The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters
by Elisabeth Robinson. Book #30 in my 50 Book Challenge for 2005. A novel in letters about Olivia Hunt, who is trying to produce a film of Don Quixote when she finds out her younger sister is dying of leukemia. The letters are from Olivia to various people in her life–friends, family, co-workers, her ex-boyfriend.
The epistolary format didn’t work for me. I didn’t find Olivia’s narratives well differentiated in types of letter (emails were similar to faxes and to letters) or in recipient (she told parts of the story to whomever she was writing to, so if you removed the “Dear X” from the letter, it didn’t matter for long stretches whether she was writing to her sister, her friend or her ex.) I think this book might have worked better if Robinson would have interspersed narrative and letters, rather than trying to cram the former into the latter.
There were some sentences that were unwieldy and incongruous in general, made more so for being in a letter, e.g.,
It’s a clear, fine spring day and I had to feel it for a minute, to just breathe in the sweet magnolia scent of a June day in the Ohio Valley.
Also, Robinson didn’t use quotation marks, which made dialogue sometimes difficult to follow.
Perhaps as a result of the letter format, none of the characters felt three dimensional. I didn’t see much growth or increased insight even in the main character of Olivia. Things changed around her, but I didn’t find her very changed at the end.
On the positive side, there was a good balance of funny and sad, and some interesting insight into the Hollywood experience. Since I read it recently, I understood all the references to Don Quixote, and thought it was a good thematic match for her sister’s illness. I thought it especially ironic that she notes in a few letters that people should not worry about Gilliam’s Don Quixote, since it won’t get made. Her fictional version does get made, though in real-life Robinson worked on a version that didn’t. Terry Gilliam did eventually try to film Don Quixote. He turned his failure into the documentary Lost in La Mancha.
May 25th, 2005 at 9:53 pm
as you know - i disagreed, the format really worked for me. it actually reminds me of a nonfiction book i loved ‘dear, exile’ - did you ever read that? letters back and forth between two college roommates while on is working for the peace corps (or some org like that, can’t remember exactly) in africa. very diff. subject matter but for some reason reminded me of it. i read the hunt sisters in the fall, then watched lost in la mancha over christmas with my dad. a very fun pairing!!