I'm almost finished reading a book called The Vision of Emma Blau, by Ursula Hegi. This is the second of Hegi's books that I've read, and while the other had some disturbing and unsettling parts, this one is touching some sore spots that are making me very sad.

This is a multigenerational story of a German immigrant who builds an elegant apartment house in a small New Hampshire town. It's a story of his family, of longing and yearning and pretending; one of selflessness and selfishness; one where dreams and reality are interwoven in a way that is ultimately quite realistic, but hard and disillusioning, nonetheless. It's a story of giving all and of withholding love and affection, of giving or taking too much power in a marriage.

It is about the bittersweet emotions we get tangled up with in our relationships, both the healthy and the unhealthy. Personally, my own inability to have a child is somehow mirrored in the main character's having a child that she loves fiercely, but cannot devote all her time to, having two stepchildren and even the ghostly presence of her beloved husband's two dead wives who preceded her. People live and die, we mourn and go on...it's all infused with such incredible sadness.

While many of the characters experience moments of happiness, the world they inhabit is not one I think I would care to live in. Even the lightest times are tinged with darkness, foreshadowing some rift in a relationship that will never mend, a realization of a truth that one has been blissfully blind to up until that point. Siblings and step-siblings are in the end all alone, quibbling and distrusting and resentful of each other and their parents.

The heaviness in these character's lives that Hegi portrays is pervasive, even as I put the book down to go about my own business in my own life. Perhaps the inability to stop eating that plagues one of the characters hits a bit close to home, although I don't go to the extremes Robert does in the book. But the temptation to fill up our empty spaces with food, sex, shopping or drugs is surely real.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I suspect the ending will provide a kind of resolution, as opposed to just an ending. I do not expect it to point out that God is the only thing that can fill up that hole inside us all.