We Were the Mulvaneys

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The last part of the book and the ending was very bittersweet. As much as you want to be happy you can't help feeling something is just not letting you achieve that. It's probably the same thing the Mulvaneys are feeling by the end. Somehow we've become the Mulvaneys by just a few chapters into the book, so truly whatever they're feeling, you're now feeling. That just got you all the more involved in the book, because of course you want to know everything that happens and why. It also makes the book that much harder to put down. He querido leer este libro desde hace años, cualquiera que me conozca sabe lo mucho que lo busqué por todos lados, incluso en librerías en Estados Unidos, por algún motivo su edición había sido descontinuada y se habían retirado todas las copias disponibles de librerías.

The novel is so psychologically intricate – Oates documents all the little things, the minute failures in communication that build up until everything reaches the point of no return. I particularly enjoyed the description of how the family communicates through their pets in a way of avoiding having difficult conversations. The daughter’s only act of rebellion noted was this one time when she broke from this established form of communication and snapped at her mother. It was such a small thing, but it left ripples. As a person with an easy access to her store of anger and rage, I found the mother’s and daughter’s inability to get angry perplexing and frustrating, but possibly, understandable in its context. Corinne does not reject Marianne. She chooses her husband over her daughter out of desperation and must live with that choice. But she never ceases loving, and grieving over, Marianne, the child most like herself.

We Were the Mulvaneys" offers insights into the intricacies of human nature. The characters' responses to tragedy reflect the spectrum of human emotions—grief, anger, guilt, and resilience. Oates portrays the imperfections of familial relationships, illustrating that even the closest bonds can be strained by external events and internal conflicts. The Mulvaneys are blessed by all that makes life sweet. But something happens on Valentine’s Day, 1976—an incident that is hushed up in the town and never spoken of in the Mulvaney home—that rends the fabric of their family life…with tragic consequences. Years later, the youngest son attempts to piece together the fragments of the Mulvaneys’ former glory, seeking to uncover and understand the secret violation that brought about the family’s tragic downfall. However, his failure is still to be regarded as a failure. By failing to allow his own daughter to grieve in her own way, he betrays her. She needs a stable support system, but instead he makes her into a loner and a vagrant. She has to deal with the trauma alone. We Were the Mulvaneys is at once a rich textured novel of family life and love (including the abiding love of animals) and a profound discourse on themes of free will, evolution, gender, class, spirituality, forgiveness, and the nature and purpose of guilt. A master of her craft, Oates weaves a seamless web in which ideas blend perfectly with plot. In conclusion, summarize your reading experience with We Were the Mulvaneys. What grade would you give this novel?

The Mulvaney family's idyllic life on their farm is characterized by innocence and unity. However, a tragic event disrupts this innocence, sending ripples through the family's dynamics. The theme of innocence is central as the characters grapple with the loss of their innocence and the unraveling of their tightly-knit relationships. Puoi avere un solo figlio miracoloso. Se sei fortunato. Però molta gente non lo è. (Quindi non dovete gongolare, è ovvio) The next section is REALLY a spoiler, since it tells how everything eventually turns out. Please be fore-warned.A father denies his favourite child, and the devout mother unquestioningly goes along with it; the other children react by leaving or messing up; careers and ambitions are thwarted; a plan to execute retribution is hatched, further dividing the family; and, as lives are ruined or put on hold and the scars of the past refuse to heal, nobody talks about “it” – the unmentionable “event.”

Animals play a tremendously important part in the book —in a sense the Mulvaneys communicate and love through their animals. Have animals always been important to you? Did you have some larger message in mind that you wanted to express through animals? By the end of this book I was crying. I just want to start with that and get it cleared out of the way. It wasn't just a sniff and the threat of tears, I had actual tears running down my face and snot streaming out of my nose. I was leaking enough that I actually had to put the book down and go grab some tissues. Finally Michael. Not at the reunion because deceased. So in the end he Michael is the only one of these characters that does not find himself, or if he does, and realizes that he has found himself, it is not an uplifting affair at all, since he in most respects has neither found his own salvation nor helped the family his family to find theirs, at least not except perhaps in one thing, but that thing no different in kind and very much less in quantity that Corinne’s contribution to their children finding their way, but nevertheless for all that still important, and all that Michael could grasp; that thing being that after all the years of all of them searching for themselves, they (including Corinne) are able to find that for which they searched in part because of those twenty years that Michael gave to them all (including Corinne) when he did help, as did Corinne to an even greater extent, to bring his children up well. And it was that upbringing that Michael did in fact contribute to (before his own flaw caused him to stop contributing), which enabled all of them, after years of searching to come to that self knowledge and self acceptance and their own version of Truth and thus at long last find against the odds perhaps that they, the (remaining) Mulvaney’s, despite losing him, became again and were again that family whose name he contributed – the Mulvaney’s. Despite her success (Oates has published 37 novels, 19 collections of short stories, four novellas, eight volumes of poetry, seven plays and eight academic essays), she has the habit of hitching the disclaimer "it seems like a small thing in the great scale of being" to the end of her statements, although this is possibly a rebuke to the giant egos of the literary world rather than straightforward modesty. The great scale of being is something she is in two minds about. "I veer between a vision of the human race rather like Jonathan Swift's, dark and embittered and satirical, and a kind of idealism that maybe there are just enough wonderful people in the world to make us feel thrilled with the possibilities of the human." They say the youngest kid of a family doesn’t remember himself very clearly because he has learned to rely on the memories of others, who are older and thus possess authority. Where his memory conflicts with theirs, it’s discarded as of little worth. What he believes to be his memory is more accurately described as a rag-bin of others’ memories, their overlapping testimonies of things that happened before he was born, mixed in with things that happened after his birth, including him.

Yo diría que los ciervos no llevan abrigo, la traducción de ‘coat’ aquí tendría que ser ‘pelaje’. Y hay unas cuantas más, pero bueno, se deja leer.