San Miguel

Schön geschrieben, und dann hört es einfach auf, ohne Spannungsbogen, Sinn und geradezu untypisch für Boyle - enttäuschend...wen das nicht stört, gute Unterhaltung...

This book is divided into three parts, each centered around a particular woman involved, in one way or another, with the God-forsaken island of San Miguel, off the coast of California. The only practical economic activity on the island is raising sheep for their wool. Sadly, horrific weather extremes make it inhospitable to humans.There are many other reviews of this work that state it's strengths and weaknesses more eloquently than I can. Essentially, the book starts out with a heroine named Marantha, who is struggling with tuberculosis but hoping that the climate of the island will be good for her health. Unfortunately, her hopes are dashed as she encounters powerful winds, incessant rain, and an impossible house that provides little in the way of creature comforts.Tuberculosis eventually takes the life of this proud and brave woman, leaving the book with weaker characters who provide little in the way of interest. About halfway through the second part of the book, that featured Marantha's daughter, Edith, I was well along in losing interest in the story.T. C. Boyle is a very gifted writer, who provides brilliant word pictures and outstanding descriptors of his characters' feelings and emotions. Throughout the half of the book that I read, I enjoyed how well he constructed the narrative in a picturesque and vivid manner. As the story began to bog down, however, I lost the will to finish the book.

Vintage Boyle. Not much action here, but very subtle portraits of three women and their connection with San Miguel Island. The reading itself is a joy, as always with Boyle, no matter where he is leading you.

After reading "The Women", I was anxious to read another T.C. Boyle novel. This one didn't disappoint. This is basically the story of an island: San Miguel, just off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. However, it's the story of an island as portrayed through the lives of fictional women who inhabited it. Marantha is the first women we meet, a women wracked with tuberculosis. Marantha comes to the island with her husband Will and her adopted daughter Edith. Marantha wants nothing more than to leave.Her daughter Edith finds herself unwillingly brought back to San Miguel by Will and becomes virtually a prisoner on the island. A young woman who loves books and music, she hungers for a better life and is willing to take risks to escape which she is finally able to do. Edith's life after the island is cleverly told in the third section of the book with only enough detail to "make you wonder."I felt the story truly became live with the telling of Elise's experience on the island years later. Growing up in New York, married late in life, Elise embarks on a unimagineable venture coming to San Miguel with her husband Herbert. Never thinking she would have children, she soon gives birth to two daughters. The island undergoes changes as the world changes: communication, transportation, World War II. The island is affected by all, but Elise's steadiness remains. The story builds to a dramatic but not totally unexpected ending.

T.C. Boyle returns to the starkly beautiful landscape of his last novel, When the Killing's Done, in his newest work, San Miguel. Don't look for the action-packed, bullet-paced prose of most of Boyle's earlier work, though. Boyle's novel, which is essentially the stories of the Waters and Lester families, explores the hauntingly elegiac mood and rhythms and, yes, boredom of life on an isolated island off the California coast. Hardcore Boyle addicts looking for his stinging wit and humor may wonder when the story is going to begin. It really begins with the impending death of Marantha Waters whose husband's untimely affair with a trusted family servant and his decision to hold her daughter Edith in island servitude makes Marantha's end all the more tragic. After several attempts to escape the island that has become her own private hell, during one of which when she yielded her virgin patent to an older man, Edith finally escapes. As the Waters family saga ends, the story of the Lester family begins fifty years later during Prohibition. We're set amid the island's solitude along with Elise Lester and her husband Herbie. Life seems idyllic for the "Swiss Family Lester" as they are dubbed by the national media that tincture their poverty-stricken isolation with false romanticism. The Swiss Family Lester veneer rubs through, though, with the advent of World War II, unwanted visitors and a tragic end that even idyllic Herbie could never have imagined. The two family histories are joined by a single thread in the form of Jimmie, once gangling would-be paramour of Edith and later a used-up farmhand for the Lesters. Based on actual family histories, this is a haunting novel that keeps us searching for relics of the fate of the Waters family even as the Lesters make a new life on the island. The answer lies with San Miguel Island itself, rugged, stark, beautiful, and relentlessly unforgiving.