Customer Reviews

The Blue Marionette

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

By TT reviewer Chuck Gregory
Jaimie has been blessed, and cursed, all of his life. He is blessed with wonderful understanding parents, with privilege and a comfortable standard of living. He is further blessed with an incisive wit, a quick mind and deep feelings that he is willing to face and longs to understand. Perhaps most important, he is blessed with not only the admiration but also the true love of others. But his deep feelings can be a curse, especially when he is parted from someone he loves most. This happens more than once; the results are poignant and help to shape his attitudes and his innermost self. His is at the same time an uplifting and a heartrending tale, and in this way it has a strength that seems to lift it out of the computer or printed page and into the reader's heart.

I found this book extremely difficult reading. Several times I put it aside; it tended to penetrate too deeply for me to be able to go on. Each time that I stopped, I said to myself that it was worth reading, indeed very much worth reading-but I couldn't continue just then.

Stafford's prose has a lyrical quality that is almost hypnotic. His lush descriptions start from an event or a place, but move on to the realm of mind and emotion, and always there is an awareness of God, angels, fate, life and death. He mentions in his dedication that he had taken 60 years to finally write this novel. I am afraid it might take me 60 years to fully appreciate it, for I have developed the short attention span of our day.

I believe that if I could find more patience to relax and enjoy this novel, I would rate it far higher. It is so full of detail that it is overwhelming. Reading it is a bit like trying to stand in the center of a river after a dam broke upstream-you have to let it take you where it will, and not spend too much time trying to analyze as it goes by. Yet, on another level, it is well deserving of analysis, and so you feel you have missed something, and you want to go back.

In "The Blue Marionette", Jaimie's eyes are blue, as blue as the sky in fairyland. Blue is the color of happiness for Jaimie, and Jaimie is happy, although always the happiness seems to end. For someone is pulling his strings...

If you have patience, and you enjoy layer upon layer of description and a slow but inexorable revelation of events foreshadowed from the start, try this book. It will reward you. If you, like me, suffer the impatience that is all but encouraged in this 21st century, you might want to spend your time on one that provides quicker gratification. Still, I must commend Elsan Stafford on his achievement.

Upon finishing The Blue Marionette, the feeling that swept over me was that I was in the presence of greatness.

Elsan Stafford is a masterful story-teller, and with The Blue Marionette has taken us back to a time when chivalry and altruism were still prized measures of character. It is also a look into the human struggle between the desire to find true love, and the realization that there are other responsibilities of even greater importance.

As an added bonus, the author begins most chapters with a brief but fitting poem. You'll find them to be among the most hauntingly beautiful verses you've ever enjoyed. Whether through the story itself, or through the ability to arouse your emotions and reach deep into your psyche, it seems that at 88 years young, this gentleman can still show the rest of us a thing or two about living life to the fullest.

If you enjoy a poignant love story that will ultimately leave you uplifted and filled with a renewed desire to express altruism in your own life, then you should read The Blue Marionette.

Just got my hard copy of Elsan's epic novel and am reading it for the second time. What? You haven't ordered your copy yet? What're you waiting for, the Second Coming? I dare say there's not a more beautifully written book in the whole universe. And I dare say your life will be forever positively and poignantly changed after you read The Blue Marionette. Do you dare not read this book? If you do, you will miss out on enjoying one of literature's most unique and rhapsodic creations!