"Bridge of Sighs" by Richard Russo
Wow...what a novel! I really haven't been able to tear myself away from it. A wonderful picture of small town America in about the same time frame as I grew up in and told mainly in flashback from someone my age. A complex, thoughtful, questioning but ultimately affirming book about the lives of people many of whom were just like my parents, my extended family, the neighbourhood I grew up in etc.
Russo won the Pulitzer for his novel "Empire Falls" which I'm looking forward to reading. I read his satire on academia called "Straight Man" which was amusing and had some meaning but not stunning literature like this novel was.
Always difficult to pick up something when you've just read something wonderful. In my current stack of books I have Mark Haddon's "A Spot of Bother" (wrote The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-time), Joan Barfoot's "Luck" (I just loved "Exit Lines" recently), "Cockroach" by Rawi Hage (he won the Impac Dublin Award for "De Niro's Game" which I enjoyed and I was thrilled to end up with this book at our Christmas book exchange in ), and "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath...this last one came inexplicable packaged with some books from Amazon I had ordered. I wonder which one will win out...the first two are library books so will get first dibs.
