- Paperback: 375 pages
- Publisher: Diane Pub Co (30 Sep 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0756784158
- ISBN-13: 978-0756784157
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 14 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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First Sentence
In a moment of discontent, a moment of dull charm, a moment of proud rejection, Violet Farr crumpled that piece of paper and its contents until she heard the small, mocking sound of those frail bones shattered. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
In a moment of discontent, a moment of dull charm, a moment of proud rejection, Violet Farr crumpled that piece of paper and its contents until she heard the small, mocking sound of those frail bones shattered. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A well written book which describes an almost entirely tragic story of lost lives in such a way that the feeling it could happen to anyone is simply and truly conveyed. I thouroughly enjoyed the book and was immersed in its sadness and unsentimentality. The modern-day Hardy, was my first thought. Try it, you won't be disappointed.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Brilliant!
20 Sep 1999
Format:Paperback
I am endlessly amazed at the many unexpected surprises life delivers, and "BLOOD TIES" is one such surprise. Having recently read a small item in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY regarding the campaign being made by Ms. Lash's children to promote this, her last book, particularly by her sons, actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, I was intrigued. At first a deeply disturbing story of parental neglect, at its end, "BLOOD TIES" is a story of love and redemption. Ms. Lash's prose is beautiful and lush, and the story, compelling. This is a novel that will stay with me for some time, and one that deserves widespread recognition.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
(A mother's) love makes the world go round.
16 Aug 2001
Format:Hardcover
This splendidly crafted work of fiction covers five generations of an Irish family and its focus is on the emotional lameness that can result from a lack of parental nurturing.
Despite violating every known convention of what schoolteachers call the mechanics of writing, Jennifer Lash offers us a magnificent novel of the effects of alienation and indifference on human development. Many think the opposite of love is hate, but this is not the case. The opposite of love is indifference. And this is Violet Farr's problem: she is totally indifferent to anything that involves affect, sentiment or love.
Worshipping the memory of her own dead father and married to a marginally conscious, sexually repressed gay man, Violet is rich, intelligent, cultured and extremely competent in dealing with things and ideas. She has an innate talent for managing things but is inept in her dealings with other humans at the level of emotion, especially as regards needs, apirations, individual interests, fears.
Her son, conceived only because her husband manages to fantasize about a delivery boy during coitus, soon turns into an unclean, foulmouthed drunk and gets shipped off to school in England, where he goes from bad to worse, finally begetting a child on a bimbo barmaid whose mother has died in an insane asylum.
Violet's grandson lives with his slovenly mother for several years but then gets trunked off to Ireland to live with Grandma, who is still emotionally unable to deal with the situation of having a young child around. After a particularly unfortunate incident involving a dead chicken she packs him off back to England as she had done with his father.
The boy goes to school for a while, lives in foster homes, and then takes to the streets and lives a life of meanness and horror in contact with unruly, violent young vagrants. He is rescued from it all by Winifred and her daughter, who nurse him back to health and stability and give him the human kindness he has been denied most of his life. After making love (but it is genuine love) to Winifred's daughter and inseminating her, he is killed in a bike accident.
The child of this liaison has the chance to bring a kind of redemption to Violet and her loveless existence.
The author has a special gift for rich characterization, and even her language changes as she moves from one personage to another describing them and their activities in individually appropriate terms. Only occasionally does she fall into stereotyping, as with the know-it-all priests and the wise, faithful family retainers.
This book can be recommended for anyone interested in human development or parent-child relations. It would also do nicely for those fascinated with the Irish literary tradition, of which it is a noteworth representative.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Blood Ties by Jennifer Lash
27 Jan 2000
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Blood Ties, by Jennifer Lash. This is Ms. Lash's final book and it is emotionally harrowing. She has exposed, and skillfully, the substance of not caring and its consequences down the generations. There is a terrible price to be paid. I found the story heartbreaking and the acts of alienation hard to forgive. Equally skillfully, Lash looks at what it means to love, the work of the imagination in loving and its power to heal. She is a writer driven by ideas but her work is specific and her people impossible to forget. I'm so exceedingly sorry that she isn't here to write more.
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