Quite simply, the masterful narrative of a life by an author at the top of his game. Grandiose.

The Gravedigger's Daughter, this is Rebecca Schwart, a "young worker" who, "an afternoon of September 1959 [] way home by the towpath that ran along the Erie Canal to the east of the small town of Chautauqua Falls" ; to pretty much, this is so begins the thirty-sixth novel by Joyce Carol Oates (1938), and the reader to be drawn by the narrative power of a writer capable of lintéresser anonymous dune fate for more than seven hundred pages. It is true that the first chapter is impressive: during his journey, Rebecca Schwart, married to a Tignor, realizes what is followed by a man, and there Oates book a tour de force: it oscillates between narrative that his character feels in the moment and memories it awakens in her, all with a fluidity showing dune absolute mastery of narrative art. One comes to fear for the life of this young woman, up to the moment when it is actually joined by a well-dressed man pretending in every respect and that the mistaken some "Hazel Jones."

The following three chapters show Rebecca Tignor (the waltz of names is just beginning), her life with her husband for a brewery representative and his little boy what love. Then comes a flashback, well led, which explains why it is presented as "the daughter of the gravedigger" in 1936, she arrived Europes with his parents, Jews who left Germany an increasingly hostile and are forced to re-invent a life in the United States, specifically in Milburn, New York, where his father, a former professor, proposes for the post of gravedigger. This is the intellectual decline dune slow start for the man who refuses to lon speak German at home and stuffed brain Schopenhauer. Again, Oates is very strong, showing a paranoid struggling to love her children (both brothers of Rebecca, and this in fact born in the port of New York and therefore a "real" American), buying a radio just listen to the news of the war that are bad

The situation deteriorates to the point that his son disperse, and that he ends up committing suicide in front of her daughter after killing his wife. This is the time of the first re-invention of Rebecca Schwart, which will become a ward of his former teacher and girl's room in a large hotel until his meeting with Tignor, who will marry him. And she again re-invented, becoming woman on the road, and then a housewife in a house in Poor Farm Road, then stay at home mom and working mother because her husband left too long without giving up its new explosion of torque (in a forty-fourth chapter of Part experiencing impressive reading but, again, mastery of narrative), and the flight of Rebecca with Niley, her little boy.

At that time held the most beautiful re-invention, it becomes Hazel Jones, remembering that name quon gave him once (though it still unclear what it has fatal), a single mother in the Puritan lAmérique early sixties. Under this identity, she met Chet Gallagher, a jazz pianist from dune immensely wealthy family, what will eventually accept dépouser, who allowed the musical talent of his son déclore openly. The story could end there, except quun epistolary epilogue shows one that is now Hazel Gallagher contact some Freida Morgenstern, what think the reader of his memoirs, to be his cousin who was on a ship filled with Jewish refugees but cleared by the United States

That, summed abruptly, the seven hundred pages of The Gravedigger's Daughter ramnées a simple story except what ballast do not that much, and that he there was beauty in this voluntary lépopée woman in 1936 to lAmérique 1999 she discovers in passing that "the most profound truth of American soul is what has the dune cartoon superficiality". What Oates is inspired by the life of his grandmother to write this particular novel najoute or subtract anything to its qualities. And any of them have more is not that the author failed to make his novel exploration of the soul of the United States during the six decades that it covers; no, she clings to his character, this tiny woman born on a boat of refugees from Nazi horrors and concludes its existence Florida cancerous and seeking dune family ties. This is the beauty of this novel, his greatness: he speaks only of Rebbeca Schwart and its many incarnations, with history in the background (even "from 1955 to 1956, the years of economic boom," or "the Vietnam War, the longest war and most shameful history of the United States ") to the image of what our lives, basically.