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Intrusions by Ursula Hegi, Marc Burckhardt (Illustrator), Mary Schuck (Designed by)
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(Paperback - Reprint)
- Pub. Date: March 1997
- 288pp
- Sales Rank: 681,159
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: March 1997
- Publisher: Touchstone
- Format: Paperback, 288pp
- Sales Rank: 681,159
- Series: Scribner Paperback Fiction Series
- ISBN-13: 9780684844817
- ISBN: 0684844818
- Edition Description: Reprint
Synopsis
Ursula Hegi, is the author of Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones From the River and Salt Dancers. She lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest
Annotation
Brilliantly stretching literary conventions, the author of Stones from the River creates a funny and original novel within a novel that explores the doubts, decisions, and "might-have-beens" that mark not only the writing process, but life itself. "A lively first novel about the layered realities of a woman's life."--Robin Morgan.
More Reviews and RecommendationsBiography
Mary Macky of The San Francisco Chronicle once observed that "Ursula Hegi has a real genius for the material of personal existence, for the world seen close up." In her quirky yet poignant novels, the German-born Hegi displays this genius time and again.
More About the AuthorFact File
Name:
Ursula Hegi
Current Home:
Upstate New York
Date of Birth:
1946
Place of Birth:
Germany
Education:
B.A., M.A., University of New Hampshire
Biography
Multiple award winner Ursul Hegi moved from West Germany to the U.S. in 1964. She has lived on both coasts, in the states of Washington and New York.
Hegi's first two books had American settings; but when she was in her '40s, she began investigating her cultural heritage in stories about life in Germany. Her critically acclaimed 1994 novel Stones from the River gathered further momentum when it was selected in 1999 as an Oprah's Book Club pick.
Among numerous honors and awards, Hegi has received an NEA Fellowship, several PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards, and a book award from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) in 1991 for Floating in My Mother's Palm. She has taught creative writing and has written many reviews for acclaimed publications like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post.
Good to Know
Hegi immigrated to the U.S. in 1964, at the age of 18.
After it was rejected by several publishers, Hegi destroyed the manuscript of her first novel. She explains herself in this way:
"[The novel] was called Judged, and I wrote it between 1970 and 1972. When Intrusions -- my first novel brought into print -- was accepted for publication, I was a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire, and one of the other students said it would be interesting to write a thesis on my two unpublished novels. By then I knew that I didn't want to publish Judged. It just wasn't very good, and I knew I didn't want to revise it. But I had learned a lot from writing it -- especially how not to write a novel. I went home, made paper airplanes with my children from the manuscript, and landed them in the wood stove.
My second unpublished manuscript, written in the mid-1970s, was The Woman Who Would Not Speak. It was set in Germany, and I used quite a bit of the material, in very different form, for two later novels, Floating in My Mother's Palm and Stones in the River. I always felt that I wanted go further with those characters. When I began Floating, it helped a lot to have descriptions that I'd written not too long after leaving Germany. Floating contains one chapter, called "The Woman Who Would Not Speak," which gives you an idea of the storyline and characters in the book. I revise my work between 50 and 100 times, going deeper each time. But part of revision is also knowing what to abandon."
Feature Essay
As far back as I can remember, there were stories. How I loved to disappear into those stories when my mother told them to me or read them from books. Evenings, after she would turn off the light, I'd tell my own versions to my younger sister. Years later my mother would tell me that she and my father used to stand outside our bedroom door, listening.I learned how to read when I was five, and by the time I was six, I had figured out that the only thing that could possibly be more exciting than reading would be writing. But I didn't know anyone else who wrote. It seemed a weird thing to do. And yet, writing felt as natural to me as breathing. I'd walk along the Rhine River by myself, sit on the jetties, write poetry. I wrote stories. Began a novel. Finished half of it on lined paper.
