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Sacred Time

Name: Sacred Time
Author: Ursula Hegi
ISBN: 9780743255998

by Ursula Hegi

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Overview

The bestselling author of Stones from the River delivers her most ambitious and dramatic novel yet — the unforgettable story of an endearing, but also flawed, Italian American family.

In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parents' Studebaker, the Paradise Theater, Yankee Stadium — and in his imagination, where he longs for a stencil kit to decorate the windows like all the other kids on his street. Instead he gets a very different present: his uncle Malcolm's family.

Malcolm is in jail for stealing — once again — from his latest new job, and Anthony's aunt and twin cousins settle into the Amedeos' fifth-floor walk-up. Sharing a room with girls is excruciating for Anthony, despite his affinity for the twins. But the real change in Anthony's life comes one evening when he causes the unthinkable to happen, changing each family member's life forever.

Evoking all the plenty and optimism of postwar America, Sacred Time spans three generations, taking us from the Bronx of the 1950s to contemporary Brooklyn. Keenly observing the dark side of family — and its gracefulness — Hegi has outdone herself with this captivating novel about childhood's tenderness and the landscape of loneliness. Ultimately she reveals how the transforming power of a singular event can reverberate through a family for generations. With gravity and poise, Hegi turns her astute yet forgiving eye on the essential frailty and dignity of the human condition in this elegant and fast-paced novel.

Synopsis

In December 1953 Anthony Amedeo's world is nested in his Bronx neighborhood, his parents' Studebaker, the Paradise Theater, Yankee Stadium -- and in his imagination, where he longs for a stencil kit to decorate the windows like all the other kids on his street. Instead he gets a very different present: his uncle Malcolm's family. Malcolm is in jail for stealing -- once again -- from his last new job, and Anthony's aunt and twin cousins settle into the Amedeos' fifth-floor walk-up. Sharing a room with girls is excruciating for Anthony, despite his affinity for the twins. But the real change in Anthony's life comes one evening when he causes the unthinkable to happen, changing each family member's life forever. Evoking all the plenty and optimism of postwar America, Sacred Time spans three generations, taking us from the Bronx of the 1950s to contemporary Brooklyn. Keenly observing the dark side of family as well as its gracefulness, Hegi has outdone herself with this captivating novel about childhood's tenderness and the landscape of loneliness. Ultimately she reveals how the transforming power of a singular event can reverberate through a family for generations. With gravity and poise, Hegi turns her astute yet forgiving eye on the essential frailty and dignity of the human condition in this elegant and fast-paced novel.

The New York Times

Sacred Time becomes more structurally intricate and more satisfying as it progresses, enough to make a reader wish this were a longer, more lingering novel. — Valerie Sayers

About the Author, Ursula Hegi

Mary Macky of The San Francisco Chronicle once observed that "Ursula Hegi has a real genius for the material of personal existence, for the world seen close up." In her quirky yet poignant novels, the German-born Hegi displays this genius time and again.

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Editorials

The New York Times

Sacred Time becomes more structurally intricate and more satisfying as it progresses, enough to make a reader wish this were a longer, more lingering novel. — Valerie Sayers

