In drie onderling verbonden verhalen worden de belevenissen van evenzoveel uiteenlopende koppels beschreven.

In drie onderling verbonden verhalen worden de belevenissen van evenzoveel uiteenlopende koppels beschreven.

I have tried and failed many times over the several months I've been reading this book to describe effectively all that this book is and does, so I concede now that nothing I write in this review will do it justice. This book is a well-crafted consideration of human connection to each other and the world as a whole, systemic oppression and its emotional and physical effects, the way time/history shape the stories we tell and the stories we live, and ultimately healing. The nonlinear plot made the story feel more emotionally realistic for me, and the characters kept me rooted in the story, so I never felt lost. By the end of the book, I felt that this story is, in many ways, a declaration of what I assume to be Walker's personal philosophy. While I don't agree with every aspect of this philosophy, I do believe there is a lot that can be learned from it. I hope to make time to reread this book in years to come in order to continue learning from it. ( )

OMG, did I ever hate this book. I loved The Color Purple, so I thought I'd like this.

It jumps around like crazy and includes new characters far more often than it refers back to ones we've already met. I got so sick of trying to keep track of characters that I finally threw it down in disgust. Irritating and a waste of time. ( )

Alice Walker is reputedly one of the most well-known, yet most difficult post-modern authors to read, and The Temple of My Familiar makes both of these reputations known. Why is it difficult? In an effort to present life, and I mean life as in the history of man (and other creatures) in this world throughout time, there's no doubt that the result of this feat would be a difficult read. Walker's novel travels in a non-linear way through time, covering South America, North America, Africa, and England, among others. With such an all-encompassing focus on "human" history, Walker can focus neither on one time period or one character.

Walker achieves this by use of a different ordering principle than we normally use to recognize time, i.e., past lives. She takes fantastic liberties with the presentation of the past and human origins, telling a matriarchal creation story where the men attempt the emulate the perfect art form of female childbirth and pregnancy. Walker also presents an arboreal past that is possibly an evolutionary history, and the most utopic of all the worlds in the novel.

With these stories and multi-faceted characters, Walker communicates that in every other person, there is a piece of ourselves and our histories, that from within one person, our entire past exists. She communicates the Jungian philosophy of the collective unconscious being connected back through time and culture in significant ways. It is with this that one of the characters, Mary Jane, claims that "we all touch each other's lives in ways we can't begin to imagine."

Such off-the-wall stories and complicated concepts add to the difficulty of the read while at the same time encouraging the readers to swallow a world that is so unlike their "normal" ones. This world of magic realism, an art form perfected by Walker and fellow writer, [b:Toni Morrison|6149|Beloved|Toni Morrison|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165555299s/6149.jpg|736076], is one that makes for a refreshing and engrossing read. The characters are unforgettable, the historical and visual backdrops breathtaking. Names like Carlotta, Fanny, Hal, Lulu, Suwelo, and Lissie will forever remain portraits of amazing people that live in my mind beyond Walker's intricate telling.

Suwelo himself speaks of the "rare people...[who are:] connected directly with life and not with its reflection." It is this ultimate person that I believe Walker wants to present, create and/or reach with the readers of this story. With this, Walker's confusing journey becomes almost a dramatization of how she feels the universe itself works. ( )

If ever there was a book I would have loved reading in a group or book club-type setting, this would be it. I felt like taking notes throughout the whole thing. I wanted to express my thoughts after certain chapters, and listen to other reactions, too. It has the depth to warrant this. I have come across several references to it as "a sequel to The Color Purple," but find that misleading. Some of the characters are the children or other family members of the main characters in TCP, but there is no pick up of that story at all. If you're looking for that, you'll be disappointed.

These people are living their own lives, finding their own way through their own adventures and circumstances. Beautiful prose, as I would expect from Ms. Walker, some of it magical and even surreal. It's dense, to be sure. Some of the characters grow long-winded, and in certain instances I agree with the comments that the monologue style of the book can be challenging - but in other instances, it's perfect.