I read whatever I could find at home, in the church library, and under the cover of our ironing board, where our housekeeper hid trashy romances. By the time I was 12, I'd gone through nearly everything my parents had on their shelves: Kafka and tales of the saints; Edgar Wallace mysteries and Goethe; Dostoevsky and the catechism. I loved Thomas Mann as much as young girls' adventure sequels. Often I read with a flashlight under my blanket. Since my mother did not allow me to have comic books -- she believed they stunt your imagination by feeding you pictures along with the words -- I read comics at my friends' houses. Also taboo were books that had even the slightest bit to do with sex. Those were locked up in a glass case in our living room. But once I found out where the key was, I sneaked in there whenever my parents were out for the evening. The book I remember most vividly was about the Titanic. I can't recall its title or author -- only that it had at least five unchaste scenes of women and men inside their cabins in the hours before the Titanic sank.
I was a greedy reader, a fast reader. What I looked for then -- just as I do now -- were books that sucked me into their pages, books that let me identify with their characters, books that made me even forget that I was turning pages. I gave myself over to the passion of words. I was a Christian martyr in Rome. A murderer in Russia. A grandmother in Norway. I gave birth a decade before I ever became pregnant. Rode a horse through the American West years before I arrived here from Germany as an 18-year-old immigrant.
I feel fortunate to live a life that's so deeply connected to books; I read them, write them, review them, teach them. Yet, since much of my reading now has to do with responding to what I've read, the magic of being sucked into the pages happens less frequently. Whenever it does, though, I know what it's all about. Like that day when I stood in a bookstore and opened Isabel Allende's Eva Luna. Within the first few words I forgot where I was. After I bought the book, I stood reading on the sidewalk.
I tell my students how to re-create that magic for themselves. At the library or a bookstore, they scan 50 first paragraphs from books by writers whose work they don't know. After they choose three writers whose work affects them strongly, they go with the one who makes them vanish into the pages, and then read everything that writer has written. I teach them how essential it is to give ourselves time for the silent and greedy reading we discovered as children, the reading we do just for ourselves, the reading that lets us emerge from a book dazed. Awed. Transformed.
I left Germany and came to the United States at age 18, always writing for myself. In my mid-20s, I began to study writing at the University of New Hampshire. My first publication was in Aegis, the university's student magazine. I published my first book when I was 34. Actually, it was the third book I'd written. The first two were rejected. I've found that a lot of writers have written one or several books before their so-called first book is published. It's part of the apprenticeship.
As a bicultural writer, I write along that border that all immigrants know so well, the ever-shifting border between our country of origin and our adopted country. The setting of my work reflects that. Some of my books and stories are set in Germany, some are set in Italy or Mexico, but most are set in America where I've lived for 39 years.
From Barnes & Noble
In this intriguing novel within a novel, Ursula Hegi's "author" and her fictional heroine deal with continuous intrusions into each other's lives. "...a unique and satisfying read about the burden of being responsible for ourselves."-- Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
From the Publisher
Ursula Hegi, is the author of Unearned Pleasures and Other Stories, Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones From the River and Salt Dancers. She lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest
Product Details
- Pub. Date: March 1997
- Publisher: Touchstone
- Format: Paperback, 288pp
- Sales Rank: 681,159
- Series: Scribner Paperback Fiction Series
- ISBN-13: 9780684844817
- ISBN: 0684844818
- Edition Description: Reprint
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Megan Stone was walking along the deserted beach.
You will probably ask, Why another book about another woman walking along another beach? Another deserted beach, to be more specific. And you will sigh impatiently, wondering how soon Megan is going to arrive at some monumental insight which will liberate her dramatically from her husband, the demands of her children, and the eighty or ninety Christmas cards she feels obligated to send every year — an insight which will leave her alone in an open-ended situation that could lead anywhere, not excluding nowhere.
Or you might scan the horizon of the plot, waiting for the appearance of a prospective lover, quite likely younger than Megan's forty-one years, who will introduce her to multiple orgasms and fellatio (in neither my Webster's Collegiate nor my Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary), not to mention various imaginative positions, some of them slightly uncomfortable, and who will serve as a catalyst to free her from her marriage. Naturally, you will expect Megan to sooner or later leave the younger lover (hereafter also referred to as Y.L.), in order to demonstrate her ability to make independent decisions.
