![Imagen de portada para The Hour I First Believed [electronic resource] : A Novel](https://images.yourcloudlibrary.com/delivery/img?type=DOCUMENTIMAGE&documentID=uf889&token=nobody "Imagen de portada para The Hour I First Believed [electronic resource] : A Novel")
Resumen
Resumen
New York Times Bestseller
The profound and compelling story of a personal quest for meaning and faith from Wally Lamb, #1 New York Times bestselling author of She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True
"The beauty of The Hour I First Believed, a soaring novel as amazingly graceful as the classic hymn that provides the title, is that Lamb never loses sight of the spark of human resilience. . . . Lamb's wonderful novel offers us the promise and power of hope."
--Miami Herald
When 47-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Connecticut to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm back east. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.
In The Hour I First Believed, Wally Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character.
Reseñas (4)
Kirkus Review
A glacially paced novel of modern manners and mayhem, its chief elements being middle-aged angst, mass murder and pizza. Like Jack Torrance of Stephen King's The Shining, Caelum Quirk is a man of ambition who moved to Colorado to find his fortune and wound up teaching creative writing to the unwilling. At the beginning of the book, we learn that Caelum's wife, Maureen, has been engaging in certain extracurricular activities. While Caelum does not take an ax to the offending parties, he is consigned to the hell of anger-management courses all the same. For her part, Maureen discovers horror when violence erupts at the school where she worksnamely, Columbine High, in the tidy Denver suburb of Littleton. Caelum, a teacher, is absent, attending to a sick aunt across the country. While doing so, and over the course of much time and much talk among many characters, Maureen reckons with having become unhinged while Caelum discovers ominous clippings in the family archive. Lamb (I Know This Much Is True, 1998, etc.) writes at considerable leisure about all this; indeed, the gunfire starts 150 pages into the narrative. Meanwhile and after, there is much pondering. Lamb knows how to put together a good, meaning-charged sentence ("I've stalked the monster during long, meditative runs on country roads, at the bottoms of wine and scotch bottles, and over the Internet, that labyrinth inside the labyrinth"), but there are plenty of clunkers, too. Moreover, the takeaway point isn't quite clear: Lamb seems to be suggesting that inside every one of us, or at least every family, there's a Dylan Klebold screaming to get out and plenty of skeletons for too few closets. A clearer focus and a forgone subplot or two would have helped. Of interest, however, as an entry in the body of literature that has emerged from real tragedy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
Lamb has enjoyed phenomenal popularity ever since being annointed by Oprah for inclusion in her book club two years in a row. She's Come Undone got the nod in 1997, and I Know This Much Is True was chosen in 1998. This is his first novel in 10 years, and, continuing his practice of taking his book titles from songs lyrics, the title is a line from Amazing Grace. In a sprawling narrative that contains enough tragedy for three novels, Lamb tells the story of 47-year-old English teacher Caelum Quirk and his third wife, Maureen, a nurse. After almost breaking up over Maureen's infidelity, the two move to Littleton, Colorado, hoping for a fresh start. There they take jobs at Columbine High School. That's where Maureen ends up cowering in a cabinet for hours while Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris methodically execute students in the library before taking their own lives. Maureen never recovers from this tragedy, which sends her on a downward spiral that eventually encompasses addiction to prescription medicine, vehicular homicide, and a lengthy prison stint. Meanwhile, Caelum rents out his home to refugees from Hurricane Katrina and researches his own family history via old diaries and letters found in the far reaches of his house. It will come as no surprise to readers that the history is a dark one. Lamb's overlong narrative and endless recitation of tragedy dilute the power of his story. Still, his particular brand of hope-and-despair fiction holds a powerful allure for his fans, who will be lining up for this long-awaited novel.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2008 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
