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Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence," Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood. Lucy's story encompasses everything from the tragic death of a Confederate boy soldier to the feisty narrator's daily battles in the Home--complete with visits from a mohawk-coiffed candy striper. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is a marvel of narrative showmanship and proof that brilliant, emotional storytelling remains at the heart of great fiction.… (more)
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Substance: First-person pseudo-memoir cum interview of nonagenarian widow of last living Confederate veteran (having married the 50+ bachelor at age 15). Gurganus tries to emulate a crusty, humorous old woman, but I didn't feel persuaded.
Overall, probably not a bad book, but I just ran out of patience.
Through Lucy we learn how the Capt. enlisted in the Confederate Army at the age of 13 and some of the traumatic experiences that shaped the strange man he was, how Castalia was brought to America to be a slave, and the strange experiences Lucy had raising her family in the South while married to a man who was still living his experiences in the War.
Capt. shot and then tried to save the life of Union soldier to whom he promised to return a heirloom watch to the soldier's New England family. He didn't because he fell in, love with the watch. He went to war with his best friend who he saw killed. He was at Appomattox for the final moments. When he returned to his Mother and their plantation, he found Sherman's men had burned it to the ground and his Mother was badly burned and his slaves had fled.
This a sprawling epic of the tragedy that became the lives of many in the South because of the War. It took me a long time to read this novel because parts of it lacked interest for me and took away from the main narrative. There were some fascinating sections especially Castalia's story of how she came to America which read somewhat differently than other tales of this trip that I have read. Another well written section was the Capt.'s time in battle. The descriptions of life in the Confederate Army were gut wrenching.