Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River was our last book group read. A superficial plot description (psychic German dwarf growing up between the wars) didn’t have me panting to read it. But after just a few pages, I was totally sucked in. I have a few complaints about technique, but they pale beside the characterization and the questions Hegi raises about difference, secrets, power, storytelling, and resistance.
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My partner’s mother read it and praised it highly. Since then it has been on my wishlist. Guess I should move it up a few notches in the list.
I was dissapointed in Stones from the River. With the everyday hustle and bustle of joyous occations and incidental problems there was nothing to worth remembering rather than the ending when I could finally relax and relfect upon the novel. In this book’s atempt to mimic each of our individual lives, by bringing us through the everyday occurrences of Trudi Montag’s life to emphasize the importance of how one would “run the race” not the importance of what place you finished “the race”, each of us are not inspired by its monotonous slendour because each of us all know that we are all different. We all contain some trait in our genepool, some activity that we do that sets us appart from normal people. Trudi just happens to be a Zwerg, and I just happen to practically live in Classical Music. How alienated are we each. In the early 1900’s very few people care for Dwarfs. Now, very few people care for Classical Music. How is this story different from everyone. It isn’t. We all have a story like this, we all are persecuted, and we all are different.