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Summary
Summary
From the award-winning novelist Mary Gordon, here is a book whose twentieth-century wisdom can help us understand the difficulties we face in the twenty-first: There Your Heart Lies is a deeply moving novel about an American woman's experiences during the Spanish Civil War, the lessons she learned, and how her story will shape her granddaughter's path.
Marian cut herself off from her wealthy, conservative Irish Catholic family when she volunteered during the Spanish Civil War--an experience she has always kept to herself. Now in her nineties, she shares her Rhode Island cottage with her granddaughter Amelia, a young woman of good heart but only a vague notion of life's purpose. Their daily existence is intertwined with Marian's secret past: the blow to her youthful idealism when she witnessed the brutalities on both sides of Franco's war and the romance that left her trapped in Spain in perilous circumstances for nearly a decade. When Marian is diagnosed with cancer, she finally speaks about what happened to her during those years--personal and ethical challenges nearly unthinkable to Amelia's millennial generation, as well as the unexpected gifts of true love and true friendship.
Marian's story compels Amelia to make her own journey to Spain, to reconcile her grandmother's past with her own uncertain future. With their exquisite female bond at its core, this novel, which explores how character is forged in a particular moment in history and passed down through the generations, is especially relevant in our own time. It is a call to arms--a call to speak honestly about evil when it is before us, and to speak equally about goodness.
Author Notes
MARY GORDON is the author of eight novels, including Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; six works of nonfiction, including the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother; and three collections of short fiction, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received many other honors, including a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1937, Marian Rabinowitz (née Taylor) is 19 years old and newly married-in name only-to a Jewish doctor who had been her brother's lover. She has left behind Vassar and her bitter, Catholic Park Avenue family and is on her way to Spain with her husband to tend to the wounded fighting against Franco. Their marriage is a ticket out of Dodge for Marian and a respectable cover for Russell, and Marian in particular is giddy with the possibilities she hopes her courageous new life will allow. Her idealism, however, doesn't last long. Working in hospitals, she quickly comes to face the grim reality of both war and the limitations of her own circumstances. In this commendable new novel, Gordon (The Liar's Wife) presents Marian both at the beginning of her adult life and at the end, a woman in her 90s, living in Rhode Island with her 20-something granddaughter Naomi, who knows nothing of her grandma's earlier escapades until, not quite on her deathbed, Marian begins to tell the story of how, after her first husband left Spain, she fell in love with a Spanish doctor who died suddenly. Marian went on to spend 12 years in Spain, finding both despair and resilience. Marian's story eventually compels Naomi to begin an adventure of her own, hoping to understand more of the loss and renewal that shaped her grandmother. While much of the novel relies on heavy exposition and a structure that feels somewhat artificial, Marian is a delightful, absorbing character, illuminating both a period and a place. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Gordon (The Liar's Wife, 2014) performs another astute and powerful variation on the Jamesian theme of American innocents abroad. A student at Vassar in 1936, Marian Taylor breaks the bonds to her wealthy, harshly conservative Irish Catholic family in the wake of her father's disastrous reaction to her beloved brother Johnny's homosexuality, sailing off to volunteer in the Spanish Civil War with Johnny's lover, a doctor. Marian's enmity toward the church intensifies as she witnesses the consequences of its unholy alliance with the brutal dictator Franco. Gordon dramatically illuminates Marian's grueling, even gothic ordeals, first as a medical assistant steeped in atrocities, then during her near-incarceration in a Spanish village as a war widow after the briefest of marriages. The time frame shifts between the past and 2009, when Marian, 92 and ailing in Rhode Island, reveals her hidden past for the first time to her thoughtful granddaughter Amelia, another innocent on the verge of a harsh awakening. Gordon's masterful pairing of passionately descriptive, stunningly revelatory action scenes with Marian and Amelia's churning interior monologues convey with arresting insights and startling immediacy the intersection of brutality and faith, the voluptuous appeal of tyranny, the infectious nature of fear and hate, and the lifesaving courage of love. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Gordon is a go-to writer for serious fiction lovers, who will be rallied by a national promotional effort and author tour.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE HOME THAT WAS OUR COUNTRY: A Memoir of Syria, by Alia Malek. (Nation Books, $27.99.) This Syrian-Americanjournalist moved to Damascus in 2011 to renovate a family apartment. Her insightful reporting on the war's effects on the population and her account other grandmother's life create a history of Syria. WE CROSSED A BRIDGE AND IT TREMBLED: Voices From Syria, by Wendy Pearlman. (Custom House/HarperCollins, $24.99.) A politics professor collects accounts of refugees in the Middle East and Europe. She foregrounds the extraordinary heroism of ordinary Syrians, both those who are trapped in the country and those who struggle to make new lives. THE CHANGELING, by Victor LaValle. