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I Know This Much Is True: A Novel (P.S.) Paperback – April 8, 2008
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#1 New York Times Bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection
"Thoughtful . . . heart-wrenching . . . . An exercise in soul-baring storytelling—with the soul belonging to 20th-century America itself. It's hard to read and to stop reading, and impossible to forget." — USA Today
Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. Dominick is forced to care for his brother as well as confront dark secrets and pain he has buried deep within himself—a journey of the soul that takes him beyond his blue-collar New England town to Sicily’s Mount Etna, the birthplace of his grandfather and namesake. Coming to terms with his life and lineage, Dominick struggles to find forgiveness and finally rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his troubled twin.
I Know This Much Is True is a masterfully told story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal—an unforgettable masterpiece.
- Print length928 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateApril 8, 2008
- Dimensions5.31 x 1.48 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100061469084
- ISBN-13978-0061469084
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Thoughtful...heart-wrenching....An exercise in soul-baring storytelling--with the soul belonging to 20th-century America itself. It's hard to read and to stop reading, and impossible to forget." — USA Today
“A gratifying saga of loss and redemption.” — People
"[A] tour de force that sweeps the reader along in its swift emotional current....A work of astonishing craftsmanship, structural symmetry, and literary self-awareness...Read it and weep." — St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Dominick Birdsey is an epic hero and his story an inspiring, darkly comic tale of redemption--a late twentieth-century Les Miserables." — Glamour
"Never grapples with anything less than life’s biggest questions. . . . Lamb clearly aims to be a modern-day Dostoevsky with a pop sensibility." — New York Times Book Review
“A fully developed and triumphantly resolved exploration of one man’s suffering and redemption.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Every now and then a book comes along that sets new standards for writers and readers alike. Wally Lamb's latest novel is stunning--and even that might be an understatement...this is a masterpiece." — Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers
"The saga of the century. Best, most wonderful, most dramatic, most powerful. There are no superlatives impressive enough to describe this, another Lamb masterpiece." — Oakland Press
"You couldn’t ask for a more beguiling summer read." — Entertainment Weekly
From the Back Cover
"On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother, Thomas, entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut, public library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. . . "
One of the most acclaimed novels of our time, Wally Lamb's I Know This Much Is True is a story of alienation and connection, devastation and renewal, at once joyous, heartbreaking, poignant, mystical, and powerfully, profoundly human.
About the Author
Wally Lambis the author of five New York Times bestselling novels: She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much Is True, The Hour I First Believed, Wishin’ and Hopin’, and We Are Water. His first two works of fiction, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, were both #1 New York Times bestsellers and selections of Oprah’s Book Club. Lamb edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself, I’ll Fly Away, and You Don’t Know Me, three volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he has been a volunteer facilitator for two decades. He lives in Connecticut and New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I Know This Much Is True
A NovelBy Wally LambHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Wally LambAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061469084
Chapter One
On the afternoon of October 12, 1990, my twin brother Thomas entered the Three Rivers, Connecticut Public Library, retreated to one of the rear study carrels, and prayed to God the sacrifice he was about to commit would be deemed acceptable. Mrs. Theresa Fenneck, the children's librarian, was officially in charge that day because the head librarian was at an all-day meeting in Hartford. She approached my brother and told him he'd have to keep his voice down or else leave the library. She could hear him all the way up at the front desk. There were other patrons to consider. If he wanted to pray, she told him, he should go to a church, not the library.
Thomas and I had spent several hours together the day before. Our Sunday afternoon ritual dictated that I sign him out of the state hospital's Settle Building, treat him to lunch, visit our stepfather or take him for a drive, and then return him to the hospital before suppertime. At a back booth at Friendly's, I'd sat across from my brother, breathing in his secondary smoke and leafing for the umpteenth time through his scrapbook of clippings on the Persian Gulf crisis. He'd been collecting them since August as evidence that Armageddon was at hand--that the final battle between good and evil was about to be triggered. "America's been living on borrowed time all these years, Dominick," he told me. "Playing the world's whore, wallowing in our greed. Now we're going to pay the price."
