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3.48 AVERAGE
3.48 AVERAGE
Lots of suffering but well written. Kept me reading through the sadness.
Powerful. Artistically composed. In taking a glimpse at each of Hattie's 9 children and one grandchild, the author builds up to an unexpected catharsis where Hattie applies her wisdom in a way that those who have not seen what she has seen cannot possibly understand or support. I don't know that everyone will appreciate this book, but those with mothers who are fierce, unbending, and constant in their sacrifice will know the value.
Rating = 3.5 stars
In so many ways this is a powerful, beautiful book. It is also an extraordinarily difficult and painful book as it explores one black family's story of continued persistence through the conflicts of the American 20th Century. The story is told as a collection of voices - each chapter is essentially one family member's story - and is thus rather epic in scale as the reader follows the family over the course of decades. The story challenges the reader to face many of our collective problems in a very personal way. It is never easy to face extreme loss, and this book is not easy. Still, we can find some hope in the endurance of the human spirit.
In so many ways this is a powerful, beautiful book. It is also an extraordinarily difficult and painful book as it explores one black family's story of continued persistence through the conflicts of the American 20th Century. The story is told as a collection of voices - each chapter is essentially one family member's story - and is thus rather epic in scale as the reader follows the family over the course of decades. The story challenges the reader to face many of our collective problems in a very personal way. It is never easy to face extreme loss, and this book is not easy. Still, we can find some hope in the endurance of the human spirit.
I really enjoyed this book as the writing was amazing, but it took me a bit of time to get used to the structure.
I don't normally read Oprah recommended books for the reason I wasn't thrilled with this book. There is little to offer hope; instead, everything seems hopeless and dreadful. Didn't enjoy it.
I found this an emotionally powerful, exquisitely written, and originally conceived novel. I always give five full stars for any book that makes me cry and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie got me (in the "Bell" section). So, despite perhaps not being the equal of a handful of the world's greatest novels, it's still in the "A" category, an excellently written and unique novel.
I see that most readers here want to frame The Twelve Tribes... as a collection of short stories masquerading as a novel. I'm going to note that, formally, there is something quite original going on here, but I don't think it's that. Many other novels have a panorama of characters--and it's their interaction and clashing perspectives that create what the critic Mikhail Bakhtin called "the dialogic" aspect of the novel, what makes a novel, in his opinion, a superior form to the more monologic poem. As a novelist myself, and a reader always on the lookout for novelty, I rather read The Twelve Tribes... as a dialogic attempt to construct a character in a new and interesting way, through ten chapters, the titles of which and focus of which are Hattie's eleven children and one grandchild. In three of the chapters the child is only an infant, therefore the focus of those chapters falls on Hattie herself, and the matriarch is more or less present in each of the other narratives, depending upon the age and placement of each child in the events described in their chapters. The male characters particularly are often found far away from home and Hattie's immediate presence, like moons eclipsing the sun for not insubstantial chunks of narrative, but that's also a strategy of literary realism. For me the character of Hattie centered the overall narrative and even though the individual chapters themselves could have been excerpted and stood alone as short stories, I do feel that they also came together enough through the present and/or shadow figure of Hattie woven through them to make up a novel--just not a traditionally-shaped narrative.
What makes the individual chapters stand out as short form narratives is their respect for the unities, mainly of time, and their use of the Joycean epiphany: each follows about a 24 hour period in the child or grandchild's life, culminating in a radical self-revelation. Although, as it does for most of us, I should think such an awareness of ourselves is always going to feature the shadow of our parents. I'm 58 years old and am still pretty radically branded (mostly through trauma and neglect) by my own mother. Knowing that I am partially of her formation--sadly for me--doesn't change how I am or make it possible for me to shuck off the aspects of myself that I now believe she cultivated in the raw clay of my childhood, but failing to acknowledge her influence would be, it seems to me, a looking away from rather than at myself and who I am even today, 40 years after I left the nest as it were. So, yes, I approve of this formal technique by which the novel is simultaneously readable as short stories but also comes together to make up the more novelistic portrait of the matriarch behind all of the characters, present or absent from their lives as she may be in the moment that each chapter chooses to display her children's various epiphanies.
Similarly, the chapters move us forward in time and place, from the South to Philadelphia and the 1950s to the 1980s, creating a historical and chronological panorama that is also more indicative of the novel than short fiction. Although, as was said about my own first novel (set in the 1980s) by an editor, the epoch didn't seem all that important, it was as if the events described could have happened any time. (For my own novel I disagree, since it deals with young people and their revolutionary urges, I needed a time when there was leftist terrorism. Nowadays there is only Jihadist and rightist terrorism really. No, Antifa is really not a thing--if it were I would be a member.) A stepping up of these panoramic social and historical aspects of the narrative would have made The Twelve Tribes... more ambitious, much longer, I think, and more obviously a novel rather than a collection of short stories. Mathis chose, however, to play her cards rather closer to her chest. By sticking to single days in the lives of various family members over the course of 40 years, she risked the criticisms that the narrative doesn't hold together as a panoramic narrative in the interest of intimacy and a closer focus, I think. I admire this choice as it stripped away a lot of the fluff of expositions that a more social or historical novel would have had to add to fill out its contours.
