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The Vision of Emma Blau

by Ursula Hegi

Summary

When both his wives die in childbirth, Stefan Blau travels from America to his native village in Germany, marries again, and returns to the states, where he has built a huge apartment house that threatens to take over his life. The complicated relationships among Stefan's three children form the nucleus of this century-long family saga that spans both world wars.

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Media Reviews

"Hegi is an old-fashioned storyteller, and her characters are deeply engaging. She keeps a dozen distinct plot lines going at once and manages to give them each equal weight, so the reader never scans ahead through one to find out what will happen in the next....But despite its substantial length, THE VISION OF EMMA BLAU feels like a small novel in many ways....Every member of the Blau family seems to live in his or her own individual pod, close to the ones that they love without ever really touching....Unfortunately, it's hard to make a book about isolation feel compelling."    -- Ann Patchett

   -- Chicago Tribune Books

"Ms. Hegi has a canny eye for the lingering effects of a German background on manners, furniture, and food, and also for the subtle resentments created by the family's cross-cultural heritage. This is a novel of wide range, richly interesting in both character and episode."    -- Phoebe-Lou Adams

   -- Atlantic Monthly

"THE VISION OF EMMA BLAU is densely populated, and Ms. Hegi has mixed success in making the reader care for her characters....There's also some clunky writing."    -- Gabriella Sterne

   -- Wall Street Journal

"This is a capacious and at times exhausting novel. There are many characters to keep track of...[and] some potentially fascinating characters are summarily sketched....Eventually, though, I came to realize that individual characters are secondary to THE VISION OF EMMA BLAU....The constellation that is the family is the true subject of this novel."    -- Diana Postlethwaite

   -- New York Times Book Review

"This is a great saga-wurst of a novel, a generational smorgasbord, a Virginia Reel of a novel, with its complex family at the core....But in the end, there are too many balls in the air; they don't spin quickly enough to abandon their individual orbits and blend into one continuous loop, as they must to hold the book together."    -- Susan Salter Reynolds

   -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Touchstone Books
Published date: 2001
Size: 5 x 8 inches
Weight: 0.95 pounds
Pages: 432

Publisher's Notes

A novel of immigration and love follows a German man who flees to the United States at the start of the twentieth century and makes a life for himself, spawning four generations of descendants.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Simon & Schuster (2000) - from $1.00
• Paperback - Simon & Schuster (2001) - from $1.00

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