Bøger af Hortense Calisher

A "tattoo" is a bugle call, a summoning that lingers in the ear. Although Hortense Calisher's family eventually migrated north to New York City, the echoes of their days as a slave-owning Jewish family in the South still resonate with this acclaimed author, who uncovers a part of history never before so strongly and tenderly revealed. Calisher traces her family's years in the South and their transformative move up north, beautifully evoking the mood and texture of the early twentieth century. Her Virginia-born father, a perfume manufacturer, was twenty-two years older than her German-born mother. Marked by longer-than-normal gaps between the generations and conflicts between the mercantile and the scholarly, the "American" and the émigré, her family is characterized by Calisher as "volcanic to meditative to fruitfully dull, and bound to produce someone interested in character, society, and time."

Hortense Calisher has been hailed as "stand[ing] vividly with Cather and Fitzgerald" (Cynthia Ozick). In this, her latest and most lauded novel, she explores a family united in blood yet divided by ideas. Son Charles hopes to be a Supreme Court justice; family beauty Nell has children by different lovers; art expert Erika has a nose job; and artist Zach has two wives. Their mother, infamous in Israel, born of a well-to-do Boston background but no longer rich, is bound to a past that never quite dies. The buried history of this extraordinary--and very American--family comes to light unexpectedly when grandson Bert brings home as a wife the woman who, years ago, joined the family circle, then mysteriously disappeared. Told with wit and deep acuity, Sunday Jews is a tour de force from a writer whose fiction has justly been compared with that of Eudora Welty and Henry James, and whose ability to delineate our lives is unparalleled.

The 14th novel from a veteran writers' writer, now in her 86th year, who has for almost a half-century been lavishly praised for her verbal ingenuity and peevishly damned for her baroque fiction's frequent obscurity. The eponymous protagonist (and partial narrator) here is a 40ish nomad, on her own in New York City 20 years after being imprisoned for her complicity in a lethal bombing incident engineered by student revolutionaries. She has spent the ensuing years in and out of drug therapy and psychiatric hospitals. Almost immediately, Calisher ups the rhetorical ante, mingling first-person and omniscient narration and juxtaposing Carol's conversations with the exhausted "SW" (social worker) who visits her cold-water flat against verbal sparring with her street-person comrade Alphonse, an indigent actor. Her escape to a condemned storefront populated by homeless dropouts suits Carol's need to belong somewhere. Beyond this (early) point, little happens. Memories of her student days and of her childhood in Dedham, Massachusetts (raised by two aunts - one of whom, she guesses, was her mother), jostle against her infatuation, friendship, and disillusionment with a handsome South African actor who has his own demons to confront, off in a far different world. This inconclusive, almost inchoate novel lacks both development and tension, but is worth reading nonetheless for its knowledgeability (Calisher brilliantly describes the staging of a pompous piece of theatrical agitprop), really rather remarkable empathy with the city's festering downside, and the assured cadences of its precise, witty prose ("The virtue of the street is that you do not expect") One expects more from Calisher, but is grateful for even this otherwise flawed display of her unique, often haunting mastery of language. (Kirkus Reviews)

Rupert is an honored American poet; Gemma a retired architect. They live happily and comfortably in a Greenwich Village apartment; the setting, for over thirty years, of their married life. Each with a previous marriage behind them - which left her with two daughters and him with the promise of greatness - they are now facing the challenge of old age together. Both, in their own way, defy the inevitability of death, and yet both are busy preparing for it. The alternating entries of their private journals, which make up the body of Calisher's text, tell a story of familiarity and the fear of loss, love and uncertainty of the future, meanings and habits. With rare verve and panache, Hortense Calisher has confronted a difficult and often neglected subject - and has triumphed magnificently.