My love of family novels

Do you ever read a book that then gets you so excited about the prospect of writing your own book one day that you have to set this bound object down, admire its spine, and curb the fluttering of your heart?

That’s how I feel whenever I read an epic piece of literature. And by that I mean, a large novel, one that requires absolute patience and perseverance. It doesn’t hook you in right away. In fact, it may move too slowly for your taste, and it does so on purpose. But then one day, you’re absorbed by the context only a massive book can grant. 

All my favorite novels are usually family novels in some way. They are just long enough to deter the right reader, then become a secret place for only those who are willing to endure the stage-setting required for a drawn out story.

It’s funny though. I either love short stories or long novels. Most works in-between just don’t sit right with me. Of course, some do. But I either want a story I can sink my teeth into or something totally snack-able. 

I think what I admire about enormous books is first of all the enormity, of course, but the depth they can offer. I love the drawn out discussions, the superfluous. That backstory is absolutely essential to me. I love it how gives me time to form new opinions about characters, make assumptions, then realize I was wrong all along. Large novels reflect life in that way. Short stories reflect the fleeting interactions we have, and big novels—700-pagers or more usually—are a definition of our more permanent relationships.

Family novels have always been for me because I love and cherish family. Friendship is interesting and self-selected, but I like that a family is bound to you, mess and all. Suddenly people are forced to accept the wicked and the good, side-by-side, all because of shared blood. So simple, so arbitrary if you think too hard about it. But isn’t that what makes people most interesting? When we find ourselves making a faulty excuse for someone who shares our genealogy, simply because deep down to share our DNA is to share ourselves. A family is an organism, a macrocosm of ourselves. There is a mess within it, and some messes are worse than others. But for the sake of self-preservation, we find ourselves talking around it, forgiving it even when we shouldn’t, but most of all trying over and over to understand it. 

Is it not that different from how we think about ourselves as individuals? I am made up of many flaws, and I will always first try to defend and excuse myself because I am my own family. And then I will carry that out one day to my brother, my mother, my father. And then what makes it all the more interesting is that one day you meet a stranger and have children of your own, and while you two are not from the same genetic history, you’re in the midst of making one together. So the web is always, always expanding, but always limited to your little neighborhood of each-otherness. 

I think that’s why I love a family novel. It’s emblematic of that shared history. It’s a tomb of what it means to feel in all complexity the range of human emotions for those we are bound to love without choice. But most of all, it reminds me a little of the family history I may tell my own children one day.

I’m not sure who reads this corner of my blog anymore, and I’m delighted that I don’t care. It’s nice to journal here, talk to myself, and share what I love and think. Even if sometimes I feel like I’m still that rambling teenager who hopes one day people will pour through my journals to wonder what I thought about what. Is it really all that interesting? I’m not sure. But if you’re still here, the book that started this thought was A True Novel by Minae Mizumura. I am completely dazzled by it. It’s a Japanese adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and yet it’s also its own entity. I have found so many international gems in the past decade or so that my English degree hardly ever addressed. Another that comes to mind is Chronicle of the Murdered House by Lucio Cardoso, a family novel that reminds me of a Dostoevsky novel written in Brazil. It just goes to show how around the world everywhere, people are writing their own magnificent family epics, and all they need is a translator and admirer of words to make it so.