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Lädt ... Love in Idlenessvon Charlotte Mendelson
Lädt ...
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The Orange shortlisted author's haunting debut about the pursuit of passion.I loved it. The evocation of ennui and loneliness rings very true . . . great unexpected observations . . . very funny' Lesley Glaister Anna Raine is desperate: to escape Somerset, to evade her mother, and above all to find a model of adulthood on whom to base her future self. When Stella, her mother's reckless younger sister, offers her London flat, Anna's buried curiosity about Stella quickly becomes fascination: dark secrets, she is certain, lie within her reach. While by day Anna feigns efficient adulthood, by night she sinks into an increasingly heated world of discovery. As secrets rise to the surface she tries to focus on London - on anything other than her aunt. But the truth has its own momentum, and when Stella returns from Paris, something, or everything, is going to give . . . 'With her gift for light humour, Mendelson seems to be skipping across the surface. Then she'll suddenly dive into a world of obsession' Independent on Sunday 'A strange, stealthy, headily scented seethe of a book' Ali Smith, Glasgow Herald Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813Literature English (North America) American fictionKlassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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The protagonist is defined by a naïvité that is neither charming nor believable. Lacking any sense of ambition or the slightest self-consciousness, she merely - as Mendelson might put it - lollops along in life, stumbling from hideously clumsy and thoroughly uncharming faux pas to another. She lives off others unrepentantly, with no expectation of anything so realistic as a career - a feature of the novel that grates especially to today's reader. What twentysomething now could stand to read about a character so directionless and complacent, who daydreams about the interpersonal situations she encounters as if she were a young teenager? There is no existential insight, no moral complexity - merely vacuous tales of one's exasperating relatives, and a supposedly-scandalous denouement which descends into melodramatic tedium without ever quite getting to grips with any juicy details of betrayal.
In terms of its writing style, the novel begins well. There are some lovely bits of description in its early pages, but this is not sustained throughout. Instead, it becomes a sequence of scenes in which we are supposed to see the development of an obsession. It is all rather superficial, however, and peppered with scraps of unnecessarily graphic description of bodily business that add little to our understanding of the character, save a generalised feeling of distaste. A theme of self-harm suddenly emerges from nowhere, half-way through, then vanishes as quickly as it had arrived.
While the prose is often light and readable, it is also rapidly becoming rather dated, and ultimately one is left distinctly unsatisfied. If you want what Mendelson does to a T in her fiction - neurotic, ungainly, elliptically-Jewish characters with messy but oh-so-darling families, slow-burning love affairs and dramatic showdowns, pick up 'Daughters of Jerusalem' instead. ( )