Reviews

Married Love: And Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

noel_rene_cisneros's review

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Estas narraciones captan los conflictos del amor y del compromiso, cómo la rutina puede ser el aceite que mantiene lubricada la maquinaria de una relación o el agente corrosivo que termina por romperla. Jóvenes que se deciden casar con sus profesores cuarenta años mayores que ellas, una escritora que la revela a su nueva amiaga el abuso que sufrió de manos de su padrastro en la niñez, un joven que no puede hablar de lo que vio en la guerra y sólo puede describir la ropa de la gente que vio en ese país extraño al que lo mandaron son algunos de los cuentos que conforman esta colección.

buttercupita's review

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2.0

Had never heard of Tessa Hadley, but she has a new book coming out and the Boston Globe lauded her as one of the best short story writers around. I decided to check it out, but her plots just didn't grab me.

bmg20's review

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3.0

‘He knew how passionately she succumbed to the roles she dreamed up for herself. She won’t be able to get out of this one, he thought. She can’t stop now.’

Married Love: And Other Stories is a collection of short fictional contemporary stories. Married Love is not all about domestic bliss. It's about the every day struggles that the characters encounter. Each story is a showcasing of a brief moment that manages to convey an entire life without leaving one feeling incomplete by the shortness of it.

'For a moment, however, she could imagine the sensation of chewing politely and sufferingly on a mouthful of broken crystal, tasting salty blood.'

Reviewing a collection of short stories is always difficult. Do you review each one individually? Do you rate them as a whole? All in all, the characters within her stories are strongly written and despite the fact that I certainly preferred a few more than others they all managed to shine in their own way. Her writing was stately and succinct and quite enjoyable. My interest has definitely been piqued and I would love to read more from this author.

'I couldn't help being swept along by the idea of someone changing who she was: I knew I wasn't capable of this; I was just helplessly forever me.'

proffy's review

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4.0

The Short and Sweet of It
Because I am incapable of summarizing a short story collection: "Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today’s most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents’ party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. In this stunning collection, Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect."

A Bit of a Ramble
I was struck by the quiet reserve of most of these stories. These are tiny portraits of relationships, most of which are not perfect, some of which are perfectly ambivalent, a state of being rather than a value judgment on that state of being.

As with many short stories I have read, plots seem unfinished, characters not quite fully developed; in this instance, however, this feels intentional and effective. Readers are given snapshots of everyday life, or sketches of people, that may not give the whole picture but do offer just enough for a truth to appear. These tiny moments in the characters' lives are a microcosm through which readers can derive a more universal reflection (and possibly an evaluation) of reality.

Many people, when reviewing a short story collection, discuss individual stories, their favorites or the ones they feel are most representative; however, I cannot do that this time around. I started scribbling down some notes about individual stories but found that I wanted to say so much about each one that this would be the longest review ever.

It is enough to say that I honestly believe you should read this one for its simple beauty.

aricoh's review

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3.0

hmm. like the illegitimate love child of alain de botton and rachel cusk

themoonkestrel's review

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2.0

Some stories where better, others were mostly blah, quite a mix, but it was a light read and quite nice.

librarylucy's review

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challenging dark emotional funny reflective tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? N/A
  • Loveable characters? N/A
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

4.0

flomc's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

an_enthusiastic_reader's review

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4.0

Most of these stories are set in contemporary Britain, about people with normal lives. What separates them from the mundane is Tessa Hadley's ability to full animate the setting and the interior lives of her characters. She knows how to eke out details that are necessary to the whole, and to the story's overall effect and tone.

My favorite is "In the Country," where Julie is Ed's wife. They gather with Ed's family at the country house to celebrate Ed's mother's sixtieth birthday. Julie has a sort of love for the family, but always feels like an outsider, and she consciously holds back things about herself from them to maintain a level of reserve. It's not clear if this is for self-protection or to maintain a sense of self that she feels she might lose if she were to reveal it.

Without giving too much away, Julie shares a secret about her past with someone, and she does it not with just words that describe her memories, but with a sort of pantomime. She shows the character the way she dressed by putting cloth on her head, shows him the way she held her hands while she was praying, and then reveals more. There is a pulse in the story, summed up by the line, "The understanding came to her that these alternating moods were two pulses in life, opposite and yet related, like the expansion and contraction of a heartbeat: one diffusing sensation and sending it flying apart, this one gathering it in the living centre."

unabridgedchick's review

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4.0

I have to confess, when I saw the blurb from the San Francisco Chronicle on the cover -- "An acknowledged master of limning the Chekhovian mysteries of experience." -- I kind of panicked. I know Chekhov is great, but isn't The Seagull super obscure and boring? I'm pretty sure I know what 'limning' might mean, but needless to say, I was a bit daunted to start.

I needn't have worried! While these stories are quiet in a way, they aren't boring or obscure. They're moody and sad, poignant and romantic, bittersweet and heartbreaking, frustrating and expansive. Hadley's writing is pretty at times -- ("The wind is tearing scraps of cloud in a fitfully gleaming sky, and combing through the twigs of the hornbeam trees (the trees are another difference between this street and his), setting them springing and dancing like whips.", from 'The Trojan Prince') -- and sharp at other times, like 'In the Cave', six pages that articulated perfectly the disappointment of not being in love.

Some of the stories are historical -- set in the '20s or the '70s -- while others are ambigu-contemporary.  All are about relationships in some way, and usually about the way those relationships fail one or both people. The New Yorker has the entirety of 'Married Love', the titular first story of this volume, online; you can get a sense of Hadley's writing style and subject through this story, which I found captivating and maddening. My favorite story might have been 'The Trojan Prince', about a young man in 1920 who decides to befriend his wealthier second cousin for a nebulous, un-articulated reason and instead finds he's less enamored of her than he expected.

I inhaled this volume over the past weekend -- there are twelve gems in this book -- and it was perfect for kicking me out of my reading funk.  These sad snapshots of love and life were a kind of escape -- I was grateful for my own happier relationships and caught up in the whirlwind of the ones contained in the book -- and I'm still thinking about these stories with a mix of sadness and longing.