The Rules Of Engagement

Zusatztext "Beautifully rendered. . . . Unexpectedly and intensely moving.” – The New York Times Book Review “Few novelists can stand with Anita Brookner when it comes to the interior revelations of the human heart. . . . A single sentence! a certain expression! a look or a gesture convey worlds of meaning. . . . Every page has a felicity of wording that makes you want to reach for a pen! to underline passages that you don’t want to forget.” – The Seattle Times "Beautifully written. . . . The Rules of Engagement demonstrates the triumph of a keenly introspective mind." – The Atlantic Monthly “ The Rules of Engagement is vintage Brookner in the grace and ease of its language. The Booker Prize-winning author is a gifted storyteller! weaving in twists and turns that make the book hard to abandon.” – Chicago Tribune “Elizabeth Wetherall is clearly recognizable as one of Brookner’s exquisite gem solitaries. . . . To read Brookner is to come into contact with a first-rate mind. . . . [She] is relentlessly existential. But also comic.” – Miami Herald “The story is told . . . with such elegance and polish that its surface–satiny! flawless and smooth as an onion! as always–holds a fascination equal to its content.” – The Washington Post Book World “One of the great strengths of Brookner’s fiction: her ability to lay bare in limpid! measured! luminous prose her characters’ least admirable! most desperate motivations.” – Los Angeles Times Book Review “[Brookner renders] her characters with intense fidelity. Few novelists have such a subtle! portrait artist’s sense of their characters.” – San Francisco Chronicle “Brookner is a master of the art of the middle distance and as graceful as a matador when she uses the bright cape of her elegant Jamesian sentences to keep intimacy at bay.” – The Boston Globe Informationen zum Autor Anita Brookner Klappentext Elizabeth and Betsy had been school friends in 1950s London. Elizabeth, prudent and introspective, values social propriety. Betsy, raised by a spinster aunt, is open, trusting, and desperate for affection. After growing up and going their separate ways, the two women reconnect later in life. Elizabeth has married kind but tedious Digby, while Betsy is still searching for love and belonging. In this deeply perceptive story, Anita Brookner brilliantly charts the resilience of a friendship tested by alienation and by jealousy over a man who seems to offer the promise of escape. 1 We met, and became friends of a sort, by virtue of the fact that we started school on the same day. Because we had the same Christian name it was decreed that she should choose an alternative. For some reason—largely, I think, because she was influenced by the sort of sunny children’s books available in our milieu—she decided to be known as Betsy. When we met up again, several years later, she was Betsy de Saint-Jorre. Not bad for a girl initially registered as Elizabeth Newton. How much nicer children were in those days than the adults they have become! Born in 1948, we were well-behaved, incurious, with none of the rebellious features adopted by those who make youthfulness a permanent quest. We went to tea in one another’s houses, sent each other postcards when we went on holiday with our parents, assumed we would know each other all our lives . . . The Sixties took us by surprise: we were unprepared, unready, uncomprehending. That, I now see, was why I married Digby: it was the right, unthinking thing to do. That was why Betsy took it upon herself to have a career, out of despair, perhaps, at not being provided for. Choice hardly dictated our actions. Yet I suppose we were contented enough. Certainly we knew no better. And now we know too much. Discretion veiled our motives then, and perhaps does so even now, even in an age of mu...

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Anita Brookner
• Editore: Vintage USA
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 08.02.2005
• EAN: 9781400075300
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7530-0
• Pagine: 273
• Dimensioni: 127 mm x 203 mm x 13 mm
• Serie: Vintage Contemporaries; Vintage Contemporaries
• Categoria: Narrativa > Romanzi