The Vision of Emma Blau

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In a gripping epic that spans an entire century and four generations of the Blau family, THE VISION OF EMMA BLAU is a story of loves and hates, of excesses and successes, of sins absolved and the search for redemption. It begins with Stefan Blau, a young boy who migrates from Burgdorf, Germany (the fictional setting for STONES FROM THE RIVER), to America at the naïve and impressionable age of 13. For several years he carves out a living and even manages to save a few dollars working various jobs in New York City. After a tragic fire nearly costs him his life, he moves to New Hampshire where he buys an old building along the edge of a lake, prompted by a recurring vision he has of a young girl playing in front of a massive and beautiful apartment building.

Stefan eventually brings part of his vision to life when he builds a beautiful, opulent, six-story apartment house he calls the Wasserburg -- German for "water castle." For Stefan, the building is the culmination of a dream, a fire-proofed edifice that houses not only himself and his family, but all his hopes for the future. It is a legacy that turns out to be both a salvation and a curse.

Stefan's first two wives both die in childbirth, though their offspring -- Greta and Tobias -- survive. Wanting a mother for his children but not wishing to risk another wife to pregnancy, Stefan takes advantage of the love felt for him by his childhood sweetheart, Helene Montag, who has been writing him over the years. Stefan fetches her from Burgdorf to be his third wife with the intent of maintaining a childless marriage. But Helene manages to break through his barriers long enough to conceive, creating a culture of sibling rivalry that will affect the Blau family for years to come.

Each generation of the Blau family suffers from a variety of problems, character faults, and emotional stunting, everything from being a closet gay to compulsive eating disorders. They all share one common struggle, however, that of trying to assimilate themselves into American society. The outbreak of World War II does little to help this process and the Blaus often find themselves the object of others' hate and discrimination simply because they are German.

When Stefan's granddaughter Emma is born, he recognizes her as the young girl from his long ago vision. Emma seizes upon her grandfather's love for the Wasserburg, but unfortunately the building passes to Emma's flaky mother upon Stefan's death. As the years pass, Emma tries to maintain the Wasserburg in the face of her mother's indifference and irresponsible spending, but the once grand house eventually loses its luster and becomes home to a seedier clientele. It also becomes a bone of contention between various family members, a legacy with the ability to tear the family apart. In fact, the house is as much a character in this tale as any of the people, an almost living, breathing entity that holds great influence over those who live within its walls -- walls that have come to know the secrets, tragedies, and dreams of many generations of Blaus.

Hegi is the perfect narrator for the audio version, which she abridged herself. Her voice is as distinctive as her prose and her accent is fitting to the characters she portrays. And while she makes little effort to change her voice when switching from one character to another, the strength of the writing and the depth of her characterizations make it clear who is who. It is obvious both on tape and on paper that Hegi is not only a born storyteller, but one of the most distinctive literary voices of our time.

Freelancer Beth Amos is an audio addict.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Much as she did in Stones from the River, Hegi creates a social world in microcosm, and, following her characters for almost a century, fashions a saga of hidden loves and destructive obsessions. The fictional German town of Burgdorf, the setting of Stones and Floating in my Mother's Palm, also figures in this novel, the story of a German-American family and their fellow residents in an opulent apartment house set, inappropriately,in a rural community on the shores of New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee. In 1905, Stefan Blau, recently emigrated from Burgdorf, has a vision of a girl dancing in a courtyard (foreshadowing identifies her as his eventual granddaughter, Emma) and resolves to give substance to his dream in a building that he will call the Wasserburg. Stefan's passion for the Wasserburg is also a curse, manifested when both his first wife and his second die in childbirth. Determined not to risk another child, he returns to Burgdorf and marries Helene Montag (sister of Leo, the dwarf Trudi's father in Stones). Helene tricks him and has a child of her own--and survives--but the sibling rivalry among Stefan's offspring, combined with the personality defects they acquire when he reserves all his love for the Wasserburg, will threaten to destroy the family. Hegi uses the story of the Blaus and their tenants and neighbors to examine the social pressures on German-Americans during two world wars, and to contrast the differences in cultural attitudes and behavioral standards. She tends to animate characters in terms of psychological eccentricities (one of Stefan's sons eats compulsively to make up for paternal cruelty; his sister can foresee the future and heal by touching; and the eponymous Emma has the same obsession with the Wasserburg that prevents Stefan from nurturing his family). The eventual deterioration of the Wasserburg symbolizes the family's decay, but the much-signaled curse on the house is finally broken. Hegi's gift for depicting family dynamics and sexual relationships, including the concealed sorrows and tensions that motivate behavior, anchors the narrative, but it is her larger perspective of a family's cultural roots that grants her novel distinction. Agent, Gail Hochman. 6-city author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

