Undue Influence (Audible Audio Edition) Anita Brookner Diana Quick Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : Undue Influence (Audible Audio Edition) Anita Brookner Diana Quick Audible Studios Books
Undue Influence is the 19th novel by Anita Brookner, the Booker Prize-winning author of Hotel du Lac.
Enigmatic Claire is 30 and lives alone. When she meets Martin Gibson, a faded scholar, she becomes inordinately interested. She is even more interested when she meets his wife, a far more spectacular personality. But the unexpected news of this woman's death releases emotions that were not entirely foreseen.
Anita Brookner was born in South London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her 24th, Strangers, in 2009. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
Undue Influence (Audible Audio Edition) Anita Brookner Diana Quick Audible Studios Books
I am a devoted Brookner reader so I will be biased. I enjoy her sentences and observations; the themes and characters inhabiting her work often function as simple vessels for the striking images and ideas which dominate these books. In this last novel, of all the wacky protagonists she has created, Claire Pitt is immersed in her fantasy life to the point of blindness. She's grieving the death of her mother, she can't think straight, yet she's getting on with her day, her life and making big misjudgements. This is familiar Brookner territory but it never fails to be effective and exciting. The people who surround Claire, in particular the two elderly women who own the rare book shop, as well as the father and son who buy them out, are intriguing and fully, if sadly, developed.A friend in London recently told me some good gossip: while waiting for his bus he sees Brookner heading out to theWaitRose Supermarket on the King's Road at eight in the morning to do her shopping. First I was struck with how similar this is to her own characters with their ordered lives which begin early in the day. But if I saw Brookner on the street I would want to talk to her. "Doesn't anybody stop and speak with her," I asked. "No," he replied, "I doubt anybody knows who she is." Amazing, humbling and wonderful.
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Undue Influence (Audible Audio Edition) Anita Brookner Diana Quick Audible Studios Books Reviews
Claire Pitt is a young woman who has just lost her mother. She has few friends and a menial job in a bookstore. Claire makes up imaginary scenarios about the people around her, and she sometimes lives in a fantasy world. The death of her mother marks a turning point in Claire's life. Claire is desperately looking for a purpose and a future for herself. She makes the acquaintance of Martin Gibson, a patron of the bookstore where she works. Claire views Martin as a weak man who needs her guidance. She is misguided in this, as she is in most of the projects that she undertakes. "Undue Influence" is a slice of life about a woman who has few ambitions and is at loose ends. Brookner uses wit and a deft touch to describe Claire. What Claire must learn to do is live in the here and now and face reality. Only then will she have a future. Although the book has it charms, I began to lose patience with Claire's flighty behavior towards the end of the novel. However, the book is effective in its depiction of a lost soul.
It is difficult for me to deconstruct a novel by the great Anita Brookner, especially as I have finally gotten around to reading something by her. The book (and the author) lived up to expectations. This is not a book about which you say it was enjoyable or fun to read. You have to come to a book like this with patience and a willingness to let the characters overtake you. It doesn't take long. Right away from the opening pages in Claire's (the main character and narrator) bookshop, the stage is set and you learn all you need to know about her. She is intelligent, quiet and serious, introspective, attractive enough, yet she doesn't quite have the social skills to form a relationship with the opposite sex. When she does so, she chooses the wrong type of man and she knows it. She also knows that it will have disastrous consequences, but she goes after him anyway. At times, the British manners and style get in the way for me, although maybe it's just what I am accustomed to reading. Nevertheless, I believe Ms. Brookner, in the end, transcends time and place and speaks with a brave forthright voice to the universal wisdom and longings of the human heart, and particularly as a champion of women.
Anita Brookner's protagonists, usually female, have the same damaged sensibilities and shriveled lives of Tennessee Williams' immortal Blanche Dubois, but they lack her romanticism, humor and glamorous self-deception.
These women seem to drift through their own lives as if they were museum-goers at a not very enthralling exhibit. The most they can expect after an hour or two of dutiful but listless reading of labels on display cases is a nice cup of tea at the museum shop. There's no point buying postcards; whom would they send them to?
Spinsterish Claire Pitt in Brookner's "Undue Influence" is firmly in this long line of stunted Brookner women. She's been alienated from her virginal-seeming, remote mother who was afraid of the outside world, and from her father who was himself hemmed in by a stroke. Though she's traveled to Europe, it doesn't seem to have affected her in any lasting way.
Claire is given to long walks and cooking up elaborate fantasies about people she sees. Like her predecessors, she seems under some kind of spell that keeps her becalmed in London's vast social sea. She has no relatives, almost no friends, no serious connections with other people.
Working part-time at a bookstore, she loathes weekends, which pass in a kind of swoon of boredom; for her, Sunday "is a day on which nothing happened, or could be expected to happen." You can see Claire headed to that dim voyeurism Brookner's women exhibit later in life watching trafficless streets, fallen leaves, and shifting shadows on the wall.
But there are some intriguing differences to Claire. She's more judgmental than Brookner's heroines tend to be, and not quite as kind-hearted. Brookner also wants us to believe that Claire is also apparently highly sexed and attracted to muscular healthy men she wants to control. That would make her far more active than the typical Brookner heroine, though this side of her personality seems much too vaguely drawn.
Claire pursues a connection with a suave, older man who wanders into the bookstore. His invalid wife is the kind of person who's a fixture of the Brookner landscape fascinating, heedless, selfish. When the wfie dies, Claire seduces the widower, but he turns out to be a lot more like his wife than Claire had first believed. He disappoints her, but the novel builds to this crisis in a lackluster and cliched way.
For all their solitude, the lives of Brookner's emotional hermits and cripples are intensely--though quietly--dramatic. Brookner is amazingly adept at capturing the sad, swift passage of time that mauls and gobbles up even the most timid of dreams. Her novels are intimate dramas of disappointment and resignation--far more common in life than spectacular disasters.
But Undue Influence begins too languidly, takes too long to start making a case for why we should be interested in Claire, and it never really does convince you that Claire is worth the attention. Brookner is always praised for the wit and beauty of her prose, but it doesn't seem as precise or compelling as usual here.
This is definitely not vintage Brookner; readers who don't know her work would be better off starting with either of her powerful last two novels, Falling Slowly or Visitors...
I am a devoted Brookner reader so I will be biased. I enjoy her sentences and observations; the themes and characters inhabiting her work often function as simple vessels for the striking images and ideas which dominate these books. In this last novel, of all the wacky protagonists she has created, Claire Pitt is immersed in her fantasy life to the point of blindness. She's grieving the death of her mother, she can't think straight, yet she's getting on with her day, her life and making big misjudgements. This is familiar Brookner territory but it never fails to be effective and exciting. The people who surround Claire, in particular the two elderly women who own the rare book shop, as well as the father and son who buy them out, are intriguing and fully, if sadly, developed.
A friend in London recently told me some good gossip while waiting for his bus he sees Brookner heading out to theWaitRose Supermarket on the King's Road at eight in the morning to do her shopping. First I was struck with how similar this is to her own characters with their ordered lives which begin early in the day. But if I saw Brookner on the street I would want to talk to her. "Doesn't anybody stop and speak with her," I asked. "No," he replied, "I doubt anybody knows who she is." Amazing, humbling and wonderful.
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