Leaving Home

Zusatztext "A small gem of clarity and intensity. Her latest, Leaving Home , promises--and delivers--the savory experience devotees of Brookner have come to crave." — The Baltimore Sun "Yet another delicious reading experience. Her elegant prose and psychological acuity are fully on display. . . . As a narrator Emma is both clear-eyed and honest--often achingly so." — The Christian Science Monitor "Beautiful, piercingly elegant." — New York Times Book Review “It’s hard to pinpoint how Brookner’s world differs from the one we know, since the minute we begin reading her fiction, we lose our awareness of the boundaries that separate us from the people whose often circumscribed lives she is so deftly describing. . . . Admirable and refreshing.” — Bookforum Informationen zum Autor Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, has lived there ever since. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. Leaving Home is her twenty-third novel. Klappentext At twenty-six, Emma Roberts comes to the painful realization that if she is ever to become truly independent, she must leave her comfortable London flat and venture into the wider world. This entails not only breaking free from a claustrophobic relationship with her mother, but also shedding her inherited tendency toward melancholy. Once settled in a small Paris hotel, Emma befriends Françoise Desnoyers, a vibrant young woman who offers Emma a glimpse into a turbulent life so different from her own. In this exquisite new novel of self-discovery, Booker Prize-winner Anita Brookner addresses one of the great dramas of our lives: growing up and leaving home. 1 suddenly, from the depths of an otherwise peaceful night, a name erupted from the past: Dolly Edwards, my mother’s friend, a smiling woman with very red lips and a fur coat. I remember the coat because it was not removed for the whole of her visit, which she no doubt intended to be fleeting, having, she implied, much to do. There was another friend from my mother’s prehistory, before I existed, but this presence was less distinct, perhaps not seen at such close quarters. Betty? Betty Pollock? The Pollock seemed shifting, uncertain, an approximation. Maybe that had been her name before she married, for in my mother’s day everyone got married. Women wore their husbands much as they wore their pearl necklaces, or indeed their fur coats. The shame that attached to unmarried women was indelible, and my mother seemed to bear something of that imprint although she was a respectable widow. Dolly Edwards, with her flourishing presence, obviously felt sorry for my mother in her lonely state, with only an eight-year-old child for company. Fortunately my mother did not perceive this, although I did. My mother was impressed by this visit, grateful, even happy. And Dolly Edwards played her part valiantly, reminiscing, producing names unknown to me and rejected by me as having no relevance to my own life. I may even have been jealous of this woman who had known my mother before her anomalous condition was confirmed by the death of my father. Truth to tell she did not much miss him: solitude seemed so much her natural state that Dolly Edwards was not mistaken in making of this a flying visit. My mother marvelled for days over this, with no resentment. It was less a visit than a visitation. It was never repeated. The other friend, the one I thought of as Betty Pollock, though that might not have been her name, was less opulent, but kinder. This friend we actually journeyed to see, an event so rare that I remembered it. This visit occasioned no wistful comments from my mother, probably because Betty Pollock was not someone of whom she had learned to be slightly afraid. She was even rather unattractive, though clearly was not concerned by this, and in any event her...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Anita Brookner
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 13.02.2007
• EAN: 9781400095650
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-9565-0
• Pagine: 224
• Dimensioni: 132 mm x 205 mm x 16 mm
• Serie: Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi