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orlagal's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abortion, Adult/minor relationship, Antisemitism, Child death, Confinement, Cursing, Death, Death of parent, Drug use, Emotional abuse, Forced institutionalization, Genocide, Grief, Hate crime, Murder, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Pregnancy, Racism, Religious bigotry, Sexism, Sexual content, Slavery, Violence, and Torture
litdoes's review against another edition
2.0
Built on a promising premise of showing us how clothes define our selves, this novel was also ambitious in its attempt to capture the history of a slum landlord in London through the eyes of his estranged niece.
Interspersed with thread narratives about slavery, the plight of East European refugees, discrimination and family ties, it also tries to deal with a displaced youth's sense of belonging and relations with her timid parents who are afraid to live life (in her opinion).
But perhaps it is the breadth of issues that the novel tries to tackle that causes it to fall flat in the end. They could not keep up with the characters the author was trying to paint, and for the most part, the characters just remained as characters on a printed page for me. The lackadaisical narrator failed to engage me in her problems. I remain unconvinced nor particularly moved by the narrator's changed impressions of her Uncle Sandor (termed the 'new face of evil' by the press), her plight as a young widow, nor her callous dismissal of her parents, especially in her conversations with her mom. She sounded like a cruel, overgrown and bratty 25-year-old teen in those exchanges.
A disappointment, considering the accolades this book garnered, and being on a Man Booker Shortlist, no less.
Interspersed with thread narratives about slavery, the plight of East European refugees, discrimination and family ties, it also tries to deal with a displaced youth's sense of belonging and relations with her timid parents who are afraid to live life (in her opinion).
But perhaps it is the breadth of issues that the novel tries to tackle that causes it to fall flat in the end. They could not keep up with the characters the author was trying to paint, and for the most part, the characters just remained as characters on a printed page for me. The lackadaisical narrator failed to engage me in her problems. I remain unconvinced nor particularly moved by the narrator's changed impressions of her Uncle Sandor (termed the 'new face of evil' by the press), her plight as a young widow, nor her callous dismissal of her parents, especially in her conversations with her mom. She sounded like a cruel, overgrown and bratty 25-year-old teen in those exchanges.
A disappointment, considering the accolades this book garnered, and being on a Man Booker Shortlist, no less.
maylingkuo's review against another edition
3.0
i picked this one up randomly on the library shelves. i love the way grant writes - she has a way with language. the first chapter had me captivated and i found her way of describing the transformative power of clothes interesting.
from there, you go back in time and the story itself is not so interesting to me. the main character's relationship as her uncle develops and the closeness and repulsion drew me in a bit, but her failure to communicate and relate with others, most notably her family, left me dissatisfied. i'd love to read something by linda grant where i'm actually interested in the plot.
from there, you go back in time and the story itself is not so interesting to me. the main character's relationship as her uncle develops and the closeness and repulsion drew me in a bit, but her failure to communicate and relate with others, most notably her family, left me dissatisfied. i'd love to read something by linda grant where i'm actually interested in the plot.
sarahspell's review against another edition
1.0
The only reason I finished reading this book was because I was in rural Malawi with nothing else to do. The main character was self-absorbed at best, and I can't think why I'd want to read about her. The maturation of a naive young woman doesn't come across. But, hey, I didn't like "Breakfast at Tiffany's" either.
mskimberleyw's review against another edition
3.0
I found this absorbing and evocative but after a strong start I didn’t think it quite followed through. I wanted more from and about the protagonist, Vivien. Having said that it was fairly gripping and the locations, periods and events were vividly portrayed, a good quick page turner.
nothingforpomegranted's review against another edition
4.0
This captivating short novel contained so much beauty and so much depth. Linda Grant's writing is stunning and subtle as she explores the concepts of identity and how we present ourselves to the world.
Vivien's assertion at the end of the novel that a new dress might be "all it takes to make a new beginning" is profound, a neat and cozy summary of the ways that clothing defined the characters of this novel.
The story begins and ends with Vivien's red dress, simple and bold, a costume for her character after the trials she has endures. Vivien's parents are plain, dressed in brown and dowdy outfits that match the brown and dowdy apartment that they never leave. The contrast with Sandor Kovacs, Vivien's estranged uncle, the infamous West Indian slumlord, is vast, marked when he knocks on the door in an electric-blue suit and a watch with glistening diamonds, shining into the dull apartment. Clothing remains a powerful motif, the subject of stunning essay that someone should write one day.
