The Bay of Angels

Zusatztext “One of her very best. . . . A pure delight to read.” – San Francisco Chronicle “An unusually beautiful and heartbreaking book.” – Detroit Free Press “Brookner’s wit glows like a kind of background radiation that charges everything here. . . . She has never been more clearsighted! more compellingly brilliant.” – The Christian Science Monitor “A wise story about competing impulses and the trade-offs we make to accommodate them.” – The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 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. Klappentext Despite growing up with a widowed and reclusive mother! young Zoë Cunningham retains an unshakable faith in storybook happy endings. When her mother! Anne! finally decides to remarry! Zoë is thrilled with her prospective stepfather! Simon Gould! who is not only wealthy! but also kind and generous. Simon's affection for his new family allows Zoë to pursue what she thinks is an independent life: her own apartment in a fashionable part of London! a university education! casual affairs! and carefree holidays at Simon's villa in Nice. When a series of unexpected calamities intervene! Zoë learns that the idyllic freedom she enjoys has come at a steep price. To preserve both her mother's and her own sense of wellbeing! Zoë must discern the real motives of the strangers on whom she now depends! including the silent and mysterious man whose nocturnal movements have attracted her attention. I read the Blue Fairy Book, the Yellow Fairy Book, and the stories of Hans Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault. None of this was groundwork for success in worldly terms, for I was led to think, and indeed was minded to think, of the redeeming situation or presence which would put to rights the hardships and dilemmas under which the characters, and I myself, had been labouring. More dangerously, it seemed to me that I need make no decisions on my own behalf, for destiny or fate would always have the matter in hand. Although I was too sensible, even as a child, to believe in a fairy godmother I accepted as part of nature’s plan that after a lifetime of sweeping the kitchen floor I would go to the ball, that the slipper would fit, and that I would marry the prince. Even the cruel ordeals undergone by the little match girl, or by Hansel and Gretel, would be reversed by that same principle of inevitable justice which oversaw all activities, which guided some even if it defeated others. I knew that some humans were favoured—by whom? by the gods? (this evidence was undeniable)—but I was willing to believe in the redeeming feature, the redeeming presence that would justify all of one’s vain striving, would dispel one’s disappointments, would in some mysterious way present one with a solution in which one would have no part, so that all one had to do was to wait, in a condition of sinless passivity, for the transformation that would surely take place. This strikes me now as extremely dangerous, yet parts of this doctrine seemed overwhelmingly persuasive, principally because there were no stratagems to be undertaken. One had simply to exist, in a state of dreamy indirection, for the plot to work itself out. This was a moral obligation on the part of the plot: there would be no place for calculation, for scheming, for the sort of behaviour I was to observe in the few people we knew and which I found menacing. This philosophy, the philosophy of the fairy tale, had, I thought, created my mother, whose strange loneliness was surely only a prelude to some drastic change of fortune in which she need play no active part. I therefore accepted as normal that she should spend her days sitting and reading, engaging in minimal outdoor activity, for surely these wer...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Anita Brookner
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 09.04.2002
• EAN: 9780375727603
• ISBN: 978-0-375-72760-3
• Pagine: 208
• Dimensioni: 130 mm x 200 mm x 15 mm
• Serie: Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi