Sacred Time : A Novel (Hegi, Ursula) [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Ursula Hegi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2, 2003

The bestselling author of Stones from the River delivers her most ambitious and dramatic novel yet -- the unforgettable story of an endearing, but also flawed, Italian American family.

In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parents' Studebaker, the Paradise Theater, Yankee Stadium -- and in his imagination, where he longs for a stencil kit to decorate the windows like all the other kids on his street. Instead he gets a very different present: his uncle Malcolm's family.

Malcolm is in jail for stealing -- once again -- from his last new job, and Anthony's aunt and twin cousins settle into the Amedeos' fifth-floor walk-up. Sharing a room with girls is excruciating for Anthony, despite his affinity for the twins. But the real change in Anthony's life comes one evening when he causes the unthinkable to happen, changing each family member's life forever.

Evoking all the plenty and optimism of postwar America, Sacred Time spans three generations, taking us from the Bronx of the 1950s to contemporary Brooklyn. Keenly observing the dark side of family as well as its gracefulness, Hegi has outdone herself with this captivating novel about childhood's tenderness and the landscape of loneliness. Ultimately she reveals how the transforming power of a singular event can reverberate through a family for generations. With gravity and poise, Hegi turns her astute yet forgiving eye on the essential frailty and dignity of the human condition in this elegant and fast-paced novel.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A boisterously funny opening is followed by family tragedy in this moving if occasionally manipulative novel by Hegi (Stones from the River, etc.) charting a tumultuous half-century in the lives of a delightful Italian-American Bronx family. Seven-year-old Anthony Amedeo's comfortable life with his caterer father, Victor, and his mother, Leonora, is disrupted when his ne'er-do-well Uncle Malcolm goes "elsewhere" (a family euphemism for prison) and his Aunt Floria moves into the Amedeo apartment with her eight-year-old twin daughters. They arrive just before Christmas 1953, and soon afterwards, one of the twins plunges to her death from an open window. The tragedy will define the lives of everyone in the two families and change them as surely as their Bronx is changing. Even before the accident, trouble was brewing. Leonora, aware that her husband is having an affair, considers divorce and dallies with a much younger man, but reluctantly allows her philandering husband to return. Floria, meanwhile, has long been in love with the best man at her wedding, and after three decades of married life, a trip to her beautiful ancestral hometown in Italy helps her decide to leave Malcolm and marry the best man. It is Anthony, however, who bears the novel's greatest burden. He witnesses his cousin's plunge to her death and lives a smothered life even after he becomes a chef and marries, always under the unspoken cloud of the family's suspicion that he pushed the girl. The novel's final chapters, in which Hegi's characters finally come to terms with their grief, rely too heavily on italicized forays into the past, but even readers who resist the bathos may be gripped despite themselves. This is something of a departure for Hegi, who usually writes on German themes, but she vividly evokes the Italian-American community of the Bronx, and readers will recognize her skill at capturing the complex dynamics of large families.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Simon Read, San Francisco Chronicle Sacred Time is an ambitious piece of writing.

Valerie Sayers, The New York Times Book Review Sacred Time offers its own version of hope in the face of despair, of truth in a new era of secrecy and evasion. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• ISBN-10: 0743255984
• ASIN: B0009W8B0A
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,878,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully crafted novel, April 20, 2004

By 

donna baek "db3819" (Snohomish, Wa USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sacred Time: A Novel (Hegi, Ursula) (Hardcover)

I always read the Amazon book reviews but rarely write them myself. After reading the previous reviews, I feel compelled to voice another opinion on this book. Having read all of Hegi's work, I was eager to read her latest novel.Until the end of the first chapter, I was very disappointed. Being written from the point of view of a child, the ideas and writing seemd sophmoric and completely unlike the poetic and meaningful writing of Hegi's previous novels. The dramatic end of the 1st chapter changes all of that & signals the thrust of the rest of the book which is the life of a family as it moves through time from several of its members' points of view and how it is shaped & impacted by a tragedy. Hegi is a master of manipulating the tools of story telling and in her past novels she employs various interesting writing techniques to try to approximate the changing and often abstact nature of experiencing life. This book is no exception. She jumps ahead several years as she switches from chapter to chapter and to the point of view of another family member. Some things are made clear while much is left unsaid. This book does not proceed in an orderly fashion from event to event so it may unsettle some readers . But one of Hegi's greatest strengths is her abilty to portray the thoughts and emotions of her characters as a person really experiences them: in flashbacks,in snatches of rememberances, in emotional reactions. She is also very gifted at presenting a single happening from so many different points of view thereby really giving one a more complete understanding of an event's true impact. Reading Hegi is like looking at a character's family photo album and reading his/her journal. It is raw life stripped down to it's true nature & presented in a profound and poetic way. The point of this novel is the impact a single event can have on a family and its subsequent generations & how people are shaped by the forces of time, events and our interactions with one another. In order to capture such an unwieldy subject matter she has pared down her narrative to it's emotional essence. It's an absolutely beautiful novel. I have only a few pages left and I don't want it to end. If you are the type of person who enjoys looking at another person's family photos you will love this book. I cannot imagine having the genius to write this well.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars elegantly simple and triumphantly natural, April 20, 2004

By 

Katherine Thompson "kjthomps" (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sacred Time: A Novel (Hegi, Ursula) (Hardcover)

Ursula Hegi opens her novel Sacred Time with deceptive simplicity: the first paragraph contains only one sentence, "That winter of 1953, stenciled glass-wax decorations appeared on nearly every window in the Bronx, and Uncle Malcolm was sent to jail for stealing stamps and office equipment from his last new job." The same bare elegance runs throughout, somehow creating a subtly complex and motivated story out of clear, uncomplicated prose. The novel has the impact that it does because Hegi selects the perfect words, constructs layers of rich atmosphere, and forces the reader to fill in not only sundry details, but major plot points as well--she tends not to finish one subplot until long after several new ones have started, which results in a novel that is truer to life than the books whose chapters each contain a perfect capsule of introduction, rising action, climax, and dénouement.
A novel that spans three generations and two continents could easily become stretched, with too few delightful specifics and too many underdeveloped story lines. Hegi does a good job, however, of making Sacred Time fill out its expansive framework, partly by letting all the stories grow naturally out of previously-recounted events. Her multiple narrators echo each other in their own words, and stories that are only hinted at in some chapters burst into full and satisfying bloom in later sections. By combining this intriguing structure with effortless prose and delicious details, Ursula Hegi creates in Sacred Time a novel that is as compelling as it is thought-provoking.
At under 250 pages, Sacred Time is a fairly quick read, but make sure to have some cannelloni or calzones on hand before you start, because it will be as hard to resist your cravings for the traditional Italian fare that appears throughout as it will be impossible to put the book down before reading the last, triumphant sentence.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I Totally Agree with Donna!, August 5, 2004

By 

Shirley "Lover of Contemporary Fiction" (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sacred Time: A Novel (Hegi, Ursula) (Hardcover)

I had to review this book because I could not believe how bad the customer ratings were. This was one of the best books I've had the pleasure to read all year and I think others should read it as well.

Please disregard the bad reviews and give it a try, it will be well worth your time.