Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Unavailable
The Hundred-Year House: A Novel
Unavailable
The Hundred-Year House: A Novel
Unavailable
The Hundred-Year House: A Novel
Audiobook8 hours

The Hundred-Year House: A Novel

Written by Rebecca Makkai

Narrated by Jen Tullock

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

The acclaimed author of The Borrower returns with a dazzlingly original, mordantly witty novel about the secrets of an old-money family and their turn-of-the-century estate, Laurelfield.

"Rebecca Makkai is a writer to watch, as sneakily ambitious as she is unpretentious."
Richard Russo
 
Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents' wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there's Violet Devohr, Zee's great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room.

Violet's portrait was known to terrify the artists who resided at the house from the 1920s to the 1950s, when it served as the Laurelfield Arts Colony—and this is exactly the period Zee's husband, Doug, is interested in. An out-of-work academic whose only hope of a future position is securing a book deal, Doug is stalled on his biography of the poet Edwin Parfitt, once in residence at the colony. All he needs to get the book back on track—besides some motivation and self-esteem—is access to the colony records, rotting away in the attic for decades. But when Doug begins to poke around where he shouldn't, he finds Gracie guards the files with a strange ferocity, raising questions about what she might be hiding. The secrets of the hundred-year house would turn everything Doug and Zee think they know about her family on its head—that is, if they were to ever uncover them.

In this brilliantly conceived, ambitious, and deeply rewarding novel, Rebecca Makkai unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 10, 2014
ISBN9780698162358
Unavailable
The Hundred-Year House: A Novel

Related to The Hundred-Year House

Related audiobooks

Historical Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for The Hundred-Year House

Rating: 3.5454545454545454 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

165 ratings29 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Everything fits together in this story told in reverse chronology. That is once you get to the beginning of the story.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    parts of this book were funny and interesting, but mostly i just didnt care what happened and stopped reading it about half way through.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    If you like puzzles, mysteries and such this book might appeal to you. It really takes two read-throughs to catch all the parts necessary to put together who did what when. You will either love this book or hate it. Our book group predominantly did not like it, but there were others who "loved" the book. Being the leader of this particular book club discussion I did read it through twice and caught all the pieces that I missed the first time through. I haven't read her other books so I cannot say anything about how it compares with her other works, though I have heard most people who read both much prefer her other work "The Borrowers." The problem I found with this book is that I couldn't find a character to attune with.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Strengths: Good prose. Great satire of academia in the first section.Weaknesses: Too long. The ending sections are info dumpy.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Absolutely fascinating novel. A lot of wonderful characters, spanning a century of this mansion and it's environ's happenings. I was spellbound, throughout.
    Audiobook narrated by Jen Tullock.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    THE HUNDRED YEAR HOUSE by Rebecca MakkaiI made it through 150 pages before deciding I didn’t really care about these people and their foibles and meandering progress through what passed for life. A failed writer, a failed artist, a failed mother, a failed son – who cares. The writing is lovely, the story failed.3 of 3 stars
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This had a very unusual structure that made for interesting reading and added an extra air of mystery. The first part took place in 1999, the next sections 1955, 1929 and 1900. The whole story centers around an old house that became an artist's colony and the family that owns it and you gradually unravel the stories as you read the book. I found it well worth reading.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Rebecca Makkai is teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop this year, and she was at the Iowa City Book Festival (although I didn't get to see her). So this novel was featured prominently at Prairie Lights and found my way into her stack. I expected a good read, focusing on a 100 year old house at four different points in its history. But this book far exceeded my expectations. The book begins in 1999 as Zee, a young English professor, and her husband, an unemployed academic who is working on a book about poet Edwin Parfitt, find themselves living in the carriage house of her parent's estate. The estate was once an artist's colony where Parfitt stayed in the late 1920s. But Zee's family has secrets of their own, which are gradually revealed during this first section of the book. But the house does not give up all of its secrets in this first section. Through three flashbacks, we learn more about what happened in this house that is filled with ghosts and secrets. The story is intricately layered. I can definitely see this one benefiting from a re-read, if only to try to figure out how Makkai created this complex story. Makkai is also a beautiful reader, bringing me up short with her sentences. Highly recommended!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a weird read. I like multi-generational family sagas (and thought that going backwards chronologically was a great choice for this one), and I liked the basic brushstrokes of the story, especially how a lot of little details got wrapped up in way that felt very natural to the story ... but there were some fairly significant plot points that seemed too out of left field, too over the top, that left me mostly blank. And I never really bought into the idea of the house as a character -- or maybe I did, but didn't believe the house was that invested in what it was used for. Overall, I'm glad I stuck it out, because it was the kind of the book that got more rewarding toward the very end.The specific things that didn't pass for me, because I'll forget them later:The crazy Zee behavior, with framing her colleague and then getting riled up about how he is treated, this was like a farce and didn't feel grounded in the same world as the rest of the bookThe whole gay blackmail thing seems like the weirdest thing ever, it struck me as a misread of today's perception of the values of the time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    If you like ambiguity and uncertainty, this is the book for you. The author intricately plotted to keep themes, clues, and even people running through the time periods. It is quite an admirably plotted effort. But from my standpoint I prefer things to be reasonably clear by a book's end, and that certainly wasn't the case. Even the question of who was Gracie (1999) is subject to interpretation. I kept reading into the past sections (1955, 1929, and 1900) to clarify what was going on around this old mansion, but wasn't satisfied. I considered the first, largest section (1999) the most readable, with some quirky characters and interesting and sometimes amusing situations. I expect I would get more out of the book if I read it a second time, but once was enough for me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    On page four of the copy I read, there's a typo: A character "agreed to returned." Not a huge thing, and I expect a certain number of editorial misses, but with it on page four, I was nervous that I was in for a lot more of the same.