In Wally Lamb's new novel, a high school shooting is just the beginning of a couple's misfortune. FOR those who may have forgotten him - it's been 10 years since his last novel - Wally Lamb has wrapped his new book, "The Hour I First Believed," in reminders. The dust jacket is filled with praise for the book's predecessors, "She's Come Undone" and "I Know This Much Is True," both selections of Oprah's Book Club that spent considerable time on the best-seller lists. There's also an afterword about the writing of the book, a section of "notes from the author," a detailed list of sources ("I hope I've remembered them all") and information on how to make charitable donations to related nonprofit organizations. Who needs Oprah? Lamb's publisher has managed to fit an entire segment of her show between hard covers. And what about the novel itself? Over the course of more than 700 pages, the narrative takes on major events (the Columbine High School shootings, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina) and weighty issues (motherhood, marriage, alienation, psychological trauma, drug addiction, chaos theory, prison reform, grief, the connection between ancestry and identity - to name just a few). The story is narrated in the caustic, breezy voice of Caelum Quirk, a high school English teacher living in Littleton, Colo., who has an anger management problem and a tender heart. From the start, Caelum is unlucky and unhappy. Before the action even begins, he's been struggling to hold his third marriage together. (He and his wife, Maureen, separated and nearly divorced after he discovered she was having an affair and went after her lover with a wrench.) Things are at a standstill when Caelum is called back home to Connecticut, where the aunt who helped raise him is ailing; he gets to sit at her bedside just once before she dies. Taking a break from the funeral arrangements, he sees the name of the school where he teaches - Columbine - on the television news. Maureen, a nurse at Columbine, is in the library when the shootings start and survives by hiding in a cabinet. But for her - and for Caelum - the ordeal is just beginning. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor's guilt, Maureen becomes addicted to Xanax. A move to Caelum's childhood home in Three Rivers, Conn. - down the road from the women's prison founded by Caelum's greatgrandmother - doesn't help. Meanwhile, Caelum is wrestling with his own demons, including troubling childhood memories and startling revelations about his parents. From there, things only get worse. Yet the novel isn't all misfortune. There are moments of levity - detours into the history of Rheingold beer, an assessment of rock 'n' roll hits, a brief doughnut-making tutorial - and moments of salvation. It's part picaresque, part Russian novel, part mystery. Mostly, though, it resembles an evangelist's redemption narrative. And like any evangelist, Lamb is pitching more than a story: he wants to lead his readers to a larger (nondenominational) truth. Readers of "I Know This Much Is True" will find some similarities, including the slangy, vivid voice of the narrator. Both novels feature the town of Three Rivers and include the wise and slightly loopy therapist Dr. Patel; they also touch on some of the same conflicts. But "The Hour I First Believed" is more ambitious (if, remarkably, shorter). Lamb seems determined not only to portray the range of the human condition through the life of Caelum Quirk but also to convey the sum of human experience. Caelum's trials are like Job's, and his rewards seem the gift of angels. Caelum is an unusual, provocative character, neither a hero nor an antihero but a regular guy experiencing both the tragic and the absurd. His tone is by turns funny, irritating, depressive and sentimental - which is to say, recognizably human. But he's only a front for an omniscient power - let's call him Wally Lamb - who has sought out remedies for life's uncertainties and is more than willing to share them. He's on a mission to help us help ourselves. Read this way, the supplementary pages are an integral part of Lamb's novel, anchoring and explaining the story in an easily digestible fashion. IN a preface that was included in prepublication review copies of the book, Lamb talks about the hope he felt when his son's praying mantis egg case - which they had thought a dud - hatched. And, sure enough, at several moments in the story, a praying mantis appears like a big flashing sign: "Be hopeful." Such moralizing is threaded throughout the book. Oprah Winfrey has said of "I Know This Much Is True" that it's "not just a book, it's a life experience." But this new novel does more than simply evoke a life's experience (including horrifying actual events) and leave the reader to do the hard work of understanding it. Instead, it offers to do the interpretive work for us, suggesting that in the aftermath we'll be stronger and happier, more deeply engaged with those whose lives touch our own. That's certainly a noble aim. But Lamb doesn't trust his storytelling to pull it off, and he's right not to. Near the end of the novel, during a discussion of the legend of the Minotaur, one of Caelum's students "summed up what they'd learned": "Life is messy, violent, confusing and hopeful." Heartened, Caelum gives all his students A's. Reading this, I felt the A was being extended to me too. I hadn't earned it. Fiction can indeed deepen our understanding of trauma; it can expand our capacity for empathy and provide consolation. But its highest achievement is to complicate, not simplify - to leave us better students of our messy lives, not to graduate us with honors and send us blithely on our way. Louisa Thomas is a contributing editor for Newsweek.
Library Journal Review
Lamb digs deeper here, examining issues of faith and the consequences of war. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