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) In this modern-day fairy tale, set in New York City, a young father encounters "the old kind" of evil. The anxieties of modern parenting and the rigors of survival in urban America all have their place in this strange and wonderful new novel. HUNGER: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Theessayist and novelisttells how she was gangraped at 12 and subsequently gained weight to protect herself. Her memoir is an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways trauma, stories and desire construct our reality. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls. (University of Chicago, $35.) This new life of Thoreau, in time for his 200th birthday, paints a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man. One of the book's pleasures is the way it transports us back to America in the first half of the 19 th century. THE ISLAMIC ENLIGHTENMENT. The Struggle Between Faith and Reason: 1798 to Modern Times, by Christopher de Bellaigue. (Liveright, $35.) This fascinating study of Middle Eastern scholars and political figures who grappled with reform and modernization in the 19 th and 20 th centuries reveals the multiplicity of Muslim identities and loyalties. THERE YOUR HEART LIES, by MaryGordon. (Pantheon, $26.95.) The heroine of this exceptional new novel is a 92-year-old widow who defied her wealthy Catholic family to become a nurse during the Spanish Civil War. In the present, the woman forms abond with her granddaughter, who has come to live with her. THE GREAT NADAR: The Man Behind the Camera, by Adam Begley. (Tim Duggan, $28.) This biography of Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, a 19th-century French photographer who was one of the art's greatest portraitists, is the first to appear in English. QUIET UNTIL THE THAW, by Alexandra Fuller. (Penguin Press, $25.) This ardent and original novel dives deep into Lakota culture and history. Many of the events it describes are rooted in history, and it culminates in the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Kirkus Review
Shifting points in time and points of view reveal a young woman shaped by the zealotry that can emanate from family, faith, or war.In the late 1930s, Marian Taylor breaks with her wealthy New York family after their righteous Roman Catholic persecution forces her beloved gay brother to hang himself. She sails off to Spain with his lover, Russell, a medical doctor she has married for mutual convenience, to join the forces fighting Franco by caring for the wounded. She is 19 and uncommonly nave, prey to "the vague ideas of a privileged girl," while her new friends, who are fiercely debating fascism and communism, "are the most wonderful people in the world." Gordon (The Liar's Wife, 2014, etc.) writes from within the character's fledgling sensibility to provide a baseline for innocence soon to be broken, as is the narrative. The chapters on Spain alternate with others in which Marian is 92 and living on Rhode Island's coast with her granddaughter, Amelia. Back in Spain, Marian loses Russell as he flees the war's horrors and returns to the U.S. She marries a Spanish doctor and soon loses him to sepsis. She has their baby and loses him to her domineering mother-in-law. Gordon touches often on the sadism of soldiers, clerics, and citizens under Franco, encapsulating it in a devastated priest, Father Tomas, emerging from a confessional after three hours of listening toand perforce absolvingpenitents and their litanies of cruelty. The narrative lightens considerably with the shifts to older Marian in 2009 as she gives Amelia an elderly woman's perspective on that terrible time in Spainbefore Gordon sends the younger woman off on her own little crusade, a nice parallel without much point. An emotionally and historically rich work with a strong character portrait holding together its disparate parts. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Who are you? Who am I? Those are the questions that echo throughout Gordon's (Final Payments; Pearl) latest novel. In 1937, Marian enters into a marriage of convenience with Russell, her late brother's lover, and goes with him to Spain, where he works as a doctor in support of the Republicans opposing Franco's Fascist regime. Both Marian and Russell are horrified and disillusioned by the infighting between the communists and anarchists, and by the atrocities committed on all sides of the struggle. In 2009, Marian's granddaughter, Amelia, stays with Marian while she tries to find direction, and eventually hears the stories of Marian's turbulent past. While this novel's structure of building a narrative across alternating timeframes is common in contemporary fiction, an unusual element here is that we sometimes get the same events depicted twice: first through the third person, and then through -Marian telling her story to Amelia. This way, we see Marian's attempts to attach meaning and significance to particular events, and Amelia's disinterest or boredom with parts of the story, as well as her interpretations of her grandmother's meaning. VERDICT As Amelia explores her grandmother's story in this sharply observed text, her misguided attempt to bring closure flirts with, but thankfully doesn't succumb to, a Hollywood ending. All Gordon fans will appreciate. [See Prepub Alert, 11/7/16.]-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.