Magnificence
By Lydia Millet
Summary
Lydia Millet is one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation (Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times). This stunning novel introduces Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband's death. Suddenly gifted her great uncle's Pasadena mansion, Susan decides to restore his extensive collection of preserved animals, tending to the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails.Meanwhile, a menagerie of uniquely damaged humans including a cheating husband and a chorus of eccentric elderly women joins her in residence.
Millet's flawlessly beautiful(Salon) prose creates a setting both humorous and wondrous as Susan defends her inheritance from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion's many mysterious spaces. Funny and heartbreaking, Magnificence is the story of a woman emerging from the sudden dissolution of her family. Millet's trademark themes evolution and extinction, children and parenthood, loss and wonder produce a rapturous final act to the critically acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream.
-Goodreads.com
Quotations
“The whole world suffered and bled for all eternity, through all of human history, so that a minescule, paltry few could have leisure and joy and the liberty of wealth for as long as they each should live. There is no doubt, the poor are the sacrifice, he thought, and he remembered this knowledge like a sight he had seen -- all the poor and the untended and powerless. Together they are Jesus on the cross, bleeding so openly, bleeding for all to see, and thin like Jesus too, their arms and veins opened...And yet the rich, especially the very, grotesquely rich, that fraction of a percent that make up the one man that is saved, blithely deny the truth of this, though it is perfectly obvious and as transparently clear as glass. The rich may worship God or they may pretend to but they are kicking Jesus to the floor daily, kicking him viciously and stepping on his face. Because the poor are Jesus, in their billions. Plain as the nose on his face . . . and he himself, neither Jesus nor Judas but some one in between, was dying."