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Summary: ONE WORD - F A N T A S T I C
Review: I will keep it brief. You need to read this book. Personally, it has ruined me for reading anything else. This will be the standard by which you judge anything else you will ever read again.
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Summary: ****** Flesh and Blood ******
Review: Loved this book! I enjoyed reading the way that this family evolved. I thought it was wise of Michael Cunningham to explore Constantine's childhood before looking at his adult life because it helped me to have more perspective on his choices. (Even though I hated him), I could understand Constantine's point of view more clearly than if he had just been painted as an abusive adulterer. I also found the characters three dimensional and not predictable. If people enjoyed this book I would also recommend "Fall on your Knees" by Ann Marie MacDonald.
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Summary: I love this wonderful novel!
Review: Michael Cunningham has a rare ability to convey simple emotional truths through a compelling story that captures a personal and an historical sweep. His characterisiation is very strong, and he writes successfully in different voices; young and old, male and female, immigrant and second generation, gay and straight. He creates the personalities of his characters through symbolism, dialogue, and individual reactions to common events. Flesh and Blood has a powerful momentum generated by using just one family to convey the story. The story sometimes takes the characters' differing perspectives on the same events, sometimes focusses on events which are their own. Flesh and Blood is real and painful in its truths because you understand how each character is sensitive to events, even when the author is not explicit on a character's reactions and thoughts. This is a powerful novel that I would rank alongside Dickens in terms of its emotional impact and characterisation. The story is very everyday, and for that reason touches us all.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Michael Cunningham is by far one of the best authors I have ever read. His ability to give such in depth psychological profiles of each character is remarkable and he even goes as far as describing how the characters step out of themselves and see how they appear to others.
This book was so interesting and full of many surprises. I couldn't put it down. It was even better the The Hours. Read the book and you'll never forget that you did.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: Michael Cunningham is by far one of the best authors I have ever read. His ability to give such in depth psychological profiles of each character is remarkable and he even goes as far as describing how the characters step out of themselves and see how they appear to others.
This book was so interesting and full of many surprises. I couldn't put it down. It was even better the The Hours. Read the book and you'll never forget that you did.
Rating:
Summary: Poetry in prose
Review: Michael Cunningham's "Flesh and Blood" is in some ways a unique book. It is not the choice of the subject matter, a gripping family saga that starts with a young Greek immigrant and his Italo-American sweetheart and ends in the mist of the distant future, some 30 years from now. It's not even the vivid characters that populate this saga, characters that are in most cases complex and interesting enough to become almost real in one's mind's eye. What makes this book very special is the narrator voice, a voice that lifts mundane events that happen to regular people to an upper sphere, where those events and protagonists acquire a magic quality that is unlike anything else I read. It is the use of a highly original metaphoric language that enevlops the narrative with something that is almost poetry that makes this book a joy to read. My feeling is that Cunningham (perhaps because of his young age) has a better access to younger characters than to older ones, and in some cases the older characters lose some of their vividness and become more flat. Otherwise - this is an excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Poetry in prose
Review: Michael Cunningham's "Flesh and Blood" is in some ways a unique book. It is not the choice of the subject matter, a gripping family saga that starts with a young Greek immigrant and his Italo-American sweetheart and ends in the mist of the distant future, some 30 years from now. It's not even the vivid characters that populate this saga, characters that are in most cases complex and interesting enough to become almost real in one's mind's eye. What makes this book very special is the narrator voice, a voice that lifts mundane events that happen to regular people to an upper sphere, where those events and protagonists acquire a magic quality that is unlike anything else I read. It is the use of a highly original metaphoric language that enevlops the narrative with something that is almost poetry that makes this book a joy to read. My feeling is that Cunningham (perhaps because of his young age) has a better access to younger characters than to older ones, and in some cases the older characters lose some of their vividness and become more flat. Otherwise - this is an excellent book.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful but strangely hollow
Review: Nobody could ever fault Cunningham's ability with language. Somebody said he writes like an angel, and when he's on form, he's unparalleled. His first published novel -- not A Home at The End of The World, which he and FSG would like us to believe is his first work -- was called Golden States. Why he wants to act as though that book never existed I'll never know. It was filled with one gorgeous descriptions after another. His use of verbs was truly amazing. Strangely, none of his novels are particularly original. His subjects and themes are rather shopworn, and he doesn't bring anything new to his family sagas or tales of gay men growing up. He draws characters well, but he has trouble telling a story; indeed, he could not write a narrative novel if somebody held a gun to his head. This would be okay if he was possessed of original ideas, an original point of view that could inform his books, or even a vision. But this part of his writerly intelligence is surprisingly undeveloped. For me, much of Flesh and Blood, like A Home at The End of The World was terminally boring. After a hundred pages, his verbal pyrotechnics begam to remind me of a clever puppy dog who can do sophisticated tricks. Because there is something strangely arrested or immature about his writing and about his point of view. It's maddening and truly bizarre. With Cunningham as with many authors who write beautifully, readers tend to think that pretty sentences are by definition intelligent onces. But that's not necessarily true. Many would disagree but I believe that beautiful writing is not enough to carry a novel. And yet Flesh and Blood is not as well written as Home (which incidentally has one fabulous sequence that was published in the New Yorker, a truly inspired piece of writing that was sadly only a fraction of what turned out to be a bloated novel). This surprised me.
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Summary: Once Every Few Years A Writer Touches Your Very Core
Review: Once every few years a writer the ilk of Hemingway, Steinbeck, seems to arise aout of nowhere. You awe that a human can create wonder from words others merely play at. Michael Cunningham looks out at the world from the very soul of his characters. It is rare that a reader feels the bare senses impregnated into each page. Flesh and Blood vibrated through my inner core.
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Summary: A great read!
Review: One of the best works of fiction I've read in quite some time. Very moving
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