I regret I had to read it alone, with no discussion or feedback. This is a fine novel, and Alice Walker is a genius. I'd give it 5 stars but for the certain long-winded sections. I wish I had placed sticky-flags while reading it, because parts I'd like to re-visit are hard to find. ( )

between 1 and 1.5 because i really want to like this and because i like (so much!) her point and what she's doing, i just really don't like the way she executed it. 97% of this book is written in monologue - the chapter starts with someone talking, the indicator ("_____ said") so you know which story we're hearing, and then the rest of the chapter is them monologuing, usually without even a sentence of interruption for exposition or dialogue exchange. then the next chapter is someone else talking but doing the same thing. this is one of my very least favorite ways for books to be written. i find it tedious and a hard slog, no matter if the story they're telling is a good one or not. i absolutely hate this kind of writing.

her book the color purple is one of my all-time favorite books but i also wonder if we shouldn't leave those characters to that book. she keeps coming back to them, and while i smile to hear more about their stories, i think i'd prefer to keep their lives contained in that masterpiece. (what she has to say in these books can be said without those characters, and might be better stated with new ones that don't have the history they do. or maybe not. maybe i missed so much of this book because this kind of writing is so hard for me to give focus to.)

"One night she said: 'If it is true that we commit adultery by thinking it, then is it also the same with committing murder? What about the way it is so easy, when you watch a plane take off, to imagine it blown to bits? Does this count? Are we collectively responsible for disasters because we image them and therefore shape them into consciousness? Do all human beings nowadays automatically have murder in their eyes?'" ( )

Wonderful but confusing. Tracks various lives interweaving past and present --in Africa, Central America, US--some in touch with Spirit, some struggling and learning to come to terms with their family, but not in a didactic way.
[read 2001-18 yr ago] ( )

Part love story, part fable, part feminist manifesto, part political statement, Walker's novel follows a cast of interrelated characters, most of them black. and each It is a sequel to "The Color Purple"

A meandering discourse on personal discovery, past lives, race, interpersonal relationships, all framed in a narrative that is unpredictable and hard to follow. The character development was quite well done but the overall effect is preachy. Not at al my sort of thing. ( )

great novel @ 500,000 years Black History + romances, marriages, women who have lived many lives before - great ideas
museums - other peoples booty
colleges for consumers
Burden child w/ unbearable history

It is the story of the dispossessed and displaced, of peoples whose history is ancient and whose future is yet to come. Here we meet Lissie, a woman of many pasts; Arveyda the great guitarist and his Latin American wife who has had to flee her homeland; Suwelo, the history teacher, and his former wife Fanny who has fallen in love with spirits. Hovering tantalisingly above their stories are Miss Celie and Shug, the beloved characters from THE COLOUR PURPLE.

Not a badly written book, but I couldn't get into it. Introspective characters and a meandering journey of self discovery, isn't really my thing. ( )

Alice Walker has created memorable characters in her epic novel, The Temple of My Familiar. The author uses a personal-storytelling technique where the characters present their own life history by telling it���at times, a little long-winded���to another character whose life is emotionally intertwined with theirs. Magic realist elements are used to bring us to various continents and back to past time periods in the character���s life where they struggled with the classic issues of women���s emancipation and racial discrimination. It is through the moral revisiting and questioning of past wrongs that the characters must come to terms with their present reality and move forward.
An important novel, almost historical in its presentation of the great emotional issues that have troubled us till this day.
( )

African-American writer, Alice Walker’s website provides a brief biography. It reads, in part, “Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated author, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children’s books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She’s best known for The Color Purple, the 1983 novel for which she won the Pulitzer Prize—the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction—and the National Book Award. (http://alicewalkersgarden.com/about-2/).

I read some of Walker’s works in a women writer’s class in grad school, and I found The Color Purple extremely moving. The persistence and courage of Celie inspired me in a number of ways. The Temple of My Familiar came my way at the urging of a close friend. What I found was something quite different from Purple.

