Word: budnitz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...With the last two narrators, the novel spins out of Budnitz's previously firm control. The style changes from short sentences to descriptive passages, while snippets of modern existence attempt to address all the moral and emotional issues Budnitz has introduced. To prevent the rich symbolism of Ilana's account in the old country from laying waste, Budnitz reintroduces the egg as the unifying concept for the novel. When Ilana dies, the egg loses its sheen, and the novel comes to a halting...
...Narrators change voice almost arbitrarily as Budnitz jumps from Sashie to Ilana. Aside from the content of each narration, Budnitz makes little effort to create a different stylistic or narrative voice for each one. She intrepidly attempts to address the conflict of old values and new, western values through the interplay between Ilana and Sashie. However, an analysis of dishtowels, tea leaves and hospitalization from two perspectives destroys the potential depth of this exchange. Budnitz tries to be too profound in her simplification, taking on too large a human theme within too small of a context...
...birth to her daughter, Mara, and it continues to unravel with the later insertion of Mara's niece, Naomi, as the final narrator. The work changes from a mythical tract to a soap opera of human fallibility. In the last section of the novel, one gets the impression that Budnitz wants to explore every facet of the human experience: mother and daughter, east and west, moral dilemmas and cheap symbolism...
...Mara is compulsive, jealous, hyper-analytical and destructive. She "walks as if the floor is thin ice. She checks beneath the cushion of a chair before sitting; she counts the knives in the silverware drawer." Through Mara, Budnitz explicates mental illness and the rationality of murder. This is too ambitious for her plot and narrative, especially given Mara's stream-of-consciousness rants. Had the rest of the novel not been so richly descriptive, this technique might have been effective. Instead, each thought staggers, laden with a false sense of importance and significance...
...Like the oval egg, the novel can also resemble a slightly misshapen circle. Budnitz struggles to weave multiple narratives into a unifying whole, but the sense of centripetal completion fails as each new voice grows more allied with the increasingly amorphous world inside Budnitz's novel. Still, Budnitz has more than answered the requirements of techniques that a good novelist ought to engage. Thus, one can only hope that If I Told You Once, will have a twice, for Budnitz has the skills of a tremendous writer, and round two could be a knockout...