So Many Ways to Begin
Ratings1
Average rating5
Now in paperback for the first time, So Many Ways to Begin is a potent examination of family and memory, a look at what happens when life forces you to let go of the person you might have been. David Carter is an obsessive collector, and the curator of the local history museum. In addition to overseeing the community's archives, he has, since boyhood, diligently archived the items that tell his own life story: birth certificate, school report cards, movie and train tickets. But when a senile relative lets slip a long-buried family secret, David is forced to consider that his whole carefully cataloged life may be constructed around a lie. In fits and starts, his world begins to unravel. Praise for So Many Ways to Begin: "Jon McGregor might be the best chronicler I know of the way small accidents can set a life in motion, and the way what's said between people-or left unsaid-can change everything. This is a beautiful book, elegant and particular and heart wrenching. I loved it."-Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It "McGregor is a brilliant prose stylist, and here he excels at making ... the ordinary seem extraordinary."-Sunday Times (UK )
Tags
Genre
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
There are so many ways to begin this review, but, then, that's always the hard part, isn't it...beginning....
This is a book I want to shove in the hands of every reader I meet. “Read this one,” I might coax cajolingly. “It's good. You'll like it.”
Like the characters in this book, I have a hard time saying what I want to say. What I really want to say is that McGregor knows how to tell a story, not start to finish, but in little pieces, some from the middle of the story, one or two from near the beginning, and a few from the end. Somehow he manages to connect all the pieces together to make a whole puzzle; it is only when you look at it closely that you realize he has left whole chunks out, but it doesn't matter at all.
What I really want to say is that McGregor is—what—thirty? and yet he gets life, he gets marriage, he gets children, he gets grandchildren even. He sees the big picture in a way that most of us haven't quite gotten at fifty, the sadnesses, the tiny bubbles of complete joy, the deep disappointments, the way we can turn mean, how we can forget with time, how hard it is to tell our stories, how hard it is even to know where to start.