He was oblivious of my drumming fingers on the tabletop. "Not to change the subject," I said, "but how's the coffee business?" Ever since eight milligrams of Haldol per day had quieted Thomas's voices, he had managed a small morning concession in the patients' lounge--coffee and cigarettes and newspapers dispensed from a metal cart more rickety than his emotional state. Like so many of the patients there, he indulged in caffeine and nicotine, but it was the newspapers that had become Thomas's most potent addiction.
"How can we kill people for the sake of cheap oil? How can we justify that?" His hands flapped as he talked; his palms were grimy from newsprint ink. Those dirty hands should have warned me--should have tipped me off. "How are we going to prevent God's vengeance if we have that little respect for human life?"
Our waitress approached--a high school kid wearing two buttons: "Hi, I'm Kristin" and "Patience, please. I'm a trainee." She asked us if we wanted to start out with some cheese sticks or a bowl of soup.
"You can't worship both God and money, Kristin," Thomas told her. "America's going to vomit up its own blood."
About a month later—after President Bush had declared that "a line has been drawn in the sand" and conflict might be inevitable—Mrs. Fenneck showed up at my front door. She had sought me out—had researched where I lived via the city directory, then ridden out of the blue to Joy's and my condo and rung the bell. She pointed to her husband, parked at the curb and waiting for her in their blue Dodge Shadow. She identified herself as the librarian who'd called 911.
"Your brother was always neat and clean," she told me. "You can't say that about all of them. But you have to be firm with these people. All day long, day in, day out, the state hospital van just drops them downtown and leaves them. They have nowhere to go, nothing to do. The stores don't want them—business is bad enough, for pity's sake. So they come to the library and sit." Her pale green eyes jerked repeatedly away from my face as she spoke. Thomas and I are identical twins, not fraternal--one fertilized egg that split in half and went off in two directions. Mrs. Fenneck couldn't look at me because she was looking at Thomas.
It was cold, I remember, and I invited her into the foyer, no further. For two weeks I'd been channel-flipping through the Desert Shield updates, swallowing back the anger and guilt my brother's act had left me with, and hanging up in the ears of reporters and TV types—all those bloodsuckers trying to book and bag next week's freak show. I didn't offer to take Mrs. Fenneck's coat. I stood there, arms crossed, fists tucked into my armpits. Whatever this was, I needed it to be over.
She said she wanted me to understand what librarians put up with these days. Once upon a time it had been a pleasant job--she liked people, after all. But now libraries were at the mercy of every derelict and homeless person in the area. People who cared nothing about books or information. People who only wanted to sit and vegetate or run to the toilet every five minutes. And now with AIDS and drugs and such. The other day they'd found a dirty syringe jammed behind the paper towel dispenser in the men's restroom. In her opinion, the whole country was like a chest of drawers that had been pulled out and dumped onto the floor.
I'd answered the door barefoot. My feet were cold. "What do you want?" I asked her. "Why did you come here?"
She'd come, she said, because she hadn't had any appetite or a decent night's sleep since my brother did it. Not that she was responsible, she pointed out. Clearly, Thomas had planned the whole thing in advance and would have done it whether she'd said anything to him or not. A dozen people or more had told her they'd seen him walking around town, muttering about the war with that one fist of his up in the air, as if it was stuck in that position. She'd noticed it herself, it always looked so curious. "He'd come inside and sit all afternoon in the periodical section, arguing with the newspapers," she said. "Then, after a while, he'd quiet down. Just stare out the window and sigh, with his arm bent at the elbow, his hand making that fist. But who'd have taken it for a sign? Who in their right mind would have put two and two together and guessed he was planning to do that?"
No one, I said. None of us had.
Continues...
