Ten Novels by Anita Brookner
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Overview: Anita Brookner published her first novel, "A Start In Life" in 1981. Her most notable novel, her fourth, "Hotel du Lac" won the Man Booker Prize in 1984. Her novel, "The Next Big Thing" was longlisted (alongside John Banville’s, "Shroud") in 2002 for the Man Booker Prize. She has published over 25 works of fiction, notably: "Strangers" (2009)shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, "Fraud" (1992) and, "The Rules of Engagement" (2003). She is also the first female to hold a Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at Cambridge University.
Genre: Fiction; General, Literature
A Closed Eye
Born to elegant but frivolous parents, Harriet grows up unguided, shrouded in an innocence that her friendship with Tessa, and later her marriage to Freddie, do nothing to dispel. Freddie is far older and disapproving of Tessa and her husband Jack. And yet all four are bound together.
A Friend from England
In one of her most delicate and suspenseful novels to date, Anita Brookner brings us an exquisite story of friendship and duty. Rachel Kennedy and Oscar Livingston were not precisely friends or family. Rachel had been acquanted with Oscar for some time, first as her father’s accountant, and then as her own. Part owner of a London bookshop, Rachel is thoroughly independent and somewhat distant, determinedly restrained in her feelings for others, but above all responsible. And it is this trait that leads Oscar and his wife Dorrie to seek out Rachel as a mentor for their twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Heather. Yet when Heather seems poised to make an unsuitable romantic decision, Rachel decides to speak out and intervene, causing an unwitting and devastating insight.
A Misalliance
After twenty years of marriage Blanche Vernon is alone; abandoned by her husband Bertie for a childishly demanding computer expert named Mousie. While Blanche finds this turn of events baffling, she feels that Bertie must have left her because of her overly sensible demeanor. Yet many of their mutual friends disagree. In fact, Blanche has come to be regarded as undeniably eccentric–making elliptical remarks that no one knows how to read, and chatting at great length about characters in fiction. She resolutely fills her unwanted hours with activities, maintaining her excellent appearance, drinking increasingly more wine, and, in an attempt to turn her energy to good works, becoming severely enmeshed in the life of a disordered young family.
A Private View
Brookner explores the complications that arise when one solitary man comes up against a woman who seems determined to invade his solitude. George Bland is an aging bachelor whose existence has been virtually a mirror image of his name–up until now. For into George’s life walks Katy Gibb, young, abrasively self-assured, who incites in George the most alarming feelings.
Altered States
Standing on a railway platform in a Swiss resort town, sensibly clad in his Burberry raincoat and walking shoes, a man thinks he may be looking at the woman for whom he ruined his life many years earlier. Alan Sherwood, a quiet English solicitor, remembers back to a time when he stepped briefly out of character to indulge in a liaison with Sarah Miller, an intriguing but heartless distant relative–only to find himself in a series of absurd situations that culminated in his marriage to Sarah’s clinging, childlike friend Angela.
With her compassionate portrait of a man who has paid a terrible price for his folly, Anita Brookner gives us a novel that it at once harrowing and humane. In the traditions of Henry James and Thomas Mann, Altered States is a beautifully rendered tale of loneliness, guilt, and erotic obsession.
A Family Romance aka Dolly
DOLLY and Jane – pretty Dolly, plain Jane – are the two poles between which this family antiromance swings in slow arcs, though ‘swings’ seems a rather crudely energetic word to use for the careful movement that is characteristic of a Brookner plot.
Dolly, Jane’s aunt by marriage, is ‘a true primitive’ who is ‘gifted for pleasure’. She is noisy, colourful, vulgar, and of obsessive interest (discreetly so, of course) to Jane. Dolly lives wholly and only ‘in the present, which is actually quite a difficult thing to do’, certainly much too difficult for Jane, who dusts through and tidies up the past with incessant and fastidious care, and who harbours longings ‘simply to watch the world from my window’. In fact, in a most proper Anita Brookner manner, Jane might be said to live only in vicarious retrospect.
Jane – no prizes for guessing that she is the narrator – recalls in precise and luminous detail her childhood, which was timid and pallid but contented. Her sense of it (and hence the reader’s) is akin to a view of pressed flowers under glass, faded, but emblematic of a former fragile beauty. Her most vivid memories are of the infrequent but garish intrusions of Dolly, a fish out of water whose appearances linger as turbulence in the becalmed backwater of family life.
Only the years move, only deaths happen. Dolly’s husband Hugo (reckless brother of Jane’s gentle mother) dies; Jane’s parents die; her two formidable grandmothers do not so much die as have the afterglows of their absences extinguished. Only Dolly is left – without money, or least without anywhere near enough for her insatiable needs. And Jane is left – without needs, or least without any she can identify, and with scads of money, enough to embarrass her profoundly (or so she rather frequently protests).
Family and Friends
n an ambitious departure from her usual form, Anita Brookner expands her canvas in FAMILY AND FRIENDS to create a richly textured novel about the life of a wealthy Jewish family in London, centering upon the generation that came to maturity between the two World Wars.
Lewis Percy
Anita Brookner is justly famous for her elegant, almost Jamesian character studies of women poised on the threshold of life. But in Lewis Percy, she performs a remarkable leap of imaginative empathy in her portrayal of a man torn between the reassuring cloister of the library and the alluring but terrifying world of the senses, a world populated by women who persist in bewildering him.
Providence
Kitty Maule longs to be "totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful." She is instead clever, reticent, self-possessed, and striking. For years. Kitty has been tactfully courting her colleague Maurice Bishop, a detached, elegant English professor. Now, running out of patience, Kitty’s amorous pursuit takes her from rancorous academic committee rooms and lecture halls to French cathedrals and Parisian rooming houses, from sittings with her dress-making grandmother to seances with a grandmotherly psychic. Touching, funny, and stylistically breathtaking, Providence is a brightly polished gem of romantic comedy.
Visitors
The extraordinary Anita Brookner, praised by The New York Times as "one of the finest novelists of her generation," gives us a brilliant novel about age and awakening. In Visitors, Brookner explores what happens when a woman’s quiet resignation to fate is challenged by the arrogance of youth.
Dorothea May is most at ease in the company of strangers. When her late husband’s relatives prevail on her to take in a young man for the week before an unexpected family wedding, Thea’s carefully constructed, solitary world is thrown into disarray. As the wedding approaches, old family secrets surface and conflicts erupt between the generations, trapping an unwilling Thea in the middle. Confronted by the company of Steve Best, a carefree young wanderer, Thea’s fragile facade of peaceful acceptance is pierced, forcing her to face in a new way both her past and her future.
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