From Vivien's drab beginnings, we follow her into an exciting courtship and marriage to Alexander, remarkable in that it begins with no clothing at all. They are passionate, intellectual, and beautiful, a graceful relationship with the most bumbling of endings, a drama that reconciles Vivien with her showoffy uncle, who hires her to record his story, his memoirs, for posterity but mostly for his brother.
As the story jumps back in time to Sandor and Ervin's village childhoods in Hungary, we experience a sort of reverse coming of age. As an adult, Vivien comes to understand herself, her father, her mother, and her uncle in the context of their surroundings, the impact of a community even generations after the surroundings have changed and community has disappeared.
This book is beautiful, powerful, and extraordinarily elegant, a Holocaust story, an immigrant story, a woman's story unlike any I've read before and undeniably significant.
Vivien's assertion at the end of the novel that a new dress might be "all it takes to make a new beginning" is profound, a neat and cozy summary of the ways that clothing defined the characters of this novel.
The story begins and ends with Vivien's red dress, simple and bold, a costume for her character after the trials she has endures. Vivien's parents are plain, dressed in brown and dowdy outfits that match the brown and dowdy apartment that they never leave. The contrast with Sandor Kovacs, Vivien's estranged uncle, the infamous West Indian slumlord, is vast, marked when he knocks on the door in an electric-blue suit and a watch with glistening diamonds, shining into the dull apartment. Clothing remains a powerful motif, the subject of stunning essay that someone should write one day.
From Vivien's drab beginnings, we follow her into an exciting courtship and marriage to Alexander, remarkable in that it begins with no clothing at all. They are passionate, intellectual, and beautiful, a graceful relationship with the most bumbling of endings, a drama that reconciles Vivien with her showoffy uncle, who hires her to record his story, his memoirs, for posterity but mostly for his brother.
As the story jumps back in time to Sandor and Ervin's village childhoods in Hungary, we experience a sort of reverse coming of age. As an adult, Vivien comes to understand herself, her father, her mother, and her uncle in the context of their surroundings, the impact of a community even generations after the surroundings have changed and community has disappeared.
This book is beautiful, powerful, and extraordinarily elegant, a Holocaust story, an immigrant story, a woman's story unlike any I've read before and undeniably significant.
thebobsphere's review against another edition
4.0
It seems that I have finally managed to get out of the slump I was in for the past month. It’s funny how one manages to get into phase where some reads are unenjoyable. But thankfully the Clothes on their backs gave me something I was looking for that the previous novels I read lacked and it was by an author I’ve never read before.
The Clothes on their Backs is not a highly original piece of work. It deals with (Hungarian) refugees and acceptance into British society. However the manner which these topics are presented are quite uncliched.
Vivien is the only child of two mousey Hungarian parents who believe that complete obedience to English culture is the only way of survival and she is very conscious of this. Later on in the book she meets her father’s brother who is the complete opposite of her parents. A shrewd businessman, a bon viveur and a ladies man. Eventually she manages to persuade her uncle to recall his history, back in Hungary.
In any normal circumstances the rest of the book would become one long history lesson but thankfully Grant avoids descending into these territories and keeps her focus on Vivien and how her life relates to her Uncle’s torrid past and the rest of the book deals with this dual life that Vivien experiences until one incident with an ex lover brings out some further truths which shape her outlook on her situation.
As a novel The Clothes… is EXTREMELY readable. Very breezy and Grant’s unpretentious writing style keeps you hooked from beginning and has enough depth to keep your attention.Furthermore as an a Canadian/Maltese immigrant, I was able to notice was Vivien was going through as I wondered about my identity throughout my my mid twenties. I am noticing that the importance of the migrant has been popular this decade with authors like Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Marina Lewycka and Andrea Levy (just to name a few) have all touched on the subject. A result of the ethnic diversity? hmmmmmmmmmm
The Clothes on their Backs is not a highly original piece of work. It deals with (Hungarian) refugees and acceptance into British society. However the manner which these topics are presented are quite uncliched.
Vivien is the only child of two mousey Hungarian parents who believe that complete obedience to English culture is the only way of survival and she is very conscious of this. Later on in the book she meets her father’s brother who is the complete opposite of her parents. A shrewd businessman, a bon viveur and a ladies man. Eventually she manages to persuade her uncle to recall his history, back in Hungary.
