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132nd out of 271 books
—
1,241 voters
Bellefleur (The Gothic Saga #1)
A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythical Lake Noir. Written with a voluptuousness and immediacy unusual even for Oates, Bellefleur was hailed upon publication as the culmination of her work.
Paperback, 592 pages
Published
September 13th 1991
by Plume
(first published 1980)
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BELLEFLEUR by Joyce Carol Oates is ranked as one of my most favorite novels of all time...I love this book! I savored this gothic tale cover to cover and didn't want it to end. It possesses a life of its own, the characters became ghosts that would haunt me after setting it aside after a short reading and I would look forward to picking it up again. After I finished it, I felt homesick in a peculiar way that no book has ever done to me before; it is very likely that I will revisit the pages of B...more
Sep 10, 2008
Kate
rated it
2 of 5 stars
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
1993-to-1997,
age-adult
In my English class junior year, we had a choose an author and write a critical paper about several of their books. My 8th grade English teacher highly recommended Joyce Carol Oates, so I decided to read some of hers for this paper.
Why I chose this tome is beyond me... maybe the story sounded interesting from the blurb on the back? The writing style she adopted for this novel was so long-winded--I'm talking parathetical thoughts that go on for three pages. The time frame of the novel was weird t...more
Why I chose this tome is beyond me... maybe the story sounded interesting from the blurb on the back? The writing style she adopted for this novel was so long-winded--I'm talking parathetical thoughts that go on for three pages. The time frame of the novel was weird t...more
This book is a long one, but is classic Joyce Carol Oates style. The story jumps from place to place, from one point in time to another, from character to character, none of it in any particular order. She describes some things in great detail and while only hinting at others. She doesn't always prescribe to conventional uses of punctuation and will continue a thought for line after line after line, but there is a strong flow to her stories that I find addictive.
I enjoyed this book a great deal....more
I enjoyed this book a great deal....more
One of those long reads that most either seem to love or hate. I finished it this summer after picking it up in a yard-sale. I'd only read short stories by Oates before taking this one on.
My advice to anyone planning on readng it is to abandon the thought of a linear structure as a novel and take it as delivered; a series of episodes or short stories as chapters of several generations of the Bellefleurs in their castle above Lake Noir. Forget about timeline, forget about historical perspective....more
My advice to anyone planning on readng it is to abandon the thought of a linear structure as a novel and take it as delivered; a series of episodes or short stories as chapters of several generations of the Bellefleurs in their castle above Lake Noir. Forget about timeline, forget about historical perspective....more
Ode to joyce. This is literature as it's meant to be.
"Bellefleur Manor was a horrific place - it was so inhumanly large - he hadn't remembered how large it was: ah, what a horror to contemplate! What sort of mind, driven by an unspeakable lust, had imagined all this into being? The castle ... the castle's grounds ... the lightless choppy immensity of Lake Noir ... the thousands upon thousands of acres of wilderness land ... the mountains in the distance: a terror to contemplate: and beyond them...more
"Bellefleur Manor was a horrific place - it was so inhumanly large - he hadn't remembered how large it was: ah, what a horror to contemplate! What sort of mind, driven by an unspeakable lust, had imagined all this into being? The castle ... the castle's grounds ... the lightless choppy immensity of Lake Noir ... the thousands upon thousands of acres of wilderness land ... the mountains in the distance: a terror to contemplate: and beyond them...more
Let me start by saying I'm a HUGE fan of JCO, but this was my second attempt at this book, and I finally just gave up. To my mind it's like a great byzantine workshop where ol' Joyce trots out lots of ideas that will later become full books in their own right. I recognize so many short stories, so many themes... Perhaps this is an ambitious younger writer's attempt at something 'War and Peace'-ish. There are compelling strains of story, characters full of promise, but I just can't find my way th...more
"The living and the dead. Braided together. Woven together. An immense tapestry taking in centuries."
A little over 100 pages into this novel I stumbled across the above lines, and even though I had another 500+ pages to go, I instinctively sensed that I had discovered the key to this immense, sprawling narrative, a description of what Oates was attempting to accomplish with Bellefleur. Literally spanning centuries, seven different generations and involving dozens of distinct characters, this is...more
A little over 100 pages into this novel I stumbled across the above lines, and even though I had another 500+ pages to go, I instinctively sensed that I had discovered the key to this immense, sprawling narrative, a description of what Oates was attempting to accomplish with Bellefleur. Literally spanning centuries, seven different generations and involving dozens of distinct characters, this is...more
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So atmospheric! I vividly remember Leah throwing open the door in a rainstorm that wildly blows and soaks her peignoir and lush hair for a cat named Mahalaleel! I remember a huge drum on the stair landing made from a man's skin. I remember a spinster sister visited my creatures resembling vampires. I remember Mink Pond, debt, despair, the grinding away of love. I remember too many children, too many kittens on an overgrown stone patio. It was sort of like experiencing an opera.
