Customer Reviews

The Boy on the Green Bicycle

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

 

 

I've never read anything like this before -- descriptions of childhood on a cellular level, what it felt like, smelled like, tasted like, and more -- other senses that live purely in Margaret Diehl's imagination but that resonate with ours. A hilarious, moving, compulsively readable memoir about beauty, family, aching loneliness and aching love of life. I couldn't put it down, didn't want to leave the mind of this child and the drama of her family. Diehl is a true original and takes you to places that seem like your own forgotten dreams.

This is a book about loss, lives shattered, the disconnection of those left behind, and the reality of going on with life after monumental tragedy as someone so different, so changed, that the sense of being human becomes impaired.

Sometimes like the wail of a wounded animal, always like the articulate discomfort of someone so intelligent that the mystery of death is an unaccustomed block, so sudden and so final, that she cannot accept it as so--a lifetime spent waiting to change the outcome, to go as Orpheus did to the underworld, for there must be some way to bring them back...

This book is so powerful that despite its very close focus on the feelings and experiences of the author as a child, it opens the sense one sometimes has of looking so closely at things that their reality and substance de-constructs within the mind, and falls apart.

The vision and memory of this child, now grown, whose father committed suicide within weeks of her brother's fatal bicycle accident are preserved in such a way as to fling her continually back to those years when her world was destroyed, and her home broken up, her pets put to sleep...is yet pure and limpid with clarity for the reader--the mixed feelings of relief and despair and the way they mingle and switch places...this book is so true, one need not have experienced anything like it as a child to understand completely and nod with recognition.

This book is a little masterpiece, reminiscent of the transformations in late nineteenth century French poetry, like Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal"--the transformation of the "base" into the eternal, into the flower, into a work of art instead of a scream.

The French word for a psychic is "une sensible," which translates as "a sensitive." In "The Boy on the Green Bicycle," which just won well-deserved recognition as one of the New York Times Most Notable Books of 1999, Margaret Diehl transmits an astonishing range of sensations and perceptions related to childhood which seem almost impossible for one human to have remembered, let alone to have borne. Impossible, that is, until you lie down with the book and open yourself to it the way Diehl opened herself to books as a child: "I had uncurled like a hedgehog, exposed my soft parts to the wave of the story." If the excruciating honesty of the book doesn't scare you off, you'll be afforded the closest thing there is to time travel--childhood unrolls itself before you, like the magic garden in Diehl's back yard. While the tragedies dealt with here, the accidental death of her idolized older brother and the subsequent suicide of her father, may lie beyond the reach of others' experience, Diehl's narrative of everyday childhood experience is unsurpassed. It is as if Diehl has suffered no memory loss, as if she has the sensations of a three-year-old or seven-year-old as fresh in her brain as when they were first imprinted. Her recollections of her intercourse with the natural world and of the relentless drama of family life, impossible for outsiders to grasp, are especially stunning. She delivers her own soul up to the reader, along with gentle but unsparing portraits of the entire family, in a fearless prose of vivid invention. Diehl is a writer not only for those whom language makes giddy, but for any reader as brave as she, any ready to receive the transmissions from this "sensitive," any reader honest enough to open up and say, yes, this is how it was...

I started reading "The Boy on the Green Bicycle" hoping to share in a stranger's childhood remembrances. I got a lot more than I expected.

Margaret Diehl weaves words like a spider weaves its web....... you think you can meander along, capable of disengaging at will. Wrong. Her beautiful prose teases and promises and subtly ensnares.....

I enjoyed every paragraph. I couldn't stop reading it. I wish I could find more books this engaging.

Margaret Diehl is a beautiful stylist. Some of her descriptions are truly remarkable, but this book needs an editor badly. We don't get to her brother's death until about page 168. Until then we have to wade through endless accounts of Diehl's childhood before the age of ten. Mommy is beautiful and tall and loving; Daddy smokes and drinks and has no interest in his kids. She tells us this over and over and over. The problem for me is that I don't want to spend that much time with a child. Diehl never once gives us the satisfaction of reflecting on the very tragic things in her past from an adult perspective. She never gives us a single conversation with her mother, when Diehl is an ADULT, that might shed some light on what happened. She won't even tell us what happened to her brother and sister after they grew up. Granted, the author has an extraordinary memory for her childhood, but she sometimes spends three or four pages describing a particular game she and her siblings played with no sense that it ultimately does not enhance the story. You could reasonably read every other page of this book and not miss a thing.

I am enthralled with this memoir. It is like having the author there with you telling you her story. She is breaking my heart with the stories regarding her less than loving Father. And I am touched by the loving memories she has of her Mother. This is what a memoir should be. I'm enjoying each word in this wonderful book.

I really enjoyed this book. Having lost my older brother when I was young, I can relate to it. Some of it was hard to read, but after I read it, I felt better knowing that there were others that had gone through what I did.

I wish Amazon's software allowed one to award less than one star...

This book is a appalling exercise in narcissism. Navel-gazing has its place, I suppose, if it is done with some wit and charm (see, for example, My Cousin Robert Lowell), but this self-indulgent misshapen thing hits a new low. It reads like a letter to one's psychotherapist, and perhaps it should be just that. There are glimpses of the author's other family members, but she does not even care enough about them to let us know what happens to them, though we know every wrinkle and blue Monday that affects her precious sensibilities. As just one example, she explains how she came by the childhood name of "Booger" -- an anecdote involving her love of reading and her many afternoons spent in a brown leather chair, which her siblings finally inspect the underside of...as you can readily imagine, this anecdote is neither charming nor entertaining nor education nor anything other than the purest self-indulgent narcissism.

Pass this dreadful thing. My Cousin Robert Lowell or 1185 Park Avenue are both much better.

I initially bought this book because I am about 10 years older than the author and went to school in the town where most of this story takes place (Montclair, NJ). I did not recognize her world at all. This is the worst book I have read all year, and I have seen some other prize turkeys...