    "It's stochastic," my spouse insisted. "It could be on page four or it could be on page 224." I knew he just likes using the word "stochastic" and isn't really invested in whether I finish a book or not, but still, I swallowed my misgivings and read on.

    I am so glad I swallowed those misgivings. Not only did I not notice any other typos, the book was awesome. The reverse chronology worked incredibly well, including the part near the end where Makkai broke out of the time period she was in to give us a glimpse of how one event looked throughout the years. I loved seeing the outcome and then peeling back the layers to see what led to that outcome. It was maddening to see people's mistakes happen over and over again, to see how much they missed because they were so tied up in their own lives, and to see how much responsibility they relinquished, blaming their choices on the house or the ghost(s) or their circumstances, anyone but themselves.

    It's a book about secrets, both intentional secrets and those that are just hidden by time and our own refusal to really see what's around us. It's also a book about transformation, about recognizing who we are and making the decision to be someone else. It's about freedom both from the prisons made for us and from those we've made for ourselves. And it also seems to be about how isolated we are and all of our clumsy attempts to break through and understand one another, and how much we miss and misunderstand from our limited viewpoints.

    This review is oblique, but I'm nervous about writing anything detailed. Makkai makes so many small and large revelations as she takes us back in time, and I want to avoid spoiling that process. So I'll just say that---once I got past page four---I could hardly put this book down and when I closed the back cover, I had to stop myself from turning the book over and starting again because it was after 11pm and my kids wake up early no matter how late I go to bed. As someone devoted to, at least to an extent, reinventing myself every three or four years but always feeling like I've not gone far enough, like I've carried too much along with me that I should have jettisoned, this book really spoke to me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The structure of the book is very interesting because the story is told backwards. You start with the current generation in the house and then move backwards in time through the preceding 100 years. As you read, certain things the characters say and do puzzle you until you see how it relates to the generation that lived there previously. At first I love the book. I was completely hooked into the current family living there and consumed by the mystery of what was hidden in the attic. It is the first family that comprises the bulk of the book. After that you learn less and less about the other generations and consequently my level of caring dropped too. By the end of the book the connections to the story are weaker and I found that I had to force myself to finish. I think the clue to went wrong is in the author's own notes where she says that she set out to write a book about anorexia and doesn't know what the hell happened. By the end I didn't know what the hell was happening either. It just seemed strange to have the book start so strongly only to have it disintegrate the end. By the time the last generation of Violet and her husband showed up in 1900's I had no idea what their contribution to the story was even about. It's a shame because I was really looking forward to reading this book. This was a great concept but the actually execution of the novel was somewhat disappointing.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you liked Makkai's first novel, The Borrower, you may like this one, or you may not, because this a wildly different kind of book. I loved both, because Makkai has a talent for creating living, nuanced characters that the reader cares about.The titular house is the Illinois residence of a wealthy Canadian family, for many years dedicated as an artists' colony. We meet the house - once again a private residence in 1999 - and we learn that the family matriarch stubbornly resists those who dig into the past. Fortunately for the reader, the narrative digs into the past, as the tale of the house is told backwards. Each part of the book is almost a self-contained novella. The first part of the book is very funny, the second quite harrowing, the third quite sad. My only reservation about the structure is that I was reluctant to leave behind characters that I cared about as the story moved back in time.The book works as a sensitive character study of artists, as a witty satire on academia, and as a carefully structured, clever mystery. The structure was not gimicky at all, and while it did require the reader to pay some attention, it was not unduly complicated or convoluted.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked this quite a bit. It ran out of steam a little toward the last quarter or so, but I enjoyed the puzzle it set up, which was pretty complex, and it was fun to figure out where all the loose ends tied up. I thought she did a good job of that, including leaving some bits hanging in a good, tantalizing way.But there was one sentence that's driving me nuts, a total throw-away, but if it's intentional then it completely changes the rest of the story. And if it's not, it's sloppy. I'm hiding it because it's a SUPER spoiler, but anyone who's read the book, please tell me what you think:There's a sentence at the very beginning, in the first few pages: "The wallpaper on his computer (Zee had set it up) was the famous photo of Parfitt kissing Edna St. Vincent Millay on the cheek." Wouldn't Zee have recognized her