Vandal Love A Novel Deni Ellis Bechard 9781571310910 Books
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An astonishing novel of epic ambition, Vandal Love—winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 2007—follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America and through the twentieth century.
A family curse—a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship—causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book One follows the giants’ line, exploring Jude Hervé’s career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man. Book Two traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. François seeks the identity of his missing father for years, while his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into spiritual quests. But none of the Hervés can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like themselves.
In assured and mystically powerful prose, Deni Y. Béchard tells a wide-ranging, spellbinding story of a family trying to create an identity in an unwelcoming landscape. Imbued throughout with a deep sensitivity to the physical world, Vandal Love is a breathtaking literary debut about the power of love to create and destroy—in our lives, and in our history.
Vandal Love A Novel Deni Ellis Bechard 9781571310910 Books
I had not heard of this book before speaking to the author while he was researching his latest book, Empty Hands Open Arms. Wanting to know a little more about him, I got the Kindle download. I was gobsmacked. Vandal Love should be read twice - once to experience the language, and then maybe a second time for the story, a family odyssey of desire, adversity, and yearning to fit into a world in which you don't really belong.My first reading was like drowning. Bechard will sweep you away on a flash flood of language, pull you under, tumble you, strip you bare. Occasionally you'll break surface just long enough enough to catch a breath. I haven't been borne away like that since reading C. S. Godshalk's magisterial Kalimantaan. I found myself forgetting why I was reading, or even that I was reading. I was just being pulled along, powerless to stop, until I was coughed up on shore where everything was the same but somehow strangely different.
The themes suggest that Bechard is a mystic with some affinity to the writer of the Cloud of Unknowning - but it is hopeless to compare a truly original artist - and I think that is what Deni Bechard is. After a few months I'll return to the book for the story line. And try to avoid being hypnotized again. More then.
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Tags : Vandal Love: A Novel [Deni Ellis Bechard] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <div>An astonishing novel of epic ambition, <I>Vandal Love</I>—winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book in 2007—follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America and through the twentieth century.<BR><BR>A family curse—a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship—causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book One follows the giants’ line,Deni Ellis Bechard,Vandal Love: A Novel,Milkweed Editions,1571310916,French-Canadians,Identity (Psychology),Identity (Psychology);Fiction.,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - General,Literary
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Vandal Love A Novel Deni Ellis Bechard 9781571310910 Books Reviews
I wanted so much to enjoy this work by a fellow Canadian who received such praise and the Commonwealth Writer's prize. Instead, I had to agree with the review that said that finishing the book was a chore. I too failed to find an emotional engagement with any of the characters, and finally I was not at all sure what the point of the exercise was. There is some excellent writing, sense of place is well established, but there are also sentences that I could not make head nor tail of.
Every writer has a particular rhythm to their words and phrasing. It took a few pages for my mind to fall into that rhythm and hear the song. Deni Bechard has created characters so outside my experience, yet familiar in their humanity and searches for meaning.
It is the the loneliness of his characters and their simple striving for all that has alluded them that makes you hope that they find their place in the world. It's as though if they succeed we may have a chance ourselves.
Unexpected joy of a read.
I was disappointed. The blurb tells a story of a really unusual family and I paid painful attention at the beginning to make sure I understood the lineage. Then the book is 'chunked' up into completely disjointed, choppy sections of unrelated narratives of different family members over different generations. Each story is captivating but there is no arc that brings it together, or even helps the reader understand where it fits into the bigger whole. Unless I missed something big and obvious (which I don't think I did), the book was entirely unsatisfying. Which is even MORE disappointing considering the promise of the premise a family with big giants and little runts, facing the world through the generations. Too bad. (
I read this book as my first fiction in years! Enjoyed it, especially the colorful descriptions. I like that the transitions between characters were so seamless. Nothing left you wondering if it was misplaced. Some of the characters were more interesting than others. Happy reading!
I have never read a book that showed such promise at the beginning , to decompensate so rapidly at its end.
Very, very disappointing.
I remember biking once along the rural coast in Western Ireland, when I came across a small herd of goats. As I had just come around a bend in the road, I guess I startled them, and several started off bleating, or whatever the sound is that goats make. Three of the goats, however, turned stock-still, keeled over, and were frozen with their legs completely stiff and up in the air. I almost fell off my bike in amazement, and for some time afterwords I thought I must have dreamed it. I found out later that this response is due to some mutation in a chloride channel (CLIC to be more precise), which while settling my mind that it wasn't a hallucination, sort of ruined the magic for me. Anyway, this book reminded me of that experience over and over again. The magic that we fail to notice but others live with as common experience.
Bechard's simple language often captures drops of life like I haven't found since reading Hopscotch over and over obsessively years ago "There was nothing worse than thinking about God alone. It was very lonely." I've managed to find myself there more than once...Too much existential longing? No, these characters have lives to live and mouths to feed. Only Harvey can afford to indulge in such escapism, and perhaps that's why I didn't find him terribly appealing.
If you don't find yourself falling in love at first with Jude or Isa or Francois, read it again. They don't shout their messages. It's more like that longing glance that you get from a lover telling you that your wanted or that tell-tale averted glance that your not. More feeling is found in the physical decription of a scene, which for some reason is how I read emotional weather reports. So perhaps that's why I get it...
I think I'll post more when I've further digested this more thoroughly, but I think these characters are destined for history- like Steinbeck's Lenny or Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov. Characters who taught you something, without trying.
Where to start on this review? I read this for a book club meeting. I'll start by noting that my entire book club agreed, this is a one star book. The book is series of small stories that are tangentially linked together. All the characters in the book are flawed and unlikable. The absence of a plot line to connect the characters and their vignettes, made this book a tiresome series of unlikable characters achieving nothing in their lives.
I had not heard of this book before speaking to the author while he was researching his latest book, Empty Hands Open Arms. Wanting to know a little more about him, I got the download. I was gobsmacked. Vandal Love should be read twice - once to experience the language, and then maybe a second time for the story, a family odyssey of desire, adversity, and yearning to fit into a world in which you don't really belong.
My first reading was like drowning. Bechard will sweep you away on a flash flood of language, pull you under, tumble you, strip you bare. Occasionally you'll break surface just long enough enough to catch a breath. I haven't been borne away like that since reading C. S. Godshalk's magisterial Kalimantaan. I found myself forgetting why I was reading, or even that I was reading. I was just being pulled along, powerless to stop, until I was coughed up on shore where everything was the same but somehow strangely different.
The themes suggest that Bechard is a mystic with some affinity to the writer of the Cloud of Unknowning - but it is hopeless to compare a truly original artist - and I think that is what Deni Bechard is. After a few months I'll return to the book for the story line. And try to avoid being hypnotized again. More then.
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