This book is quite a departure from Jane Hamilton's other novels, which are harrowing and strike to the heart. (I love them but I can only read one about every five years as they haunt me thereafter. Thankfully, she is not prolific in her output.) Here, she allows her detailed observations of human frailties, foibles, ego and love to emerge in humorous, satirical ways.

A beautiful coming of age story.

Alice, the central character in Jane Hamilton's great 1994 novel “A Map of the World,” takes a one-two punch that could knock any of us flat, if not out cold. First this school nurse and wife of a Wisconsin dairy farmer is still looking for her swimsuit when the two-year-old daughter of Teresa, her best friend, drowns in the farm pond. Numb with grief and guilt, Alice is then arrested, charged with sexual molestation of a boy in her school. She's jailed for months, while virtually the entire community thinks the very worst of her.

Most of the story is told from Alice's point of view, but in the middle third of the novel Hamilton gives us the perspective of Howard, her silent, handsome husband, for whom a dairy farm is a dream come true. Yet a lawyer, not to mention bail, costs money.

A third main character is Teresa, a devout Catholic woman who despite her daughter's death, perhaps because of Alice's carelessness, cannot turn against her friend. At least not until she spends a night in Howard's arms, albeit the two of them consumed more with grief than passion. Still she and Howard now have their own reason for feeling guilt.

Alice is clearly not guilty of the criminal charges against her, yet her trial proves dramatic anyway, mainly because we see it through her eyes and can read her compassionate thoughts about not just those who testify against her but also about those women with whom she lived with so long in jail.

As for the book's title, it refers to a map of an ideal country in an ideal world that Alice had drawn when she was a girl. She finds the map, in fact, while she is looking for that elusive swimsuit, and the image pops up here and there throughout the novel. Alice's own story shows us that such a perfect world is impossible, yet by the end we see that the only chance we have is for the people of our own world to accept, forgive and even love one another. The story is really all about grace.

There’s no polite way to describe this book, and some that are too polite. A hard-ass Victorian would hate it thoroughly, and many a critic will just pat themselves on the back like, Look at me reading a book. In general people refuse to look from the crime looking out, instead of the police or the press looking in, which means it runs against the grain, in some ways, although in others it’s deeply dyed in ordinariness. It’s like the opposite of the news, in other words.

It’s familiarity turned into a crime, without the external voice telling them what they’re like. The first-person aspect of it is central to the way that the whole thing is presented.

The errors that lead to crime are so gradual and commonplace that much of it is simple and easy to read. You hate your mom; you pick a bad boyfriend. You cultivate the veneer; you by turns idolize and burn with jealousy towards those not in the same prison as you. You don’t see anything wrong, do you?

At the same time, in the end it’s not about looking away from the mirror.

.......................

“The day I’m working towards wasn’t so very long ago. I’m about to tell how it went so everyone will know. I’d like to think it won’t happen again. Once is enough for the whole earth. It shouldn’t recur and if I tell about the day, step by step, people can understand certain warning signs. Then nothing like it will take place again, not ever. I imagine, when I’m sitting here, that I’m ringing a bell, and someone will hear, but to tell the truth, I also know that it isn’t very often that people change their ways. Still, I have to ring the bell, keep it sounding.” (p. 253/294 nook edition).

I think a lot of people would either see this as fluffy dross (“your life’s not important enough to write about”), or, indeed, as a caramelized treat for the mind (“oh, so I reached the end, great”); I’m slightly distressed and greatly mystified by this.

I think that it’s about halfway between a comedy and the Holocaust, you know.

It’s like a sci-fi action flick, except nothing physically improbable happens, and you’re spared the balletic glitter of how rich you are, and the subsequent coming-down alienation realization that, indeed, you are not.

In other words, it’s the opposite. “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”

To me it is a prison.... and to her.

This was a difficult story to read. The story is pure tragedy and down right painful at times to wade through. This is an Oprah book, and true to form, it is a tale of insurmountable hardship and pain. The story also shows how quickly life can unravel and change. I am not passing this in because, while well written, it is too much of a downer.

Finished reading The Excellent Lombards last night a bit unexpectedly since the reading guide came up as part of he book.
The story is narrated by Frankie who grows up with her slightly older brother William on an apple orchard run by her father and uncle. Frankie and William love the rhythm of the apple growing seasons, the picking, the making of cider, the selling at the market,etc. - as youngsters they want for nothing else. As Frankie grows older she begins to understand lessons from her teacher and from Gloria, a dedicated farm assistant, and second wife to her father. But as time passes so does the idealic life of a complicated business. New relations come to stake a claim in the future of the farm and Frankie rails against the changes that she sees, her most impressive rant comes from her own brother actually wanting to go off to college, something Frankie never thought about.
Mrs. Hamilton has done an excellent time of evoking a time and place and used many of her own experiences to bring Frankie to life, a pleasant read.

I thought this book was really lovely and moving. It does lack a strong plot, but that did not bother me as much as it bothered some other commenters. I thought the characters were very well-developed and I don't agree that the bits about Vietnam and Iraq were tangential to the theme; I thought that they were effectively used to portray both the passing of time and the way that views and perspective shift or remain the same over time.

Read this book for the characters, not the plot. Hamilton's narrator is simple and comical and endearing. For example, her description of an elderly neighbor from her childhood: "[Mrs. Foote] had several black moles on her face and breasts so big if they had hands at the end of them they might be useful." (p. 80)

Read this book for heartbreak, not for happiness. If you're looking for a light read, this isn't it. But it's damn fine fiction.

meh.

I really struggled with this book. I thought the beginning was pretty good, but then went downhill fast. Some of the author's writing was lovely, but overall, a lot of detail that in my opinion did nothing for the characters or the story. Glad it is over.