In any normal circumstances the rest of the book would become one long history lesson but thankfully Grant avoids descending into these territories and keeps her focus on Vivien and how her life relates to her Uncle’s torrid past and the rest of the book deals with this dual life that Vivien experiences until one incident with an ex lover brings out some further truths which shape her outlook on her situation.
As a novel The Clothes… is EXTREMELY readable. Very breezy and Grant’s unpretentious writing style keeps you hooked from beginning and has enough depth to keep your attention.Furthermore as an a Canadian/Maltese immigrant, I was able to notice was Vivien was going through as I wondered about my identity throughout my my mid twenties. I am noticing that the importance of the migrant has been popular this decade with authors like Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Marina Lewycka and Andrea Levy (just to name a few) have all touched on the subject. A result of the ethnic diversity? hmmmmmmmmmm
smcleish's review against another edition
4.0
Originally published on my blog here in September 2009.
The 2008 Booker Prize short list has once again proved dull, to the point that this, the fourth I have started, is the only one I have so far bothered to finish. As well as being an enjoyable book from the short list, it also falls into another small category, Booker-short-listed-novel-not-tapping-into-British-post-colonial-guilt. True, it does have immigrants as characters, but they're wartime Hungarian refugees, not from the former Empire at all.
Vivian Kovaks grows up in a central London flat, rented for a song by her parents who originally offered it as charity to a pair of refugees,not expecting them to stay for forty years. She, as narrator of the novel, describes her parents as mice seeking to bring her up as a mouse. A sheltered childhood, followed by study at York University, then marriage.
But there's what might be called an "elephant in the room". Vivian's uncle is Sandor Kovaks, who is a successful businessman; the problem is that his wealth is based on being an exploitative slum landlord, also in London. The character is based on a real person, Peter Rachman, who I vaguely remember reading about (probably in a much later Sunday colour supplement magazine). Vivian's parents won't admit to the relationship, but Vivian remains fascinated by her one childhood memory of her uncle, from the only time he visited their flat. Sandor is imprisoned when she is about ten, but she later meets him again, and the second half of the novel is really about her discovering what the man behind the tabloid horror stories is really like.
The major difference between Sandor Kovaks and Peter Rachman (ignoring the fact that Kovaks is fictional while Rachman was real) is the existence of living, known family members. Rachman too came from Eastern Europe, and after the war was unable to trace his family, though he continued to try to do so until his death in 1962. (Grant also has Kovaks live a great deal longer.) Sandor's brother and his family are useful inventions to the author, as it makes it much easier to explore his character through the complexities of the relationships between him and them - relationships which still exist, even if they have disowned Sandor, even changing the spelling of their surname by deed poll so that strangers will not ask whether they are related.
The story is told in a way which is quite complicated chronologically. The first chapter and the last chapter are set much later than anything else (and are obviously intended to be from the time at which the narrator is telling the story). In the rest of the novel, Vivian apparently adds details from her childhood or illustrative incidents from later in her life as they occur to her, prompted by details in the main flow of the story. And the central part of the novel is taken up with Sandor's life story, which reaches back before the war, long before Vivian was born. But it all rings true, because it is carefully put together so that it mimics the way that people tell anecdotes in real life. Deliberately creating this kind of simplicity through underlying complexity is a skill I admire greatly.
The point of the novel, if there is one, is about the way that people's personalities are reflected in the small details of their lives such as the clothes they choose to wear. (It is exactly the sort of incidental information that creative writing courses suggest using to establish character, because these details are much more telling than a direct description of traits.) Clothe are important in the novel particularly Vivian's trawling of second hand shops to put together a wardrobe of old fashioned but stylish outfits: retro chic long before its time, and the description of how Sandor, forced to work in a slave gang of Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, is never able to change the clothes he was wearing when first conscripted, for months and months.
It's not a happy story; no novel in which the narrator's husband is killed on the second day of their honeymoon could be described as such. But it is a pleasure to read The Clothes On Their Backs, which is in summary an excellent novel, something out of the usual way of things. Both Vivan and Sandor are fascinating characters, and the view of life in thirties and forties Europe is one not often encountered in novels by English writers.
The 2008 Booker Prize short list has once again proved dull, to the point that this, the fourth I have started, is the only one I have so far bothered to finish. As well as being an enjoyable book from the short list, it also falls into another small category, Booker-short-listed-novel-not-tapping-into-British-post-colonial-guilt. True, it does have immigrants as characters, but they're wartime Hungarian refugees, not from the former Empire at all.
