Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Two discretely shaped yet interdependent narratives creating a family saga from the viewpoints of both maternal and paternal lines (a difficult and rarely successful strategy for fiction) comprise this large and capacious novel. Distant Music begins in the nineteenth-century and extends well into the twentieth, a diptych retelling the story of the Woods and Ramos families and their descents in rough-and-tumble California. In crisp, succinct, and often elegant prose, rich in deftly selected detail, Julian Silva celebrates not only the resilience of men and women confronted with failure but-even more important-he adumbrates the compromised morality of their achievement.The Gunnysack Castle was first published by Ohio University Press in 1983. A study of the character of Belle Bettencourt was published by Cosmopolitan Magazine in March 1964.
The second section of The Death of Mae Ramos, "Vasco and the Other," was originally published in 1979 under a different title and in a slightly different form in the University of Colorado's Writer's Forum 6.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Praise for The Gunnysack Castle by Julian Silva: 'The rise of an anglicized Portuguese is chronicled in a weaving of many strands the immigrant experience, the place of women, the ambience of the nouveau riche that makes a voluptuous tapestry of life and richly satisfying first novel... This is a compelling novel of Portuguese assimilation into the American mainstream."--Publisher's Weekly"... the women in the book are complex, vulnerable, proud, silly and wise; in other words, they are real people and their lives and their stories are affecting and memorable."--San Jose Mercury News