Which brings me to the other major criticism I see here of the novel, that it's too or at least very sad. Here I have to say I disagree, in terms of being a reader of classic and experimental literature who is not at all interested in escapist, feel-good, or popular literature except for the kitsch value of some sci-fi, horror, and old noir writing. This novel is no sadder than Faulkner (I would say another model for the form along with Joyce) or life itself, which an Italian furniture salesman once described to me as being shaped like a funnel; with every choice we make going forward, he said, our path forward, the funnel of our destiny gets more and more narrow as our possibilities diminish until at last we have no choice but to go on being who we've already become on to our predictable ends. This is the heart of the Joycean epiphany, I should think, to see our destiny revealed Heraclitus-wise through the revelation of our character. It's not so much sad as claustrophobic.
I see that most readers here want to frame The Twelve Tribes... as a collection of short stories masquerading as a novel. I'm going to note that, formally, there is something quite original going on here, but I don't think it's that. Many other novels have a panorama of characters--and it's their interaction and clashing perspectives that create what the critic Mikhail Bakhtin called "the dialogic" aspect of the novel, what makes a novel, in his opinion, a superior form to the more monologic poem. As a novelist myself, and a reader always on the lookout for novelty, I rather read The Twelve Tribes... as a dialogic attempt to construct a character in a new and interesting way, through ten chapters, the titles of which and focus of which are Hattie's eleven children and one grandchild. In three of the chapters the child is only an infant, therefore the focus of those chapters falls on Hattie herself, and the matriarch is more or less present in each of the other narratives, depending upon the age and placement of each child in the events described in their chapters. The male characters particularly are often found far away from home and Hattie's immediate presence, like moons eclipsing the sun for not insubstantial chunks of narrative, but that's also a strategy of literary realism. For me the character of Hattie centered the overall narrative and even though the individual chapters themselves could have been excerpted and stood alone as short stories, I do feel that they also came together enough through the present and/or shadow figure of Hattie woven through them to make up a novel--just not a traditionally-shaped narrative.
What makes the individual chapters stand out as short form narratives is their respect for the unities, mainly of time, and their use of the Joycean epiphany: each follows about a 24 hour period in the child or grandchild's life, culminating in a radical self-revelation. Although, as it does for most of us, I should think such an awareness of ourselves is always going to feature the shadow of our parents. I'm 58 years old and am still pretty radically branded (mostly through trauma and neglect) by my own mother. Knowing that I am partially of her formation--sadly for me--doesn't change how I am or make it possible for me to shuck off the aspects of myself that I now believe she cultivated in the raw clay of my childhood, but failing to acknowledge her influence would be, it seems to me, a looking away from rather than at myself and who I am even today, 40 years after I left the nest as it were. So, yes, I approve of this formal technique by which the novel is simultaneously readable as short stories but also comes together to make up the more novelistic portrait of the matriarch behind all of the characters, present or absent from their lives as she may be in the moment that each chapter chooses to display her children's various epiphanies.
Similarly, the chapters move us forward in time and place, from the South to Philadelphia and the 1950s to the 1980s, creating a historical and chronological panorama that is also more indicative of the novel than short fiction. Although, as was said about my own first novel (set in the 1980s) by an editor, the epoch didn't seem all that important, it was as if the events described could have happened any time. (For my own novel I disagree, since it deals with young people and their revolutionary urges, I needed a time when there was leftist terrorism. Nowadays there is only Jihadist and rightist terrorism really. No, Antifa is really not a thing--if it were I would be a member.) A stepping up of these panoramic social and historical aspects of the narrative would have made The Twelve Tribes... more ambitious, much longer, I think, and more obviously a novel rather than a collection of short stories. Mathis chose, however, to play her cards rather closer to her chest. By sticking to single days in the lives of various family members over the course of 40 years, she risked the criticisms that the narrative doesn't hold together as a panoramic narrative in the interest of intimacy and a closer focus, I think. I admire this choice as it stripped away a lot of the fluff of expositions that a more social or historical novel would have had to add to fill out its contours.
Which brings me to the other major criticism I see here of the novel, that it's too or at least very sad. Here I have to say I disagree, in terms of being a reader of classic and experimental literature who is not at all interested in escapist, feel-good, or popular literature except for the kitsch value of some sci-fi, horror, and old noir writing. This novel is no sadder than Faulkner (I would say another model for the form along with Joyce) or life itself, which an Italian furniture salesman once described to me as being shaped like a funnel; with every choice we make going forward, he said, our path forward, the funnel of our destiny gets more and more narrow as our possibilities diminish until at last we have no choice but to go on being who we've already become on to our predictable ends. This is the heart of the Joycean epiphany, I should think, to see our destiny revealed Heraclitus-wise through the revelation of our character. It's not so much sad as claustrophobic.
Lost interest in the last few chapters. I would have preferred more about Hattie.
I immediately heard Toni Morrison's voice reading this book to me. That's not a huge surprise since I am simultaneously listening to Morrison narrating her audiobook, "Beloved". However, I was surprised when I flipped to the acknowledgments and saw Morrison's name listed! There are similarities in the writing styles, but "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie" is much more likable and is easier to read. At first glance, the book is organized simply. Each chapter is in chronological order and is dedicated to one or two of Hattie's offspring. But it's actually quite sophisticated because of the way each chapter carefully reveals more about the family and Hattie herself. It makes me curious about the order in which the book was written and if she shuffled the chapters to get it right. I normally read books set well before I was born, but I liked how this book started in the 50's and worked it's way into the 80's. it made the characters more relatable knowing they would have been alive when I was young.
I stayed up all night to finish this book. It made me cry, think, and remember how good fiction is written. Absolutely amazing.
The story was good, just too dark for my liking.
Content Warnings
Minor: Death