MARCH: Mr. & Mrs. March

Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize Award winner “March” has a clever starting. She tells the story that isn’t in the beloved classic “Little Women”; we follow the lives of Mr. March and his wife Mrs. March, known Marmee. Most of the novel deals with the events he facew while he is away in the Civil War.

The little women from Luisa May Alcott’s famous novel hardly make an appearance here. They are briefly mentioned from time to time, but the main character is indeed Mr. March. Flashbacks exploit his early life, when he was already an abolitionist and had problems when was teaching a slave child. We also learn how he met and fell in love with Marmee, and all he had to face when he joined the army.

The second part of the book is mostly narrated by Marmee, this is the period when she has to leave her home and go to the hospital where he is between life and death. For her disappointment, Mrs. March we will discover that her husband has secrets from the past, and she’ll have to come to terms with them if she wants to keep a happy marriage.

Mr. and Mrs. March are two complementary forces. As one character wisely describes, `he lives for the ideas’ and she is the one `left to deal with the practical matters of the life’. In other words he is the one that spends his time dreaming, while his wife is the one worried with material things that keep the family alive and together, like money and food. In this sense, the writer gives us two faces of the same coin of the marriage.

Brooks’s narrative is slow and less exhilarating the Alcott’s, but it is not boring, it requires patience and it is better if the reader is familiar with the novel “Little Women”. The writer has succeeded most of the time in a difficult task that not many contemporary writers do. Since she has two narrators it is vital that they have different voices. And here they do most of the time.

Based on Alcott’s own family, Brooks has created an interesting novel that will certainly appeal fans of “Little Women”. The events and personalities she created to Mr. and Mrs. March make sense to how they brought their children up. This later prequel may not exist in an universe without the other novel, but it is a great complementary read.

Publicado na www.Amazon.com em 01/05/06