Kehua! (Audible Audio Edition) Fay Weldon Rowena Cooper Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : Kehua! (Audible Audio Edition) Fay Weldon Rowena Cooper Audible Studios Books
Beverley may be close to ninety, but when her granddaughter announces her plans to leave home and husband for a glamorous actor, she's already considering how she can stir up a little trouble. And so are the kehua outside.
Quite how these Maori ghosts arrived outside the kitchen window is the origin of your writer's tale. Suffice to say that everyone is haunted by the traumas of the past, that Beverley's female bloodline carry a weighty spiritual burden - and that murder is at the root of it all....
Rowena Cooper reads this imaginative, original and enthralling tale of ghosts and family secrets from acclaimed author Fay Weldon.
Kehua! (Audible Audio Edition) Fay Weldon Rowena Cooper Audible Studios Books
Fay Weldon, author of thirty-four novels at the time this book was written, strikes a fine balance as she alternates between narrative, perfect dialogue, and metafictional commentary, most of it very funny, and the reader cannot help but become involved on many levels. She makes her writing life sound so intriguing that I found myself playing along, imagining myself as the creator of the dysfunctional characters in "this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption, and remorse."Weldon focuses not just on four generations of one family, from seventy-seven-year-old Beverley, to her estranged daughter Alice, her adult grand-daughters Cynara and Scarlett, and her teenage great-granddaughter Lola, along with all their many lovers and husbands. She also focuses on the invisible spirits which have come with Beverley to England from New Zealand, where Beverley (and the author) grew up. These kehua are the Maori spirits of the wandering dead, and they are particularly concerned with something that happened to Beverley when she was three years old. Walter, her father, killed Kitchie, her mother, in New Zealand, leaving Beverley an orphan. Since their bodies never received a proper burial in the "Maori standing place," and the site of the murder was never exorcised, some of the kehua hid in the hold of the ocean liner to protect Beverly when she left New Zealand years later. They intend to ensure that the family not lose its "spiritual habitation."
Even the author feels the kehuas' presence as she writes about Beverley and her family from her basement workroom: "At night if I listen hard...[I hear] a sound I can interpret only as an intent breathing too close for comfort, and then a hissing and silence." Walk-ins, Northern Kelpies, Livas's sneaky demons, selkies, and the Welsh Cwn Annwn (the dogs of death) are also mentioned in this novel in which most of the characters (with the exception of Alice) are not Christian and are generally at loose ends spiritually. The action bounces around, and scenes in one part of the book may not be explained until much later in the book, when additional information is provided. Most readers, however, will be having so much fun with the details and the often hilarious dialogue that they will willingly set aside their questions and just follow Weldon's lead wherever it takes them - through wicked stories of love and betrayal; often farcical scenes of sexual exhilaration; and satirical episodes about the trials of the mostly well-off as they search for meaning and purpose in political causes, jobs, and, in Scarlett's case, designer clothing and accessories.
Despite the novel's impressionistic structure and lack of predictable chronology, the story moves quickly, at the same time that it also presents a vivid portrait of the author at work. Filled with ironies and understatements, and often hilarious in its dialogue, this novel has something to say about people and their need for connection to the past, at the same time that it can (and should) be read for the pure fun of its characters and point of view. Highly recommended to lovers of literary fiction.
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Kehua! (Audible Audio Edition) Fay Weldon Rowena Cooper Audible Studios Books Reviews
i really enjoyed this book..not deep but a good fun read it was just a nice book..would be a great summer beach book..it will keep you reading.
This is the story of the McLean family, who once lived in a small community in New Zealand, but now find themselves in a suburb of London, along with the author, who is trying to capture their complex family history in a novel. It all started, apparently, with a terrible crime the murder of Beverly's mother by her father. (Beverly is the grandmother, the oldest character in the story.) The reverberations of this horrific event continue for four generations, manifested in all varieties of family dysfunction, estrangement, incestuous entanglements and emotional instability. And all this is manifest, as well, through the kehua, ancestral spirits who hang from trees like bats, who follow the family members and try to bring redemption. The kehua are part of Maori tradition, though the McLeans are not Maori and only spent a few years in New Zealand. Well, never mind, they go where they are needed.
Author Fay Weldon writes in a whimsical literary style, alternating between her own story as the novelist confiding in her readers and the actual novel about the McLeans. She spins a web of interesting, unstable, funny, but basically lovable characters, living in fascinating and beautiful places and carrying on complex and disturbed relationships that are, unfortunately, hard to keep track of. And there's the problem with this book. It's just too hard to keep it all straight. The author keeps breaking into the story, the characters keep changing partners, the mythic beings from New Zealand intrude unpredictably. This reader just couldn't keep up.
If you like literary fiction with an unusual, lighthearted style, and a very different perspective, you might well enjoy Kehua, but it's not for everyone. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.
Fay Weldon, author of thirty-four novels at the time this book was written, strikes a fine balance as she alternates between narrative, perfect dialogue, and metafictional commentary, most of it very funny, and the reader cannot help but become involved on many levels. She makes her writing life sound so intriguing that I found myself playing along, imagining myself as the creator of the dysfunctional characters in "this tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption, and remorse."
Weldon focuses not just on four generations of one family, from seventy-seven-year-old Beverley, to her estranged daughter Alice, her adult grand-daughters Cynara and Scarlett, and her teenage great-granddaughter Lola, along with all their many lovers and husbands. She also focuses on the invisible spirits which have come with Beverley to England from New Zealand, where Beverley (and the author) grew up. These kehua are the Maori spirits of the wandering dead, and they are particularly concerned with something that happened to Beverley when she was three years old. Walter, her father, killed Kitchie, her mother, in New Zealand, leaving Beverley an orphan. Since their bodies never received a proper burial in the "Maori standing place," and the site of the murder was never exorcised, some of the kehua hid in the hold of the ocean liner to protect Beverly when she left New Zealand years later. They intend to ensure that the family not lose its "spiritual habitation."
Even the author feels the kehuas' presence as she writes about Beverley and her family from her basement workroom "At night if I listen hard...[I hear] a sound I can interpret only as an intent breathing too close for comfort, and then a hissing and silence." Walk-ins, Northern Kelpies, Livas's sneaky demons, selkies, and the Welsh Cwn Annwn (the dogs of death) are also mentioned in this novel in which most of the characters (with the exception of Alice) are not Christian and are generally at loose ends spiritually. The action bounces around, and scenes in one part of the book may not be explained until much later in the book, when additional information is provided. Most readers, however, will be having so much fun with the details and the often hilarious dialogue that they will willingly set aside their questions and just follow Weldon's lead wherever it takes them - through wicked stories of love and betrayal; often farcical scenes of sexual exhilaration; and satirical episodes about the trials of the mostly well-off as they search for meaning and purpose in political causes, jobs, and, in Scarlett's case, designer clothing and accessories.
Despite the novel's impressionistic structure and lack of predictable chronology, the story moves quickly, at the same time that it also presents a vivid portrait of the author at work. Filled with ironies and understatements, and often hilarious in its dialogue, this novel has something to say about people and their need for connection to the past, at the same time that it can (and should) be read for the pure fun of its characters and point of view. Highly recommended to lovers of literary fiction.
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