father/Max/Parfitt? Even as a young man? Because if she knew what the connection was from the start, that would really change the tenor of the whole book.I kind of liked the fact that none of the characters was totally likeable (except maybe Max), so you couldn't exactly root for anyone. That strengthened the whole weird story for me. Anyway, it was a fun ride altogether, not like anything else I've read in a long time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The past is a common theme or authors, perhaps influenced by the last line in The Great Gatsby, or Faulkner's bon mot, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In The Hundred-Year House, author Rebecca Makkai takes things a step further to ponder just what is real and what isn't in the past and does so in a very intriguing way.Told in backwards order, Makkai looks at the history of a wealthy family living in their grand old house in the north shore suburbs of Chicago which until 1855 was the Laurelfield Arts Colony. The first half of the book, which could be read as a novella on its own, is set at the turn of the Millennium. Zee, a Marxist literary scholar has returned to her family home with her husband Doug, a somewhat dithering doctoral candidate, for financial reasons. Gracie, her mother, is a flight socialite and Bruce, her stepfather, is busy stockpiling essentials in order to survive the Y2K catastrophe he is sure is going to occur at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999. Shortly after Zee's arrival they are joined by Bruce's son Case, an out-of-work financial analyst and his wife Miriam, who is an artist who makes collages out of found materials. And floating over all is the ghost of Violet Devohr, Zee's great-grandmother who killed herself in the attic of the house.Zee, teaching "ghost story literature" at a local college, schemes by any means necessary to get Doug a tenure track job at the local college. Doug meanwhile is supposed to be writing his publishable thesis on Edwin Parfitt, a poet who coincidentally was once an artist in residence at Laurelfield. However, he is sidetracked when he gets a lucrative job churning out Sweet Valley High-like teenage novels, and also discovers that that he is more than a little attracted to Miriam. He is also trying to get to the Laurelfield archives stores in the attic, convinced that it will hold the key to writing a successful, possibly best selling, book on Parfitt. At this last endeavor, however, he is constantly thwarted by Gracie, leading everything to come to a head on New Year's Eve. If this was all there was to the book, it would be a charming little book of manners, but things get a lot more complicated in the second half of the book as Makkai takes us back in time, first to 1955 as the house once more becomes a family home, then to its artist colony days in 1929 and finally to 1900 as the house is just being built. As the story unfolds backwards the secrets of the house and its occupants are revealed. Nothing is what you thought it was going to be. Instead it's a lot more interesting.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    parts of this book were funny and interesting, but mostly i just didnt care what happened and stopped reading it about half way through.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An inventive twist on a story line kept me reading. But the last 2 sections were not compelling at all. The section with the "artists" was chaotic and uninteresting.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I won this arc from goodreads. I loved this book and the reverse writing style. 4 1/2 stars., At the end of this book I'm still confused about who Zees father truly was. Help!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There are so many fun, bizarre moments in this book, and it's beautifully written, but it never came together as a cohesive whole for me. (Also, it teased my desire for a book that inverts and deconstructs the typical Novel About Academia/White Male Professor Considers Infidelity With A Student storyline -- and though I admit that I liked how that storyline unfolded instead, I still want to read that book.)
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Count it as the universe's cruelest irony that the ghosts, who alone could piece a whole story together, are uniquely unable to tell it." - page 320This is what happens when 19th-century Gothic novel characters meet up with quirky Salinger type characters. Much like in Jane Austen's 'Northanger Abbey', what the characters read seems to influence their perception on the people and places around them. Most of the characters here love literature, are reading these types of books and you can see many books that may have had an influence on Makkai. Even before the book mentioned them, I was thinking this one reminded me of Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting of Hill House' along with Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca'. The characters of all three books seem to slowly unravel under the influence of their surroundings. Makkai's novel is separated into four sections that travel backward through time starting with 1999. The book revolves around an Illinois mansion built at the beginning of the century. The mansion's tragic past helped it to become an artist colony. While a husband wants to research the history of the artist colony, as he is writing a biography on a poet that had stayed there, it seems that his wife is slowly unraveling. The wife has a connection to that mansion. The next section involves a tragic 'Wuthering Heights' type couple in the 1950s, and the next section spends time with the artist colony in the 1920s. The final section sees a quick glimpse of the couple that built