Publishers Weekly

A boisterously funny opening is followed by family tragedy in this moving if occasionally manipulative novel by Hegi (Stones from the River, etc.) charting a tumultuous half-century in the lives of a delightful Italian-American Bronx family. Seven-year-old Anthony Amedeo's comfortable life with his caterer father, Victor, and his mother, Leonora, is disrupted when his ne'er-do-well Uncle Malcolm goes "elsewhere" (a family euphemism for prison) and his Aunt Floria moves into the Amedeo apartment with her eight-year-old twin daughters. They arrive just before Christmas 1953, and soon afterwards, one of the twins plunges to her death from an open window. The tragedy will define the lives of everyone in the two families and change them as surely as their Bronx is changing. Even before the accident, trouble was brewing. Leonora, aware that her husband is having an affair, considers divorce and dallies with a much younger man, but reluctantly allows her philandering husband to return. Floria, meanwhile, has long been in love with the best man at her wedding, and after three decades of married life, a trip to her beautiful ancestral hometown in Italy helps her decide to leave Malcolm and marry the best man. It is Anthony, however, who bears the novel's greatest burden. He witnesses his cousin's plunge to her death and lives a smothered life even after he becomes a chef and marries, always under the unspoken cloud of the family's suspicion that he pushed the girl. The novel's final chapters, in which Hegi's characters finally come to terms with their grief, rely too heavily on italicized forays into the past, but even readers who resist the bathos may be gripped despite themselves. (Dec. 2) Forecast: This is something of a departure for Hegi, who usually writes on German themes, but she vividly evokes the Italian-American community of the Bronx, and readers will recognize her skill at capturing the complex dynamics of large families. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In Hegi's latest novel (after Hotel of the Saints), a seven-word exchange between two young cousins takes on dimensions so enormous that their families never really recover. Anthony is just seven years old in 1953 when his aunt Floria and her eight-year-old twins, Bianca and Belinda, move in with his family (Floria's husband, Malcolm, "is elsewhere," i.e., in prison). The beleaguered Anthony's torment at the hands of his bratty cousins escalates until the boy utters a single word that sends Bianca falling to her death. Hegi traces the patch-job done by the survivors in order to get on with life, though crushed by grief and guilt. Anthony's place in the family is forever tainted by his relatives' suspicion that he pushed Bianca. Over the next half-century, protective barriers are erected, marriages fall apart and then are cobbled back together, and each family member searches for something, anything, that looks like peace of mind, if not genuine happiness. Still, this is far from a relentlessly grim tale: Hegi's characters provide much-welcomed comic relief with their absurdly unpleasant quirks, which are exacerbated, not softened, by their shared familial trauma. Hegi puts her readers smack in the center of the psychological morass that results from a child's violent death and offers the promise that rescue, however imperfect, is possible. Recommended for most collections.-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The German-born author breaks new ethnic ground to little effect in her tale of a child's death haunting two generations of Italian-Americans in the Bronx. Hegi (Stones From the River, 1994; The Vision of Emma Blau, 2000, etc.) chronicles a half-century (1953-2002) through the eyes of four members of the Amedeo family: Floria, her sister-in-law Leonora, and their children, Anthony and Belinda. Floria's brother Victor, who inherited their mother's love of cooking, starts a catering business and marries Leonora; Anthony is their only child. Floria weds Malcolm, a roofer from England who steals from his employees and periodically goes "Elsewhere" (jail), which means his wife and her twin girls, Bianca and Belinda, must move in with her brother. Tragedy ensues when seven-year-old Anthony encourages cousin Bianca, in her Superman cape, to believe she can fly to her father. She falls to her death, and this central event shapes every subsequent development. Floria takes to her bed and abandons her sewing business. Guilt-ridden Anthony retreats into silence. Leonora wonders whether her son has inherited a violent streak from her father, a guard at Sing Sing who frequently beat Leonora and later committed suicide. Though the loss of Bianca still resonates 50 years later, Hegi provides a slew of other dramas. Victor has an affair and tries to get an annulment before changing his mind and begging Leonora to take him back, which she does: "Because of the habits. Because of Anthony . . . . Because time will not be theirs forever." Floria ditches Malcolm for his best man, the guy she should have married all along. Belinda finds happiness in her second marriage to a former priest, while Anthony, now achef, fathers a son in an on-again/off-again marriage punctuated by six separations and five reunions. All these exits and entrances count for little beside Bianca's death, which sits like an indigestible lump in the gut of the narrative. Lacking coherent plot development and a single compelling protagonist, Hegi's latest reads disconcertingly like snippets from a multigenerational saga. Agent: Gail Hochman/Brandt & Hochman