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S and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel a deliciously peculiar dog obedie. “Burying one’s child is against the flow of nature” said the wife of the Speaker of the House Philippine Congress in her eulogy for her 16 year old daughter several years ago Her only daughter got burned when their short circuited Christmas tree went in flames The clueless poor daughter was sleeping and got trapped inside her room No one was with here in the house when that happenedThis is one thought that whenever it crosses my mind I always whisk away immediately the death of my child Typing it here even feels wrong as I remember reading that mind has that power to attract what you always think of I just don't know what to do if this happens I might as well kill myself I guess However this thing happens It’s one of the sad realities of life Once we are born we can die anytime In fact I have some friends and acuaintances whose children died ahead of them I also read and liked books that have this as its main or underlying theme Ordinary People 1976 by Judith Guest was my first The older son Buck died while sailing with the younger son Conrad and the unspoken guilt of the son and the unexpressed emotion of the parents blaming the younger son who survived was so powerful that when it was made into a movie it won the Academy Awards for Best Picture That was in 1980Second was a book that I read a couple of years back and topped my list of my favorites for that year What I Loved 2003 by Siri Husvedt The grief is also not as openly expressed as in Ordinary People but the child who died was their only one and there was no one to blame as the death was an accident Similarly the devastated couple separated and the father tried to see his dead child from same age children of his friends or even strangers In this book The Accidental Tourist the father Macon Leary starts to withdraw to his own world he would imagine that his whole body was enclosed in a cast and people would peep into the hole in his eyes and would asked “Macon are you there” However Tyler's story went further Macon seems to belief that the soul of his dead son Ethan remains in his son’s dog Edward and no matter how strange or brutal the dog behaves he keeps it and even hires a dog trainer Muriel to tame the dog The Accidental Tourist was the 1985 novel by Anne Tyler born 1941 A finalist at Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Award Circle for Fiction the novel was adapted into a 1988 award winning film starring William Hurt as Macon Leary Kathleen Turner Sarah his estranged wife and Geena Davis Muriel the dog trainer Davis won the Best Actress in a Supporting Role in this film for the succeeding year’s Academy Awards This is my first Anne Tyler novel Her writing is straightforward No frills yet incandescently clear It’s an easy read You’ll have a feeling that you are watching a movie although I missed this film but I will not forego a chance of seeing it Her strength seemingly is her strong way of building her characters She goes inside their minds and she seems to have the ability to know how the character should behave in the circumstances that they are in Her women characters are not stereotyped they can be as brutal as Sandra leaving Macon to his solitude as funny yet decisive as Muriel who fights for her love and her son Alexander or as eccentric but loyal vulnerable yet loving as Rose who arranges her groceries in alphabetical order and cries over the fact that her brothers would not want to eat her cooked overnight in low fire turkey Then there are the Leary brothers Macon the father Charles and Porter and they all are poor in direction that they always get lost even if they are just going to the corner store This book is peppered with many memorable characters that I had a feeling that I was standing in front of a buffet table and I am confused which one to put on my plate as my favoriteI used to ignore the books of Anne Tyler but next time that I see Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant that Tyler said to be her best work or Breathing Lessons that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 I will surely buy them right there and then Be it bargain or regular priced Anne Tyler can surely give back the value of every penny you have in your pocket
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The Accidental TouristMacon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and anything out of the ordinary He is grounded by lonelines. It looks like I'm in the minority here but I really did not enjoy this book I couldn't sympathize with any of the characters I thought Macon was whiny and indecisive I couldn't be compelled to care about what he wanted mostly because it was never made clear to me exactly what that was He just seemed to bump along with whatever happened More than anything else my problem with this book is that nothing happened I kept thinking that possibly in the next chapter Macon would act in some way to change his own destiny but nope Nothing even happened in the end the book just seemed to stop