Vivian Kovaks grows up in a central London flat, rented for a song by her parents who originally offered it as charity to a pair of refugees,not expecting them to stay for forty years. She, as narrator of the novel, describes her parents as mice seeking to bring her up as a mouse. A sheltered childhood, followed by study at York University, then marriage.
But there's what might be called an "elephant in the room". Vivian's uncle is Sandor Kovaks, who is a successful businessman; the problem is that his wealth is based on being an exploitative slum landlord, also in London. The character is based on a real person, Peter Rachman, who I vaguely remember reading about (probably in a much later Sunday colour supplement magazine). Vivian's parents won't admit to the relationship, but Vivian remains fascinated by her one childhood memory of her uncle, from the only time he visited their flat. Sandor is imprisoned when she is about ten, but she later meets him again, and the second half of the novel is really about her discovering what the man behind the tabloid horror stories is really like.
The major difference between Sandor Kovaks and Peter Rachman (ignoring the fact that Kovaks is fictional while Rachman was real) is the existence of living, known family members. Rachman too came from Eastern Europe, and after the war was unable to trace his family, though he continued to try to do so until his death in 1962. (Grant also has Kovaks live a great deal longer.) Sandor's brother and his family are useful inventions to the author, as it makes it much easier to explore his character through the complexities of the relationships between him and them - relationships which still exist, even if they have disowned Sandor, even changing the spelling of their surname by deed poll so that strangers will not ask whether they are related.
The story is told in a way which is quite complicated chronologically. The first chapter and the last chapter are set much later than anything else (and are obviously intended to be from the time at which the narrator is telling the story). In the rest of the novel, Vivian apparently adds details from her childhood or illustrative incidents from later in her life as they occur to her, prompted by details in the main flow of the story. And the central part of the novel is taken up with Sandor's life story, which reaches back before the war, long before Vivian was born. But it all rings true, because it is carefully put together so that it mimics the way that people tell anecdotes in real life. Deliberately creating this kind of simplicity through underlying complexity is a skill I admire greatly.
The point of the novel, if there is one, is about the way that people's personalities are reflected in the small details of their lives such as the clothes they choose to wear. (It is exactly the sort of incidental information that creative writing courses suggest using to establish character, because these details are much more telling than a direct description of traits.) Clothe are important in the novel particularly Vivian's trawling of second hand shops to put together a wardrobe of old fashioned but stylish outfits: retro chic long before its time, and the description of how Sandor, forced to work in a slave gang of Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, is never able to change the clothes he was wearing when first conscripted, for months and months.
It's not a happy story; no novel in which the narrator's husband is killed on the second day of their honeymoon could be described as such. But it is a pleasure to read The Clothes On Their Backs, which is in summary an excellent novel, something out of the usual way of things. Both Vivan and Sandor are fascinating characters, and the view of life in thirties and forties Europe is one not often encountered in novels by English writers.
jillysnz's review against another edition
4.0
"My parents thought this island, this Britain, was an oasis of tolerance and fair play, but across the Channel a howling wilderness of big ideas could inflate into an ideology, and once a man had an ideology, he was always on the lookout for enemies. When you are the enemy of a person with an ideology, you're in serious trouble. But I knew different, from the evenings handing out the leaflets. I knew that quite ordinary people, who had no thoughts at all, just feelings, could be equally dangerous. "
hrhacissej's review against another edition
3.0
I think 3.5 stars would be a more accurate assessment of my review. I enjoyed this story of a family's dissimilar ways of enduring loss and hardship and how the past affects the present. However, I don't think Grant did a convincing job of conveying character's personalities and transformations through their clothes. She certainly is detailed about what they are wearing at any given time, but I thought that it was TMI on most occasions. Perhaps this clothing/personality correlation would work better visually...at least for me.
My favorite quote comes at the very beginning and sets the mood of the book...
"I have not forgotten our summer together, when I learned the only truth that matters: that suffering does not ennoble and that survivors survive because of their strength or cunning or luck, not their goodness, and certainly not their innocence."
My favorite quote comes at the very beginning and sets the mood of the book...
"I have not forgotten our summer together, when I learned the only truth that matters: that suffering does not ennoble and that survivors survive because of their strength or cunning or luck, not their goodness, and certainly not their innocence."
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