An apartment house in New England is the dream of German immigrant Stefan Blau, who lands in America in the 1890s. The building is central to the story of several generations of the Blau family, beginning with Stefan's three children from three different wives. The people in each generation are vivid individuals with secrets, passions, and ambitions that drive this family saga through 100 years. Hegi reads her novel in a narrow range of tones; her voice has a whispery quality that does not do justice to the high emotion and animation of the characters. Unfortunately, her eccentric pronunciation gives the serious, passionate story a comic aspect that makes the family seem mildly dysfunctional rather than tragic. As well, the abridgment diminishes the epic proportion and causes great chunks of time to be omitted, disrupting the flow of the story and confusing the listener. Still, the characters and settings are interesting and well developed, and the depiction of German Americans' humiliation during the World Wars is compelling. Libraries may want to wait for the unabridged production with a professional narrator, or read the book, which was highly recommended.--Barbara Valle, El Paso P.L., TX Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Nelson

January 2000

The Vision of Emma Blau

Given the fact that women buy the majority of novels published in this country -- and given the number of so-called "women's novels" out there -- there are surprisingly few writers who consistently manage to produce family sagas that are both compulsively readable and literary enough to be intellectually satisfying but not so high-blown as to feel like homework. Anita Shreve succeeds intermittently. So does Diane Johnson. But it is Ursula Hegi who consistently scores near the top of the crowd- and intellect-pleasing short list.

The Vision of Emma Blau is a wonderful, satisfying novel about three generations of a 20th-century German immigrant family. Fans of the Oprah-fied Stones from the River will recognize Hegi's voice (and some of her characters); newcomers to the Hegi oeuvre will feel at home with them immediately. An old-fashioned tale of family, sacrifice, and love, Hegi's latest begins with the story of Stefan Blau, a small-town German boy who emigrates to New Hampshire at the beginning of the 20th century. Possessed of a vision of how life should be, Blau marries an American banker's daughter and buys an apartment building he turns, via copious amounts of sweat and tears, into the finest such establishment tiny Lake Winnipesaukee has ever seen: Blau's apartments have chandeliers, indoor plumbing, and all manner of modern conveniences. Although in some ways the Blau family will always remain outsiders, Stefan Blau soon becomes a pillar of this New Hampshire society.

But Stefan is not nearly so lucky in love, burying two wives and one baby within a decade. Now a widower with a son and a daughter, he imports a third wife, Helene, from the old country and fathers another son, Robert. And now the rich story begins: Helene, though a good mother to Stefan's children, can't help but favor her own blood, and so subtle conflicts begin to mar the lives of the latter-generation Blaus. There are property disputes among Stefan's children after his death (can you say Bleak House?) and myriad complications in their relationships. Soon we're following Robert, a character so layered with guilt and obligation that he smothers himself in food, work, and music, leaving his wife, Yvonne, and children -- the Emma of the title and her brother, Caleb -- to sort out the mysteries and secrets living in the house that Blau built.

That's a plot summary, but no such recounting of the facts can do justice to the intricate tapestry that Hegi weaves in this long but never slow novel. There are myriad subplots, some involving characters (e.g., the dwarf) who appeared in the beloved Stones, and even the most minor characters are beautifully, completely drawn. Miss Garland, an old woman who is one of the first tenants in Blau's building, lives a life parallel to the Blaus and seems to symbolize the passage of time and culture; the Jewish couple the Blaus manage to befriend even as their countrymen try to exterminate that race are particularly heartbreaking. The beauty of Hegi's work is in these and other details: the rendering of the young Stefan's dreams of glory, the flashbacks to pre-World War I Europe, the evocation of the rise and fall of an ambitious family that almost melts into the American pot. Hegi writes in a straightforward style tinged with lyricism and even a touch of magical realism. The scenes of Stefan and Helene in the old country evoke both the beauty and the superstitions of that time and place, and the tenderness with which Hegi draws the developing relationship between them reads like something out of the 19th century: knowing, yet generous about the emotional ambivalences that characterized even this prepsychotherapy age. And although it's impossible to write about German Americans in the 20th century without touching on the world events of the time, Hegi never beats us over the head with her understanding of the shame these emigrants must have felt as news of Hitler's atrocities permeated the American consciousness. We've read so much about the German-Jewish experience, but Hegi is one of the few who can make us feel for those who were German by birth but American by choice. For all their wealth and success, Hegi subtly makes clear, to be German American was to remain forever other in both cultures.

Some readers may be initially surprised by the book's title, if they take it to mean that this is the vision belonging to Emma Blau. It's not that so much as it is the young Stefan's vision of the young girl who is not born until soon before he dies; from his earliest days, he had a hope and fantasy of the future -- and a premonition of the child who would further his promise and his dreams. For her part, Hegi has carried out her own promise -- the one that began with Floating in My Mother's Palm: She has produced yet another piece of wise, intelligent fiction about people who are both imprisoned by their own past and hopeful about their futures.

Sara Nelson, formerly executive editor of The Book Report and book columnist for Glamour, is now managing online editor of Oxygen Media. She also contributes to Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, and Salon.