Rather than read this novel, it needs to be experienced. Yes, the story is convoluted, with an amazing array of characters and time periods, with love and hate, fear and courage, but at the end, characters who possessed the same persistence Walker gave us in The Color Purple. A map of the family and its shifting relationships would most definitely assist a reader.

One interesting character, Fanny, married to an African man, Suwelo, has visions of historical characters. Suwelo is a history teacher, and he is skeptical that spirits actually contact Fanny. He researches one, Chief John Horse, and finds Fanny has described his life in meticulous detail. Suwelo once asked her about the spirits. “What do you love about these people?” (186). Fanny replies,

“I dunno. They open doors inside me. It’s as if they’re keys. To rooms inside myself. I find a door inside and it’s as if I hear a humming from behind it, and then I get inside somehow, with the key the old ones give me, (…) and as I stumble about in the darkness of the room, I begin to feel the stirring in myself, the humming in the room, and my heart starts to expand with the absolute feeling of bravery, or love, or audacity, or commitment. It becomes a light, and the light enters me, by osmosis, and a part of me that was not clear before is clarified. I radiate this expanded light. Happiness. / And that, Suwelo knew, was called ‘being in love’” (186).

Another character, Lissie, remembers in great detail all of her past lives – from a childhood in Africa, to one during the middle passage, through to one as slavery ended and another during the civil rights movement of the 60s.

Some novels require a great deal of patience and close reading. Not all are worth that extra effort, but Alice Walker’s Temple of my Familiar most certainly is. The only flaw involved rapid shifts of time and place, which I found confusing. Despite this, I did not invoke my rule of 50, and my persistence paid off. One chapter explains the life of Lissie, and it all fell into place. 5 stars

--Jim, 8/11/13 ( )

This is a strange, amazing, mythical-proportioned multi-threaded tale. You may need a map to navigate it, and the ending is rather anti-climactic (ahem) but some of the pieces of it are just amazing. Also, it's like a sequel to "Color Purple," in a way. ( )

Not quite as accessible as The Color Purple, but more sprawling and, by necessity, more finely wrought. This is a big book--lots of characters, with a multi-generational timeline. To complicate things further, a great deal of the book is told in epistolary fashion or in long monologues by one of the many characters. Not an easy book to read, but quite good. ( )

This book was given to me by my sister, bless her heart, many years ago. Its heart is in the right place, but it comes across as a little preachy.

Quotes:
"What a euphemism, 'leather'. A real nonword. Nowhere in it was concealed the truth of what leather was. Something's skin. And his tortoiseshell glasses. He took them off and peered nearsightedly at them, holding them at arm's length. But they were imitation tortoiseshell. Plastic, probably. But this made him even gloomier, for he knew the only reason for imitation anything was that the source of the real thing had dried up. There were probably no more tortoises to kill. And what, anyway, of plastic? It was plentiful, cheap. But even it came from somewhere. Of what was plastic made? What died?"

"HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differentness."

"You must try not to want 'things' too,' said Ola, 'for 'thingism' is the ultimate block across the path of peace. If everytime you see a tree, you want to make some thing out of it, soon no one on earth will even have air to breathe." ( )

My favorite book of all time by my favorite author! I love the character of Lissie in this book. Reading this book just took me to a different place and time that I didn't want to let go of... ( )

