Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All: A Novel

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All: A Novel
by Allan Gurganus

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Allan Gurganus
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-10-16
ISBN: 0375726632
Number of pages: 736
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
  • ISBN13: 9780375726637
  • Condition: New
  • Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Book Reviews of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All: A Novel

Book Review: One Of a Very Select Few in the Pantheon of All-Time Best Books
Summary: 5 Stars

OK. I admit it. I completely overlooked this book when it was published, and coming to it 21 years later. I am a lifelong devourer of books, yet this one took me almost six weeks to read. It is so dense, so rich, that 30 pages a day was all I could absorb.

And, yes, it has its longueurs, its slow parts. So does War and Peace. They don't detract an iota from the overall accomplishment, a masterpiece. They seem to serve as places where the author, out of breath, regains it.

It is pointless to summarize the plot yet again. What it is, above all else, is a testament to life and the resilience of the human spirit. It is also a window into the complexity of life and human relationships.

No one has mentioned the homoerotic threads that run through the lives of the two protagonists, Captain Marsden and his child bride Lucy. Gurganus has left it to us to discern them and to understand them, especially the lifelong obsession Willie Marsden has with the long dead Ned. And Lucy's story parallels Willie's, though her relationship with her childhood friend is not as obsessive or deeply ingrained. Marsden, perhaps, sublimates his unrealized homosexuality by becoming compulsively procreative...Hey, this is life.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells all is an enormous achievement. I believe this book will be read one-hundred years from now. There are not many books I've read about which I can say that.

Summary of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All: A Novel

Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heoines in American literature.

Lucy married at the turn of the last century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Her story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy-striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.

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