Perhaps you imagine their bodies entangled in one of those small harbors of safety among the dunes, those little alcoves away from the ocean where the tall blades of grass protect them from being seen, where the fine sand is soft and white. You can follow the course of Y.L.'s suntanned hands as they explore Megan's body. She arches her back, moaning, as he parts her thighs with his bearded chin, his face nuzzling against the warm softness, his agile tongue circling and probing. Shelocks her fingers into his thick black hair. Y.L. comes up for air and gets sand up his nose, while Megan, sitting up as she hears him cough and sneeze, gets sand up her...
There! Nothing like having your fantasy disrupted by the probabilities of reality. Of course you could have prevented this by including a blanket, one of those woven, striped Indian affairs in rich earthy colors: terra-cotta, Sahara beige, harvest yellow, tobacco brown. Or their position could be entirely different, precluding the possibility of sand obstructing the course of events.
Perhaps you don't want to imagine Megan in the traditionally submissive position, yielding only to those sensations that Y.L. chooses to expose her to. Yours might be a more aggressive, a more independent approach: Y.L. on his back, his knees bent, the only slightly callused soles of his feet digging into the warm sand, the muscles in his thighs trembling with what soon will be ecstasy, as Megan mounts the erection she created, lowering herself, slowly rotating while guiding Y.L.'s right hand to her clitoris (we'll do without worn terms such as surging, throbbing, sliding, etc.), then abandoning herself in a wild ride that would leave Attila the Hun in a cloud of dust, her long, wheat-blond hair whipping the salty breeze like a victorious banner.
Copyright © 1981 by Ursula Hegi
Read a Sample Chapter
Chapter 1
Megan Stone was walking along the deserted beach.
You will probably ask, Why another book about another woman walking along another beach? Another deserted beach, to be more specific. And you will sigh impatiently, wondering how soon Megan is going to arrive at some monumental insight which will liberate her dramatically from her husband, the demands of her children, and the eighty or ninety Christmas cards she feels obligated to send every year -- an insight which will leave her alone in an open-ended situation that could lead anywhere, not excluding nowhere.
Or you might scan the horizon of the plot, waiting for the appearance of a prospective lover, quite likely younger than Megan's forty-one years, who will introduce her to multiple orgasms and fellatio (in neither my Webster's Collegiate nor my Funk & Wagnalls Standard Desk Dictionary), not to mention various imaginative positions, some of them slightly uncomfortable, and who will serve as a catalyst to free her from her marriage. Naturally, you will expect Megan to sooner or later leave the younger lover (hereafter also referred to as Y.L.), in order to demonstrate her ability to make independent decisions.
Perhaps you imagine their bodies entangled in one of those small harbors of safety among the dunes, those little alcoves away from the ocean where the tall blades of grass protect them from being seen, where the fine sand is soft and white. You can follow the course of Y.L.'s suntanned hands as they explore Megan's body. She arches her back, moaning, as he parts her thighs with his bearded chin, his face nuzzling against the warm softness, his agile tonguecircling and probing. She locks her fingers into his thick black hair. Y.L. comes up for air and gets sand up his nose, while Megan, sitting up as she hears him cough and sneeze, gets sand up her...
There! Nothing like having your fantasy disrupted by the probabilities of reality. Of course you could have prevented this by including a blanket, one of those woven, striped Indian affairs in rich earthy colors: terra-cotta, Sahara beige, harvest yellow, tobacco brown. Or their position could be entirely different, precluding the possibility of sand obstructing the course of events.
Perhaps you don't want to imagine Megan in the traditionally submissive position, yielding only to those sensations that Y.L. chooses to expose her to. Yours might be a more aggressive, a more independent approach: Y.L. on his back, his knees bent, the only slightly callused soles of his feet digging into the warm sand, the muscles in his thighs trembling with what soon will be ecstasy, as Megan mounts the erection she created, lowering herself, slowly rotating while guiding Y.L.'s right hand to her clitoris (we'll do without worn terms such as surging, throbbing, sliding, etc.), then abandoning herself in a wild ride that would leave Attila the Hun in a cloud of dust, her long, wheat-blond hair whipping the salty breeze like a victorious banner.
Copyright © 1981 by Ursula Hegi
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