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The Nightingales Of Troy: Stories Of One Family's Century (2008)

by Alice Fulton(Favorite Author)

3.59 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

039304887X (ISBN13: 9780393048872)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: Although I liked the writing, characters, and story of this book just fine, it disappointed me because it hardly overlapped at all with the Troy that I have lived in while studying at RPI. What about the Troy picking itself up out of the post-industrial slump, the public library, the huge farmers' market, the vegan bakery, Sage College? Granted, the book ends in 1999, and most of that didn't exist yet. But the first two women to attend RPI graduated in 1946. They would have fit perfectly into this book.At least I learned just how close Frear Park is to where I live.
review 2: "That night, Ruth lay awake, obsessing. They were entering the last day of the century, and she had no plan. You must change your life!...Ruth sometimes composed imaginary perfumes to put ... moreherself to sleep. Now she thought of a fragrance that smelled only of water, a perfume that had forgotten its flowers. Lethe. That's what she'd name it." (p. 246-247, "L'Air du Temps")I should say I'm kind of uninterested in family epics in general - there always seems to be something strange about the fact that the reader (usually) gets to develop such a clearer sense of huge arcs of family patterns than anyone in the family themselves. But I have loved Alice's poems ever since undergrad, each book more than the last, and a woman at Eliot Bay Books recommended this to me with such passion over the summer (she literally added the book to my pile when she saw what else I had) that I gave in. What's most excellent about this book is the fact that each character gets her own space. This alone seems to me brilliant. And then there is the fact that something of Gertrude Stein seems present even though there's nothing direct I can point to to make that comparison - even better. The stories also seemed to me to work as essays insomuch as they felt subtly argumentative, like the voice behind them was well aware of what it was demonstrating about the nature of time, and what remains of past time. less

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