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beefmaster's review against another edition
4.0
Another example of where I wish GR had half star options. This is a 3 and a half star book, but I'll give it 4 just for the final paragraph. Yet another acrid, venomous Brookner, full of disappointment and loathing. You get the sense Brookner really hates these characters and all their self-dissembling; probably why the GR community doesn't like this book. Claire Pitt, the protagonist, is deluded, narcissistic, passive, frustrating, annoying, stuck up, and all around not a nice person. But, and here's Brookner's masterstroke, for all her bullshit, a lot of what she says rings true. You're meant to agree with her as Brookner leads you down the path of Claire's thoughts. Like her earlier Look At Me, this novel is far trickier than first glance. Not perfect though as it's a bit too long and there's a claustrophobic element to its construction; every single person Claire meets has the feel of design, like it's all deterministic—somewhat diminishes the realism. Still, another great read.
mazza57's review against another edition
2.0
CLaire Pitts mother dies and along with this most of Claire's common sense it seems. She meets, though her part time job a man whose wife is dying and seems to insinuate herself into his / their life. She is not a likeable character and the book is barely an more likeable
otherwyrld's review against another edition
1.0
I would have liked to have given this book 1 1/2 stars - I didn't actively hate it, but I didn't really like it that much either. As someone who prefers reading plot driven stories, a character driven story like this one was always going to be difficult, but it would have been easier if I had actually liked any of the characters concerned. I particularly disliked Claire, the narrator and main subject of the book. Her passivity, lack of self-esteem and willingness to take the blame for everything made her an uncomfortable subject for the story, which made it difficult to like any other part of the book. My dislike may in part be because I recognise a lot of myself in Claire, and I would hate to feel that I was anything like as inconsequential as Claire is.
The book might have been saved by a better ending, as the middle part did actually pick up and it seems as if Claire is actually going to make the changes in her life that she needs to, but at the end the author chickens out and Claire is left floundering and lost. The changes that are about to happen as the book ends now feel like running away rather than running towards a better life.
As I understand that pretty much all of the author's books are the same story told with different characters, I won't be hurrying to read any more of them.
The book might have been saved by a better ending, as the middle part did actually pick up and it seems as if Claire is actually going to make the changes in her life that she needs to, but at the end the author chickens out and Claire is left floundering and lost. The changes that are about to happen as the book ends now feel like running away rather than running towards a better life.
As I understand that pretty much all of the author's books are the same story told with different characters, I won't be hurrying to read any more of them.
nocto's review against another edition
3.0
This book seems distinctly anachronous. Anita Brookner's single lady with her own means, inherited London flat, a bit of a job in a bookshop that she doesn't really need, deceased parents etc seems to belong to a different era than the 1999 world where this book was published. But in among the distinct lack of plot here there's a Big Issue seller, answering machines and other things that place the book in a time it seems not to fit into very well. It's all distinctly old fashioned. On the whole I quite like Brookner's careful take on the world and the measured approach of her characters but this one was just a bit too nothing-y in the end.
sjhaug's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
hardcoverhearts's review
challenging
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
mrh29992's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
4.0
storyofjosh's review
dark
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
a slow, purgatorial novel about the lonely life and unhappy observations of claire pitt, a young woman living in her recently deceased mother's house in london. her social interactions are limited to her friend wiggy, with whom she dines each saturday yet preserves a certain emotional distance from, and two elderly women who own the used bookshop in whose dark basement she is tasked with dull archival research. preferring to wake up early to have the city to herself, mostly she populates her life with elaborate imagined narratives of various strangers supposedly unsatisfactory emotional lives. often these are cruel without the relief of wit and make it hard to go along with her thoughts. though brookner has great fun with the irony of claire's belief in her own superior powers of perception versus her constant misapprehensions, and her light, elegant style helps what is a tonally quite dark novel go down easily.
as the novel progresses she becomes entangled with a third person, martin. he is a much older man, recently widowed and unable to talk of anything except his dead wife in conversation, having very little interest in claire, who mainly sees him as an object of pity anyway. yet at her insistence they nonetheless start sleeping together. their unsuitability for each-other romantically helps drive the narration into a overwhelming sense of trapped despair, with the outside world mainly intruding via constant reminders of death and presence of invalids and spinsters. brookner wants you to sympathise with claire's predicament, explaining her life as being uncomfortably stuck between modern independent women who have been prepared from youth to take agency over their lives and older traditional women whose path was laid out in front of them regardless of how they felt about it. her upbringing meanwhile, especially the long influence of her mother whose house she still cannot bring herself to alter in any way months after her death, made her life in late 90s britain nearly impossible. this is interesting but not always convincing, and while it grew on me as i read it the characters and world of undue influence is too slight to be satisfying.
as the novel progresses she becomes entangled with a third person, martin. he is a much older man, recently widowed and unable to talk of anything except his dead wife in conversation, having very little interest in claire, who mainly sees him as an object of pity anyway. yet at her insistence they nonetheless start sleeping together. their unsuitability for each-other romantically helps drive the narration into a overwhelming sense of trapped despair, with the outside world mainly intruding via constant reminders of death and presence of invalids and spinsters. brookner wants you to sympathise with claire's predicament, explaining her life as being uncomfortably stuck between modern independent women who have been prepared from youth to take agency over their lives and older traditional women whose path was laid out in front of them regardless of how they felt about it. her upbringing meanwhile, especially the long influence of her mother whose house she still cannot bring herself to alter in any way months after her death, made her life in late 90s britain nearly impossible. this is interesting but not always convincing, and while it grew on me as i read it the characters and world of undue influence is too slight to be satisfying.