the mansion, though I would have liked to read more here, this section fit. Other than the theories of the people who stay at the mansion, it isn't directly implied that there certainly are ghosts. Sometimes the myth becomes bigger than the reality "...not a haunted house, a haunting house." (page 124)The book is a quick read, it seemed a bit too quick at times, not enough time to really connect with the characters of each section, see what happened to whom. It might be the fault of my own not-close-enough reading, but there was some minor loose ends that I was curious about: things that the narrative didn't address or implied but didn't confirm. Maybe I would have gotten those things if the novel moved forward in time, but I like the set up this way anyway. The book also reminded me for different reasons of 'Night Film' by Marisha Pessl, 'The Quickening Maze' by Adam Foulds and 'East Is East' by T.C. Boyle. I'm looking forward to Makkai's 'The Borrower' that has been on my shelf long before this one!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I feel a little guilty about rating this book so poorly as I think that some readers will really like it. The novel takes place over 100 hundreds years dealing with people who lived in a large mansion during several different periods. This is generally a mystery in which the people living there in the most recent era try to discover what happened during earlier times there. My problem is primarily that the characters did not engage me enough that I even cared what happened to them. I guess what I am saying is that I was totally apathetic about the people portrayed in this book no matter what the era.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was pleased to receive an advance copy of The Hundred-Year House. The book was well-written, but the reverse chronology didn't work for me. I would get absorbed in the plot of each time period, and I found it difficult to make the transition to a previous time period. It took me a long time to adjust to the new characters, so I wasn't fully appreciating the section I was reading.There were some clever plot twists, but the main characters were difficult to like. Unlike many other reviewers, I could easily have put the book down without finishing it. I usually fly through books with short chapters like this one, but that was not the case with this somewhat depressing book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    3.5 This was a very slow starter for me, but there was just enough intrigue and strange occurrences happening to keep one reading. The book starts in the present, in 1999 just before the supposed Y2K. Two couple re living in the coach house and Grace and he hubby live in the house shepherded from her mother. At one time an artist's colony the house has seen many deaths of those that have stayed there.This novel does in fact go backwards, though the first part in the present is the longest, almost 50%. This is a book that needs to be taken in slowly, paying close attention, because as the novel goes back in time so answers are provided, some secrets revealed. We follow the author to the nineteen fifties, where a young marred Grace is living a most unhappy life. This was my favorite section. Then even further back to when the house was the artist's colony, more answers, more secrets and finally to 1900, when the house is first being built and we meet Violet, she I one who is said to haunt the house.This s a beautifully crafted work, characters of which some you will love and some you will hate but they are fully realized and relatable characters. Not your normal haunted house story but one that begs an answer to the questions, "Is it the house that is haunted or are the people who stay there haunted themselves? I loved the slow unveiling of the novel, the ah-ha moments when an answer rom a previous time period s revealed. I also liked that some of the answers given are open to our own interpretation, that she trusted the reader enough to put some of the pieces together for themselves. ARC from NetGalley.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was a big fan of the Borrower, so I was delighted to receive an advanced copy of her new book. This is a very different book. Front and center is the house (Laurelfield). The book takes us from 1999 back to the beginning when the house was built. Back is the key word here. The reader meets the Devohr family in 1999 and finds them to be a rich and quirky group, each one with problems that are exacerbated by the proximity of life in the house. The history, that has come before in this place begins to unravel, as do the inhabitants. From the events in 1999, the reader drops back to 1955 to review the house and family in 1955. Aha, we say, now we see. But wait there is more, back in 1929, it started there. Finally, in 1900 where the book ends and Laurelfield began. For many years, crucial to the story, an artist's colony called house and grounds home. Their history is interwoven with the family's story. The layers of the story that tie it all together are subtle, natural and at some points spooky. There is poetry, and I wish their had been more. The characters are very well done and of course the house and grounds that over shadow all, make the reader long for a field trip to view this place which has become so vivid in our minds. I hope Ms Makkai keeps giving us such unique and enjoyable novels for a very long time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Intriguing story, sometimes hard to follow.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I didn't realize until I looked at the author's page on Goodreads that I read her previous book... and didn't like it much, as I recall. I enjoyed this one, though.