Alice Walker is reputedly one of the most well-known, yet most difficult post-modern authors to read, and The Temple of My Familiar makes both of these reputations known. Why is it difficult? In an effort to present life, and I mean life as in the history of man (and other creatures) in this world throughout time, there's no doubt that the result of this feat would be a difficult read. Walker's novel travels in a non-linear way through time, covering South America, North America, Africa, and England, among others. With such an all-encompassing focus on "human" history, Walker can focus neither on one time period or one character. Walker achieves this by use of a different ordering principle than we normally use to recognize time, i.e., past lives. She takes fantastic liberties with the presentation of the past and human origins, telling a matriarchal creation story where the men attempt the emulate the perfect art form of female childbirth and pregnancy. Walker also presents an arboreal past that is possibly an evolutionary history, and the most utopic of all the worlds in the novel.With these stories and multi-faceted characters, Walker communicates that in every other person, there is a piece of ourselves and our histories, that from within one person, our entire past exists. She communicates the Jungian philosophy of the collective unconscious being connected back through time and culture in significant ways. It is with this that one of the characters, Mary Jane, claims that "we all touch each other's lives in ways we can't begin to imagine."Such off-the-wall stories and complicated concepts add to the difficulty of the read while at the same time encouraging the readers to swallow a world that is so unlike their "normal" ones. This world of magic realism, an art form perfected by Walker and fellow writer, Toni Morrison, is one that makes for a refreshing and engrossing read. The characters are unforgettable, the historical and visual backdrops breathtaking. Names like Carlotta, Fanny, Hal, Lulu, Suwelo, and Lissie will forever remain portraits of amazing people that live in my mind beyond Walker's intricate telling.Suwelo himself speaks of the "rare people...[who are] connected directly with life and not with its reflection." It is this ultimate person that I believe Walker wants to present, create and/or reach with the readers of this story. With this, Walker's confusing journey becomes almost a dramatization of how she feels the universe itself works. ( )

I'm ashamed to admit that this one sat on my shelves for perhaps 15 years. But clearly, there was a reason I held onto it: it is a beautiful, magical, devastating, lyrical treat! Even though the narrative drifts like a winding river among a cast of intertwined characters, plots, and settings, somehow they are all connected. I can't recommend this book highly enough, but I must warn you to be patient. I urge you to just pick it up and go with the flow. Not all questions are answered in the end, but...well, that's reality, isn't it? I'm sure the author would agree with me that, ultimately, all things are connected and the journey is its own goal.

Best treat of all: We get to spend more time hanging out with the delightful Misses Celie and Shug from The Color Purple. ( )

While I enjoyed this more than some of Walker's other material, it is still employing the same themes, characters, and sentiments as always. At the same time, the story here feels more original, and the characters at many points are more believable. If I were to recommend any of Walker's works, it would be this one. ( )

This book, a work of fiction, explores topics that range from slavery, to reincarnation, sexuality, self expression, relationships, racism, sexism, healing, magic, music, writing, art, feminism...

It is filled with a rich variety of characters, all with their unique complexity, and weaves them to show how interconnected we all are, to everything around us, other human beings, animals, the earth, to life itself.

One of the reasons why Alice Walker is my favourite author is because her writing is very evoking. There's something about the way that she communicates an experience that's not just describing it to you, but it's bringing that experience to life fully. There's no fear in the writing about really delving into a moment of pain and exposing the raw sore for all that it's worth. And in doing so, in evoking the reader in that way, it becomes impossible not to see how one person's pain, is everyone's pain. How the rape of a woman is a rape of humanity in it's entirety.

I think that to be a force of change in this world, to be part of a cause or movement taking a stand against injustice, you need to have felt pain, either through an experience of your own or someone else's. That's why her writing is brilliant. It evokes. It moves. All of a sudden, I can say I have insight into what it feels like to be enslaved, or to lose a child, or to be betrayed. And through all of this her writing depicts the multi-faceted beauty of life, of reality as it is.

My heart becomes that much bigger with sensitivity and compassion. My stand becomes that much stronger. My level of tolerance and capacity to forgive grow as well.

This book is a journey to be savoured. ( )

This was an interesting book. It's been many years since I read it, so I don't remember a lot of details, but I do remember finding it quirky enough to keep my interest. Colorful characters, too. ( )

I remember liking this book although it was a bit difficult to follow. No one else around me (in college) liked it but me. ( )

African American, South American characters
Man and woman relationships
Personal identity ( )