Details Books Toward The Hour I First Believed
| Original Title: | The Hour I First Believed |
| ISBN: | 0060393491 (ISBN13: 9780060393496) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Setting: | Denver, Colorado(United States) Connecticut(United States) |
Rendition During Books The Hour I First Believed
Wally Lamb's two previous novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a chord with readers. They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor.In The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.
When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.
While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface.
As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary -- and American.
The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity.
Itemize Containing Books The Hour I First Believed
| Title | : | The Hour I First Believed |
| Author | : | Wally Lamb |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 740 pages |
| Published | : | November 11th 2008 by Harper (first published November 11th 2007) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. Contemporary. Adult Fiction. Adult. Literary Fiction. Drama |
Rating Containing Books The Hour I First Believed
Ratings: 3.82 From 55205 Users | 6470 ReviewsCriticize Containing Books The Hour I First Believed
A great story is buried in Wally Lamb's avalanche of a novel, The Hour I First Believed, but only the most determined readers will manage to dig it out. The author -- twice blessed by Oprah, for She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True -- can be a captivating storyteller, and he has built this story on one of the most shocking acts of violence in modern history. Sadly, though, his new novel becomes so burdened by diversions, delays, tangents and side plots that the whole ramblingUnbelievably good. I never thought I'd say that about a book that incorporates Columbine, prison, drug addiction, Hurricane Katrina and troubled youth but it's the truth. I had to stop and sit and think after I finished this long book. After thinking for awhile, I realized that I would always think of Caelum Quirk, the main character and narrator, as a good friend even if he doesn't actually exist.
This Lamb book was not worth the 10-year wait.I couldn't believe how much he tried to cram into the plot and the poor protagonist's life. Virtual orphan, failed marriages and cheating wives, Columbine, mentally-ill wife who ends up in prison after killing a young boy, secret mother and doctored birth certificates, mummified babies and Katrina-refugee tenants. All of this interspersed with the story within a story told by his ancestor's letters. What? Caleum couldn't have been at Ground Zero on
Wally Lamb creates characters who become real as they are revealed on the page. When thinking about the book between readings, it was like revisiting acquaintances I was getting to know intimately. There are twists and turns, history that is revealed and unraveled like the labyrinth that he alludes to in the novel.It's a book that took ten years to write, and these pages contain those ten years. Not only is does it delve into the family history of the characters for the past century, it revisits
This is a heavy, but gripping read. In the back of my mind I wonder how the people who were involved with Columbine will handle the inevitable media attention to the case but the novel has me hooked.Caelum is trying to live in the aftermath - guilt because he could have said something about the two students; guilt because he wasn't in the building at the time; guilt because his wife was. And Maureen isn't coping. His life has turned 360 and he's struggling to see the future.So far (about a third
I have just finished "The hour I first believed" and I am sitting in front of the computer with contradictory feelings. As a declared fan of Lamb's former novels, I still think he is a genius in portraying the human soul. His grasp of emotional intelligence and his skill in exposing human nature and its inner ups and downs, are masterly laid out to the reader in both a crude and tender way. The same as in his previous novels, you end up knowing each character as if it was a real human being,
In the afterword to The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb says his long career in teaching influenced his decision to center his new book on the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher before taking their own lives. (H)aving spent half of my life in high school four years as a student and 25 as a teacher I could and did transport myself, psychically if not physically, to Littleton, Colorado. Could I have acted as
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