    A lot of people seem to not like the backward chronological order, but I thought it was a neat way of telling the story. A lot of things that feel significant as you go through the book turn out to originate earlier in history, which I found very effective. I particularly liked the 1929 section of the book, when the artists are all in residence, and the way they band together has an echo in the 1999 section when Doug, Miriam, and Leland team up in much the same way. The big secret wasn't particularly difficult to anticipate, but it was still rewarding when it was finally revealed.

    Mostly, though, I just liked getting lost for a while in the setting and the writing, and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in old houses, artists' colonies in the early 20th century, or academic settings.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Earlier this year, I discovered Rebecca Makkai through her debut novel, The Borrower. That book became a favorite of mine for many reasons. With The Hundred-Year House, I knew I was in for another great reading experience, though I wasn't ready to encounter such a change from Makkai's first book. On top of that, this book is split up into a few sections. Each section has it's own style, characters, and time period to convey to the reader. This all, for me, shows how diverse a writer Makkai is and it's refreshing when many writers find one style and they stick to it (which isn't a bad thing, but changing it up is always welcomed when it can be accomplished so well.)

    As I mentioned, this book is set up in a few "parts" (three parts and a short prologue). This isn't uncommon, though, the story takes place over 100 years and each new section brings the story back in time. The fact that this story is told by going back in time was interesting to me and I wasn't sure how it'd work for me. It took a bit for me to see what the author was doing with that format, and it was definitely the right choice. It was a unique way to reveal the big picture and the missing pieces in the puzzle.

    There's a lot going on in the book that it'd be hard to pick it all apart here, and I'd rather leave it for the readers to discover on their own anyway. This book is filled with intriguing characters, many intersecting lives across generations, and some mystery that's only revealed through this journey back in time. And the characters aren't just the humans. The house, and the Laurelfield estate, itself has as much a role as a character as it does as a place for this story to take place. The bleeding together of Doug and Zee's struggles, into Grace's marriage issues, then the telling of a period when Laurelfield was an artist's colony before all of that, makes this story stand out to me as a complex but rewarding read that'll be one of few for me to go back and reread. With the knowledge I have after finishing, I'm eager to see what I pick up on from what came before it.

    Makkai’s books will be on the top of my reading list from now on. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Zee, a literature professor and her writer husband take up residence in her family home, which was once an arts colony and harbors decades of secrets.

