[0MH]⇒ Read Free When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth Fernanda Eberstadt 9780679445142 Books

When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth Fernanda Eberstadt 9780679445142 Books

Download As PDF : When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth Fernanda Eberstadt 9780679445142 Books

When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth Fernanda Eberstadt 9780679445142 Books

I discovered this book at least a decade ago. Wanting to re-read it, I found it on Amazon.
Fernanda Eberstadt is a very, very competent writer. This novel continues the story of Isaac, a brilliant young artist from rural NH, now breaking into the New York contemporary art scene. While this in itself is quite compelling, (an amazing fact in itself, since so many books with this "plot" are either bordering on the obscene, indecipherable in their jargon, or just plain boring) it is, again, Eberstadt's characterizations that are so unforgettable. Isaac in particular is wonderful, but even the "shallow" characters are, within their own shallowness, sensitively drawn, with true understanding. I believe in her characters. They are true. One comes away from this book with more appreciation of life, of other humans, of the fuzz on a peach, even of pubescent boys. I am a reader who is very, very fussy, and will reject 999 books out of a thousand. Eberstadt is a fine crafter of literature. She is good enough that I tracked this book down again after ten years. I'm now delving, deliciously, into her others.


Tags : When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth [Fernanda Eberstadt] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. From the author of Low Tide and His Devils comes a brilliant novel about the high-flying New York art world of the late 1980s. When a brash young artist enters the lives of a couple of well-to-do patrons of the arts,Fernanda Eberstadt,When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth,Knopf,0679445145,Charitable uses, trusts, and foundations;Fiction.,New York (N.Y.);Social life and customs;Fiction.,Painters;Fiction.,Charitable uses, trusts, and foundations,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction General,General,General & Literary Fiction,Modern fiction,Painters,Popular American Fiction,Charitable uses, trusts, and f,New York (N.Y.),Social life and customs

When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth Fernanda Eberstadt 9780679445142 Books Reviews

Fernanda Eberstadt has the democratic eye of a satirist (everyone is fair game), but in The Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, she's also mainly large-hearted toward her many characters, even as she mocks them for their illusions and fits of pique. The novel's title is also a paraphrase of its story. The son of Heaven is Isaac Hooker, a Harvard wunderkind from small-town New Hampshire who metamorphoses into a visionary painter, a William Blake of the Hell's Kitchen district of Manhattan. And the daughter of the Earth is Dolly Gebler, a soulful New York patron of the arts. One of the hard-working rich, she comes from Old Money and keeps to a punishing schedule of good works (committee meetings in the mornings, gallery openings at night), all in the service of her conviction that art can change the world. But at home she lives uneasily with her husband Alfred, their three children, and an assortment of maids in a shabbily grand apartment overlooking the Hudson.

Dolly gets testy with Isaac and begins to drop in at his loft with picnics. (The first hamper contains enough food to last him a week a side of smoked salmon, a loaf of black bread, a wheel of Brie.) And when Isaac needs a live model--"a buxom one," for the shepherdess in his paintings, the reader can't help but be struck by how well the stout but voluptuous Dolly fits the job description. But how can their love affair happen? They live in different worlds and come from almost different generations and they are bashful.

Isaac is in the habit of walking to Central Park in order to draw oak and plane trees as they emerge "from the heavy grey shadow of dawn--like the way you see cows sometimes looming in a field in the morning dark--surprised, comfortable." He's teaching himself to draw, "moving from scratchy, crabbed, overworked, to loose and fluid as a skater's glide." When Dolly asks him if he's drawing from nature, he says he is, but that it's "nature, New York City-style. Rats posing as sheep and crack dealers as shepherdesses. I go to Central Park weekend mornings, up by the Ramble where it's wild."

Dolly tells him that Central Park is where she goes, too--for her early morning walks, and she is soon making a detour up to the Ramble to find Isaac scribbling under a tree, so cold that even his pencil's got "chilblains." They go off to a cafe called The Nectar for pancakes and coffee. And so begins their doomed romance, more intriguing by far than the more hackneyed affair Alfred is conducting with a young painter who teaches art to women prisoners on Rikers Island. But then Dolly and Isaac are idealists, while Alfred is a realist who believes that a society must choose between freedom and equality, and that to subscribe to the French Revolution's ideal of "liberty, equality, fraternity" is as idiotic as saying that water should be, all at the same time, "hot, cold, lukewarm".

