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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
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Categories: Science fiction Fantasy Mystery Romance Business Classic Sports Young adult Humor Memoirs See all categories... |
Some people are fascinated by a genealogical table; and I, myself, like to study the intricate relationships of a large family. But some are bored and bewildered by it. So to the latter I would mention that it need not upset their understanding of this story, in the very slightest, if they cannot follow the who-is-who of the first chapter. The only individual characters who are going to be important are those printed in capital letters for that very reason: The Matriarch, who is Anastasia, and her children and grandchildren...the oldest of the oldest of the oldest of the oldest, as Toni described them. I introduced an enormous amount of aunts and cousins and great-uncles and so forth, in that long first chapter, because I wanted to show Anastasia, and later on, Toni, against a crowded background, and not descended along a single thread. But Toni herself, and Val, and Maxine, the younger ones, never bothered to know exactly how their relations were related. They just called them, in a lump, the family; or else classified them, casually, as the Paris lot or the Vienna lot.