The story had a promising beginning: two outsized young Germans meet in a public garden at the turn of the 20th century. He wins her heart by singing opera songs in foreign languages. When she becomes pregnant, they escape her disapproving mother on a boat bound for New Orleans, settling in a small Missouri town with a predominantly German population.
But this story isn't just about the emigrant couple, Frederick and Jette. It's also about their two children, four grandsons, countless great-grandchildren, and a multitude of townsfolk and strangers that pass through their lives. The narrator of the story is one of those four grandsons, James. The events that occur before his birth, he describes in too much detail for his limited perspective. There's no way that his relatives would (or could) have told him that much. Some of the events within his lifetime are beyond his realm of knowledge, so we can only assume that he's supposed to be making them up. I think it would have been more effective to either use a third-person omniscient p.o.v. or to let various characters tell their own stories.
The themes and plot became too diluted and convoluted along the way. In the beginning, music is a strong theme in the novel, a source of inspiration and unifying force. Although the narrator claims that music is important in his life, that really isn't shown. Instead, literature and chess become just as important. Within James' lifetime, too many characters dance in and out of the story, introduced just to die, it seems. With many of the main (actually important) characters, it felt like the author was trying to figure out what to do with them. The results were mostly interesting, but not always plausible. Also, the foreshadowing one-liners sprinkled through the novel got on my nerves after a while.
What really killed my enjoyment was the twist ending, which came from out of nowhere and didn't really make sense, even when I went back and reread earlier sections.