The Geblers own a farm on Long Island (Goose Neck Farm), and Dolly instals Isaac in this rural idyll in early spring, before her family makes its summer trek to the country. As he commandeers the children's icy playroom, he feels he's in paradise, his solitude a "blessed conjunction of space, light, air, birds, trees. He doesn't even feel chilly; the physical exercise of painting--"the pugilistic pounce, thrust, dance of it"--keeps him warm all day.

The best parts of this book are the descriptions of paintings and painting, of landscape, both urban and rural, and of the rural within the urban (the Ramble and the Sheep Meadow in Central Park). Eberstadt can also be wonderfully scathing about the silliness of much of the New York art scene and she does a brilliant spoof of contemporary art criticism when she describes Isaac reading a review of his first one-man show "The primal encounter in Hooker's Old Testament narratives, with their smeared and saturated iconography of transgression and redemption is that of the post-exilic urbanite grappling toward a Hegelian metatextuality, objectifying the dialogic tension between exile and the possibility of eternal recall while the seductiveness of his notched, crotchety surfaces never altogether eliminates the underlying reminder that the radical manufacture of our "humanness" demands a certain decorative distancing--decor as decorum." ("Man,"says Isaac's friend, Casey, "I think this Spicer wants to get his hot little paws on your seductively notched crotch, guy, and maybe even--how does he put it?--do a little fancy transgression. Hey, this is a rave review, Hooker.")

When a novel of ideas is as lively as this novel is, it's easy to forgive it its flaws, the chief one being Eberstadt's tendency to alter the form of address for her characters. Within a single chapter (and sometimes even on a single page) Dolly is "Mrs. Gebler", "Dolly Gebler", and "Dolly". Alfred suffers a similar fate. Eberstadt also occasionally too exactly reproduces the hesitancies of daily speech. Apart from these minor glitches, the book is amiable, untidy, bright and vital, and since it is, after all, a satire, it quite naturally lacks the narrative power of a tragedy. Only Dolly has an aura of the tragic about her, since only Dolly has fallen utterly and needfully in love.
To enter another person's world, to see things as they see them, to allow for different reactions to similar circumstances is to connect with people in a powerful way. Such empathy, compassion, and insight are essential for succeeding with the Genuine Selling system and to living a fulfilling life of Genuine Success. Listening to the stories of people in circumstances different from your own is entertaining exercise that develops this important skill. This is one of three novels (When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, Spidertown, and Ellen Foster) that I recommend to my clients for their unusually intimate and immersive experiences of worlds most business people never encounter. The practice these novels offer with escaping our own narrow versions of reality can help us to be more receptive to the various worlds of the people we manage and sell to every day.
Ms. Eberstadt continues the story of an extraordinarily talented and tormented young man, be! gun in Isaac and His Devils (out-of-print), with his impact on the New York art scene in When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth. The book introduces us to a wide cast of realistically drawn characters who intereact in a believable and compelling manner while moving in moneyed and stylish circles open to very few.
I am  pleased if a novel provides me with insight into one type of person. I am thrilled that When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth took me deeply into the heads of three people Alfred, the man who married so much money he never learned what he might have made of himself; Dolly, the heiress who loved the art milieu more than she cared about art; and Isaac, the brilliant artist whose personality and creations forced  their compromises to the breaking point.
Woven through the plot and evocation of place is intelligent writing about how art looks to its creators and appreciators. I had always thought of art in verbal terms, but ! Ms. Eberstadt uses words to evoke the visual and emotional ! experience of creating a painting or sculpture.  It is like nothing else I have read and gave me a whole new appreciation for the visual mediums, yet another new world for me.
I discovered this book at least a decade ago. Wanting to re-read it, I found it on .
Fernanda Eberstadt is a very, very competent writer. This novel continues the story of Isaac, a brilliant young artist from rural NH, now breaking into the New York contemporary art scene. While this in itself is quite compelling, (an amazing fact in itself, since so many books with this "plot" are either bordering on the obscene, indecipherable in their jargon, or just plain boring) it is, again, Eberstadt's characterizations that are so unforgettable. Isaac in particular is wonderful, but even the "shallow" characters are, within their own shallowness, sensitively drawn, with true understanding. I believe in her characters. They are true. One comes away from this book with more appreciation of life, of other humans, of the fuzz on a peach, even of pubescent boys. I am a reader who is very, very fussy, and will reject 999 books out of a thousand. Eberstadt is a fine crafter of literature. She is good enough that I tracked this book down again after ten years. I'm now delving, deliciously, into her others.