Another finely detailed, shrewdly observed and unsentimentally moving portrait of English life from two-time Whitbread Award...
Originally published in 1978, this Booker short-listed novel chronicles fraught interactions between and within the Marsh and Frayling families during the summer of 1936.
Because her mother has just had another baby, eight-year-old Margaret Marsh is allowed a special treat on Wednesdays: a trip to the seaside and surrounding woods with Lydia, the family’s maid. There isn’t much fun in the Marsh household, because they belong to a strict fundamentalist sect, the Primal Saints. Elinor Marsh converted when she married Kenneth on the rebound from a romance with Charles Frayling, whose snobbish mother forbade her Cambridge-educated son to marry a dustman’s daughter. Mrs. Frayling is dying now; Charles and his sister Binkie, estranged from her since the fight over Elinor, live in a house of their own not too far from the family manor. Gardam (The Man in the Wooden Hat, 2009, etc.) slips in and out of their various consciousnesses to delineate a tangled set of relationships. For all his religious fervor, Kenneth lusts after Lydia, tough-as-nails product of an abused childhood. Elinor, now much more self-confident than the shy working-class girl who adored Charles, flees from her husband to the Frayling siblings, but Charles has long since realized he’s not really interested in sex of any kind. Observing all this mystifying adult activity is intelligent, angry Margaret, whose reckless walk along the rocks as the tide sweeps in provides the novel’s climax. As usual, Gardam requires very few pages to delineate an entire world of class-ridden prejudice and the blighting effect it has on every character. Yet each one is so achingly vulnerable, and depicted with such empathy, that it’s a relief to be reminded in a final chapter set 12 years later that people are surprisingly resilient and can make the best of even the most unpromising circumstances.
Another finely detailed, shrewdly observed and unsentimentally moving portrait of English life from two-time Whitbread Award winner Gardam.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-933372-823-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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