Eudora Welty weaves a very Southern tale around a Mississippi family who are staging a family reunion that is also a celebration of the family’s oldest member, Granny Vaughn. This felt like going back in time and visiting the world of my childhood. My own extended family had an annual reunion at a small church in the mountains where my father was born, and I have sat through dinners that spread like the food was endless and heard the musings and memories of great-aunts and uncles, aunts and uncles, and cousins that were old enough to be my parents. I laughed, applauded the things that knit these people together, but felt the element of sadness that ran through many of these lives. Even those stories told with humor often dealt with subjects so serious that they altered lives forever.

Aside from the story, Eudora Welty might be one of the most beautiful descriptive writers I have ever come across. You could open this book to any random page and lift an amazing passage, which is what I am doing here:

The crowd was forming around three sides of the new grave hole. Where Mr. Comfort had been supposed to go was the last grave at the river end of the cemetery. At its back stood only an old cedar trunk, white against gray space. Its bark was sharp folded as linen, it was white as a tablecloth. Wreaths and sprays of spiky florist flowers from Ludlow--gladioli and carnations and ferns--were being stood on their wire frames around the grave, and the homemade offerings--the flower-heads sewn onto box lids and shirt cardboards and the fruit jars and one milk can packed with yard lilies and purple phlox and snow-on-the-mountain--were given room to the side.

I was literally standing at the grave and I could feel the respect and emotion that prompted those homemade offerings.

Welty treats with some very serious topics during the course of this novel. I wondered about the isolation that could exist in the midst of such a close community, about the lack of justice for some and the miscarriage of punishments for others. I was amazed by the ability this family showed to forgive and accept, and the sense that much of the acceptance arose from the almost fatalistic nature of life in such an environment.

This is my first Welty novel. She has been on my reading list for a long time. I will surely read more of her work at the first opportunity.
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Truly my favorite of all of her novels. I had trouble putting the book down as it almost had a soap-opera quality to it. Can Gloria escape the clutches of this bizarre Southern family (and take Jack with her)? Who is Gloria's father? What will happen to the judge's car (or rather Mrs. Judge's car)?

The battle being waged is against ignorance and poverty and all of life's tribulations that try to suck you into their depths. Somehow this cast of colorful characters manages to prevail over it all. ( )

This is one of the best books i have read. Being a northerner, it took me a while to appreciate this Southern writer. I had read this in my youth without caring for it. For some reason, I now relate to that time and the values of that time. Very subtle humor that I missed first time round. Very funny! ( )

LOSING BATTLES, a raucous novel set in Boone County, MS during the 1930s, chronicles a family reunion at the 90th birthday of Granny Vaughan. All her grandchildren and great -grandchildren gather to feast, to rehearse their family history, and to await the return of Jack Jordan Renfro, the beloved young scion of the family who's spent the last two years in Parchman prison. The novel is by turns hilarious and compassionate with a touch of pathos in the recounting of the life and death of Miss Julia Mortimer, the crusading schoolteacher, who failed to convince any of the family members of the value of education. At the center of the novel are Jack and Gloria, determined to restart their lives and look to the future with their infant daughter, Lady May. As with all of Welty's novels, there are glorious descriptions of nature, wonderful dialogue, memorable characters and a thoroughly humane core. ( )

I had a hard time reading this. Perhaps I wasn't in the right space. I'll try it again in a year or two.