Blood Ties, by Jennifer Lash. This is Ms. Lash's final book and it is emotionally harrowing. She has exposed, and skillfully, the substance of not caring and its consequences down the generations. There is a terrible price to be paid. I found the story heartbreaking and the acts of alienation hard to forgive. Equally skillfully, Lash looks at what it means to love, the work of the imagination in loving and its power to heal. She is a writer driven by ideas but her work is specific and her people impossible to forget. I'm so exceedingly sorry that she isn't here to write more.

This splendidly crafted work of fiction covers five generations of an Irish family and its focus is on the emotional lameness that can result from a lack of parental nurturing.

Despite violating every known convention of what schoolteachers call the mechanics of writing, Jennifer Lash offers us a magnificent novel of the effects of alienation and indifference on human development. Many think the opposite of love is hate, but this is not the case. The opposite of love is indifference. And this is Violet Farr's problem: she is totally indifferent to anything that involves affect, sentiment or love.

Worshipping the memory of her own dead father and married to a marginally conscious, sexually repressed gay man, Violet is rich, intelligent, cultured and extremely competent in dealing with things and ideas. She has an innate talent for managing things but is inept in her dealings with other humans at the level of emotion, especially as regards needs, apirations, individual interests, fears.

Her son, conceived only because her husband manages to fantasize about a delivery boy during coitus, soon turns into an unclean, foulmouthed drunk and gets shipped off to school in England, where he goes from bad to worse, finally begetting a child on a bimbo barmaid whose mother has died in an insane asylum.

Violet's grandson lives with his slovenly mother for several years but then gets trunked off to Ireland to live with Grandma, who is still emotionally unable to deal with the situation of having a young child around. After a particularly unfortunate incident involving a dead chicken she packs him off back to England as she had done with his father.

The boy goes to school for a while, lives in foster homes, and then takes to the streets and lives a life of meanness and horror in contact with unruly, violent young vagrants. He is rescued from it all by Winifred and her daughter, who nurse him back to health and stability and give him the human kindness he has been denied most of his life. After making love (but it is genuine love) to Winifred's daughter and inseminating her, he is killed in a bike accident.

The child of this liaison has the chance to bring a kind of redemption to Violet and her loveless existence.

The author has a special gift for rich characterization, and even her language changes as she moves from one personage to another describing them and their activities in individually appropriate terms. Only occasionally does she fall into stereotyping, as with the know-it-all priests and the wise, faithful family retainers.

This book can be recommended for anyone interested in human development or parent-child relations. It would also do nicely for those fascinated with the Irish literary tradition, of which it is a noteworth representative.

I am endlessly amazed at the many unexpected surprises life delivers, and "BLOOD TIES" is one such surprise. Having recently read a small item in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY regarding the campaign being made by Ms. Lash's children to promote this, her last book, particularly by her sons, actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, I was intrigued. At first a deeply disturbing story of parental neglect, at its end, "BLOOD TIES" is a story of love and redemption. Ms. Lash's prose is beautiful and lush, and the story, compelling. This is a novel that will stay with me for some time, and one that deserves widespread recognition.

Just finished the book and found it very poetic in some parts and kind of confusing in others. There were two errors that I found, and maybe it is nit-picking, but it made me wonder about other information that was given. First, Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine in the cathedral at Poitiers, not in Lisieux, and Abelard is buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetary in Paris with Heloise, not in Cluny. Well worth reading, tho, especially if you've been to some of the places mentioned, or plan to visit others. I found it fascinating that she most always found a room wherever she stopped whatever the time. Obviously she spoke French well.

I read a previous book by Ms. Lash and disliked it very much. Her fiction prose is declaratory and disjointed. I always thought her writing style would be much better suited to non fiction. This book proved me correct. Her declaratory statements and random philosophizing are suited to this pleasant travelogue. As an armchair traveller you get an impression of what it would be like to visit different sites of pilgrimage. You get a good sense of what it would be like to travel alone, meet interesting people and open yourself up to the possibilities of not only a physical pilgrimage but a spirital pilgrimage. As a former Catholic, Lash is tolerant of the beliefs of others without proselytizing for the Catholic faith or judging those who still believe.

Jennifer Lash, who appears to be the mother of the actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, made a solo trip of pilgrimage through France in l993 after winning a battle with cancer (for awhile). As a non-practising Catholic in late middle age, she knew her theological territory when traveling from convent to monastery to basilica to pilgrimage camp; but she approached her visits in a determined spirit of not-knowing. I found that intellectually or maybe morally refreshing; it served as a Carlos-Castaneda-like bridge role which helped me, the reader, someone else who does "not know". Her experience of moving on repeatedly reminded her that travel brings us back up against our selves. She feels strongly and works transparently to understand her feelings; the sorting-out process which the pilgrimage crystallizes for this writer can illuminate whatever journey her reader is on.

Her writing is both erudite and humble. She was a sophisticated Briton who had spent much of her life raising her very large family. From miracle site to miracle site on the French trains, carrying her baggage on an injured back, she tells us the stories of the saints whose cults have given rise to these sites, and describes the religious communities which maintain them. In between, she tells us about the people she meets and re-meets. She is often wry, but never sarcastic; describes ridiculousness sharply but never cruelly. She learns as she goes, and as she learns she teaches, in the kindest way. She is a LADY - decent and sincere, and also funny and engaged.
Her descriptions make the feel of each place most vivid - the baroque, fully alive Santiago de Compostela, the gloomy, cold Rocamadour, the wild emotional Gypsy pilgrimage in the Camargue are all made quite visible, audible, smellable, each entirely different from the others - and there are about fifteen of these places in the book.
The book is horribly proofread - the commas are in the wrong places, so that Ms. Lash reads like a rather bizarre speaker - a peculiar pauser for breath in funny places. There are outright mistakes that no one caught - the word "paramount" is confused with "tantamount", for example, and a priest is described as wearing a "scapula", the shoulder blade, when she meant "scapular", a liturgical garment. We know what she means, but we have to wade along doing our own corrections.
This strange aberration makes reading the book feel like chatting with a deeply imaginative, thoughtful, unselfconsciously wacky human being, rather than "a writer". But what a writer, and what a significant story this journey is when told in her voice.

Well I think it's a good book, couse there all the persons have imformation about dust colector, and it's very logical