    The structure of Makkai’s new novel is wonderfully different and builds tension without the process feeling like a chore. Though I was impressed by the backward narrative, I almost wished less time was spent with the initial characters, as I felt much more invested in their story than the pieces of history that were revealed afterword.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    My dearest Laurelfield,Your tale started out as a short story about male anorexia. The author have no idea what the hell happened next, and neither do I, sorry to say !The first woman, Violet Saville Devohr, to step over your threshold, understood the meaning of doors when she said to her husband: “You may shut me in, but I can shut you out. There are two sides to every door, Augustus.” And then she proceeded to commit suicide by her own rules. She defined the rest of your story as a painting hanging over your mantelpiece, being a constant reminder of what you had to witness and endure.[First paragraph of the book: "FOR A GHOST story, the tale of Violet Saville Devohr was vague and underwhelming. She had lived, she was unhappy, and she died by her own hand somewhere in that vast house. If the house hadn’t been a mansion, if the death hadn’t been a suicide, if Violet Devohr’s dark, refined beauty hadn’t smoldered down from that massive oil portrait, it wouldn’t have been a ghost story at all. Beauty and wealth, it seems, get you as far in the afterlife as they do here on earth. We can’t all afford to be ghosts. ]Built in 1900, you experienced some tumultuous moments through four significant time periods: 1999, 1955, 1929, 1900 - and lived to tell the tale of pride, vanity, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, sloth and covetousness. A side-tale of opportunism, violence, abuse, extortion, and scavenging completed your sad tale.You were firstly a house with a name - Laurelfield. Secondly,you were a mansions with a gatehouse and infamous wealth providing the status behind you. But oh dear, thirdly, the inhabitants, not you, were infested with insanity, greed, bad blood and bad luck. You had so many doors: some wide open, some formidably closed. Your windows were big and welcoming. Anyone could enjoy a view, from the inside out, or outside in.Like our pets, you reflected the personalities of the artists gracing your rooms for twenty-five years, and they had the audacity to blame you for everything happening to them. Yes, they even blamed the ghost of Violet for their misdemeanors, mishaps and bad blood.["Violet, Violet, dragged here against her will. Was that the magnetic force behind her haunting? She was pulled, and so she pulled others. Toward ruin, toward redemption, toward love, away from it. Why? Because she could. ]Some people blame God for their louzy lives, but these lot were either agnostic or atheistic, or too self-absorbed for that. They call themselves artists, I beg you! A character in the movie As Good As It Gets accused another of "being a disgrace to depression" Really, they were that and even more. They were a disgrace to art!If I were you, I would have spooked these conniving, plotting moochers and high-class squatters out. Got Violet to move the furniture around in broad daylight, when ghosts were not suppose to be active and have them running away by the speed of lightning!But you endured. Even when your tale was told backwards, too many characters killed the story, and cliffhanger moments threw your history into confusing chaos. Goodness me, Laurelfield, were you ever able to figure our who was whom in the end? Who sired Grace, and who was Zee really? Who really died, and who is really alive?For crying out loud, I couldn't. I almost succumbed to some of the characters' insanity!They were all con-artists! Yes, thinly veneered and slightly educated: you know, academically distinguished, mentally challenged, but emotionally arrested![Zilla, yes, one of the multitude of personalities got it right though: "Zilla realizes something, and it takes her a minute to wrap herself around the idea. She’s always thought of Laurelfield as a magnet, drawing her back again and again. But that’s just it: A magnet pulls you toward the future. Objects are normally products of their pasts, their composition and inertia. But near a magnet, they are moved by where they’ll be in the next instant. And this, this, is the core of the strange vertigo she feels near Laurelfield. This is a place where people aren’t so much haunted by their pasts as they are unknowingly hurtled toward specific and inexorable destinations. And perhaps it feels like haunting. But it’s a pull, not a push." ]And this is where I love and leave you, dear Laurelfield. You are the only thing I fell in love with in the end! You were so worth it!_____________________________________BOOK BLURB FROM THE BOOK:In this brilliantly conceived, ambitious, and deeply rewarding novel, Rebecca Makkai unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.______________________________________COMMENTS:There is an expression in Netherlands 'Met de deur in huis vallen', in German 'mit der Tür ins Haus fallen', in Afrikaans'met die deur in die huis val' - which, translated directly, means 'falling into the house with the door'. And that is what I want to do with this house ... mmm... review: getting directly to the point. No beating around the bush.So here it is: This book annoyed the living daylights out of me.But wait! Before your heart drops to the floor, catch it for a second, and if you later feel like dropping it anyway, be my (as well as Laurelfield's) guest! But not now. Not yet!Narrative: Brilliant!Language: Brilliant!Characterization: Brilliant! Sadly, way too many characters and none of them lovable.Theme: Mmmmm......messy but a great idea;Plot: Confusing - too many sub plots;How the plot, characters and setting relate to reality: Excellent.Entertaining Outstanding!Detail: Outstanding!HOWEVER: I did feel the last two periods, 1929, 1900 - messy and chaotic, were more a form of information-dumping, to enhance the plot. It was as though the story lacked validation and needed this information to make sense, but it did not initially fitted into the main story in the first period, 1999. It was therefore added as an urgent, yet messy, after-thought. Did not work for me. The inverted chronology might define this book, as is evident from all the attention it receives, but I did not like it. Neither did I appreciate the end landing in the middle of the book.Conclusion By golly! What a captivating unbelievably suspenseful read! The story caught me from the get-go and had me reading non-stop until the end. I did want to end it all into the second half, though but kept going. Optimism and hope it is called.I won't pursue another book written in this style, though. It was just too confusing. For a club read: excellent! I do consider reading the book again to understand its deeper nuances and hidden plots better. I want to.Was it worth my time? Yes. The prose was outstanding. I will read the author again. She's good with words.The book was provided by Viking Press through Netgalley. Thank you for this great opportunity.