Seems to me that you either do or do not like Joyce Carol Oates and your reasons are as varied as the temperaments of her abundant books. (Perhaps no reason is more fitting than poet Michael Chapman's, who liked her because she was always holding a ball-point pen in her cover shots.) This was my first Oates adventure and it was a consuming experience. If you delight in vacationing in exotic books, have a taste for the gothic and other-wordly, then this is a must-read.
I am only a few chapters in, will check back later
It took me a long time to read this book. It was nearly 700 pages long, and just not my cup of tea. The reason I picked this book up was because it was listed as a gothic novel. There were too many characters to keep up with. I never really got a good read on the main character in the novel and at two or three times I felt the urge to just stop reading this book and pick up another one instead. That is something I NEVER do. But, I forced myself t...more
It took me a long time to read this book. It was nearly 700 pages long, and just not my cup of tea. The reason I picked this book up was because it was listed as a gothic novel. There were too many characters to keep up with. I never really got a good read on the main character in the novel and at two or three times I felt the urge to just stop reading this book and pick up another one instead. That is something I NEVER do. But, I forced myself t...more
I really enjoyed Bellefleur. This story of the Bellefleur family covers about 7 generations of crazy-brilliant nutjobs. Oates moves back and forth between generations and I was dizzily flipping between pages and the family tree in the front of the book at first. But then the Bellefleurs become your crazy, wealthy, mentally unstable family and who doesn't love that? The ending was crazy and not really in a great way, but the book was, overall, really quite good.
I love Joyce Carol Oates and this is a good one. It is long and very dense and can be a bit confusing but it is original and has that quirkiness that JCO is known for. It is the saga of the bellefleur family from northern New York that runs from the late 1700's to mid 20th century. Thank God she supplies a family tree or I wouldn't have been able to follow all the relationships. The story was full of ups and downs but being JCO, mostly downs. What I really liked about it was that although one fa...more
I read this several years ago, and what I remember of it was being very confused. The writing is lush, but the overall format of the story is complex, needlessly so, and therefore very confusing. It gets three stars only because I found the writing itself enjoyable.
This book would have been more enjoyable if family tree in the front of the book would have contained birth and death dates of all of the family members. It was confusing to follow events of all 49 family members with out reference dates.
A strange book by a great and very prolific author. I found Oat's style to be gothic and heavy at times. The characters and their peculiarities made the book engaging and hard to put down though once through the first half of the book.
This is one of two books I literally threw across the room halfway into it. It’s a long story about a bunch of rich pricks that went broke and complain about it incessantly. Who cares? Nothing ever happens. Period. Snooze fest.
Aug 07, 2011
Kristel
added it
Un "Cent Ans de Solitude" se déroulant dans le comté de Chautauqua, New York. Bouquin gothique dont la construction, faite de va-et-viens dans le temps, révèle peu à peu l'histoire de la famille Bellefleur.
Since it's out of print now, I'm glad I've been lugging this one around with me from place to place, waiting to get around to reading it. It was strange, funny, horrifying, and very well written.
Many consider this to be Oates' masterpiece. It is in her gothic(as opposed to contemporary) style. A timetripping, multi-generational family history that I re-read about once every two years.
This Gothic novel of a family living with a "curse" is a bizarre yet wondrous read whicxh, like almost all of Ms. Oates' work, gives more than what one expects.
This is probably one of my top books of all times. You could call it a saga or an epic, and it is lush, sweeping and fantastic, often blurring the lines between sanity and lunacy, the real and the supernatural. Oates never quite makes the distinction between what is perceived and what is truly there, leaving the reader to decipher the reality of the Bellefleurs through their eyes. This book is long. This book is wordy. If you don't like intriguing, labyrinthine writing that's a journey into itse...more
The ending really irritated me but was also somehow fitting with it's complete waste of meaning or maybe too heavy a meaning? I cannot say... The meat of this work is in the characters. I have noted some reviews state that this book had no point, went nowhere. Were we reading the same novel? I began to feel a part of this eccentric clan and even the members that I found irritating were lovable. MORE to follow soon
incredibly well built as all Oates's novels, a page turner that you can leave to start another book and read on again very easily.
Jan 11, 2010
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
marked it as to-read
A bit rich for my blood just now - everything here is larger than life and twice as melodramatic as the average daytime soap. I will try again later.
It just takes you letter by letter - and makes you feel something you've never experienced before.
This convoluted tale of a large, unusual family is characterized by extreme emotion.
My favorite JCO book. I loved it; although it was many years ago that I read it.
notorious great story telling as always, but tedious at times
Another favorite in a very gothic suspense genre. Very other worldly.
Vampire story for adults - my favorite of Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. Pseudonyms ... Rosamond Smith and Laure...more
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