Excerpted from I Know This Much Is Trueby Wally Lamb Copyright © 2008 by Wally Lamb. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; 1st edition (April 8, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 928 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061469084
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061469084
- Item Weight : 1.42 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 1.48 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #9,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #342 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #394 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #1,091 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Wally Lamb's first two novels, She's Come Undone (Simon & Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I Know This Much Is True (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were # 1 New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah's Book Club. I Know This Much Is True was a Book of the Month Club main selection and the June 1999 featured selection of the Bertelsman Book Club, the national book club of Germany. Between them, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True have been translated into eighteen languages. Lamb is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I'll Fly Away (HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays which evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut's York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer from 1999 to the present. Wally Lamb is a Connecticut native who holds Bachelors and Masters Degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Vermont College. Lamb was in the ninth year of his twenty-five-year career as a high school English teacher at his alma mater, the Norwich Free Academy, when he began to write fiction in 1981. He has also taught writing at the University of Connecticut, where he directed the English Department's creative writing program. Wally Lamb has said of his fiction, “Although my characters' lives don't much resemble my own, what we share is that we are imperfect people seeking to become better people. I write fiction so that I can move beyond the boundaries and limitations of my own experiences and better understand the lives of others. That's also why I teach. As challenging as it sometimes is to balance the two vocations, writing and teaching are, for me, intertwined.” Honors for Wally Lamb include: the Connecticut Center for the Book's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Connecticut Bar Association's Distinguished Public Service Award, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the Connecticut Governor's Arts Award, The National Institute of Business/Apple Computers “Thanks to Teachers” Award. Lamb has received Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. I Know This Much Is True won the Friends of the Library USA Readers' Choice Award for best novel of 1998, the result of a national poll, and the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Book Award, which honored the novel's contribution to the anti-stigmatization of mental illness. She's Come Undone was a 1992 “Top Ten” Book of the Year selection in People magazine and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Novel of 1992. Wally Lamb's third novel, The Hour I First Believed, explores chaos theory by interfacing several generations of a fictional Connecticut family with such nonfictional American events as the Civil War, the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. The book will be published by HarperCollins in November of 2008.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2023
The story grabbed me from the very first pages, in which Thomas lops off his right hand while sitting in a public library. In his idealistic delusion, he felt he was making a public statement about America’s “wicked greed” and that his sacrifice would urge us “to follow a more spiritual course if we were to survive”. He believed also that his sacrifice would prevent the U.S. from entering the Gulf War; as soon as the President learned of this selfless act, he’d of course reconsider going to war.
Dominick had sworn to their mother on her deathbed that he’d look after Thomas and keep him safe. The entire theme of the book tells of his struggles to keep that promise, and how he felt he’d failed so many times, in spite of his gargantuan efforts.
How had Thomas gotten so seriously mentally ill? Was it nature or nurture? Was it because he was a gentle, sensitive child who was terrorized by his abusive stepfather? Was it because their mother never revealed who their real father was? Was it because of the secrets held by Domenico, their maternal grandfather who died before they were born? Or was it because Dominick had learned the art of defense and had often bullied Thomas? [“I was always doing that to him when we were kids: letting him know which of us was smarter, stronger, faster on the draw. Maybe that was why he was acting so wacky these days. Maybe I’d finally made him crack.”] And why hadn’t Dominick succumbed to the same fate … or would he? These are all questions that tormented the adult Dominick and forced him to try harder to protect Thomas. His quest overtook his entire life. But the harder he tried, the worse the results seemed to be ... the faster he ran, the behinder he got.
Dominick’s troubles and obsessions eventually lead him to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Patel, who guided him through his past in order to understand his present situation. As a child, Thomas had the lion’s share of their mother’s attention because, as Dr. Patel pointed out. “And was it that aspect of your brother’s nature, that quality perhaps, that made Thomas easier for your mother to love?” Jealousy over his mother’s love for Thomas had consumed Dominick his whole life.
And then there’s the issue of Grandfather Domenico’s memoirs, which their mother had given Dominick just before she died. She had never read it, as it was written in Italian, but it was obvious that she adored her father. When Dominick had it translated and started reading it, he realized his grandfather was an arrogant, egotistical tyrant – a thoroughly unlikeable man. But the memoir is fascinating reading – sort of a novel-within-a-novel.
So many secrets, such surprising revelations, such fascinating intertwined relationships make for a really great book. I promise you, those 900 pages will fly by faster than you ever imagined. I know this much is true.
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in Brazil on June 16, 2022
I was only annoyed by the many spelling errors in the italian words of the grandfather but there are too many to be an accident, I believe Wally Lamb mispelt the words on purpose as if they had been badly written by the american translator hired by the main character.
All in all a very intriguing, moving novel, to be recommended...