Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.
|
Lädt ... Almost English (2013. Auflage)von Charlotte Mendelson (Autor)
Werk-InformationenAlmost English von Charlotte Mendelson
  
 p.d.r.lindsay | Mar 6, 2018 |    ) stephengoldenberg | Apr 6, 2016 | This review is from: Almost English (Kindle Edition) I quite liked the first half, following Marina - a half Hungarian girl - who has chosen to go to boarding school, but now feels utterly homesick and yet unable to tell her family. Simultaneously the novel follows her rather ineffectual mother, Laura, who, since her husband left her, has had to live with his elderly Hungarian mother and her sisters, her life no longer her own. She too is pining - for Marina - but dare not say so... And then further characters enter the story... But as the book progressed, I found myself getting bored with the story, the wretched Hungarian women ("DAR-link!) and drippy Laura. And the culminating events were just unutterably silly. (  ) starbox | Sep 22, 2014 | otterley | Jun 6, 2014 | ) maximeg | Apr 24, 2014 |
 This is a very funny novel, dancing close to farce without ever mistreating its characters. Even Laura, who has hit her forties while avoiding adulthood, is drawn with great tenderness. It is Laura and Marina’s story, but the Hungarian sisters have several scene-stealing turns. Reading Mendelson’s easy, assured prose is like sinking into something soft and velvety. You almost sigh with pleasure. Occasionally, her lightness of touch works against her: shocking revelations are made in such a serene tone that the horror doesn’t quite hit home. Some might also find fault with the male characters, most of whom are really just ciphers. But this is such a warm book, my advice is simply to sit back and enjoy it.  Almost English, her fourth novel, has just been longlisted for the Man Booker prize and it isn't difficult to see why: it is a little masterpiece of characterisation and milieu. Set in 1988, it tells the story of Marina Farkas, a 16-year-old who has recently swapped Bayswater for Dorset, and Ealing Girls' for Combe Abbey, a boarding school replete with every single ancient ritual and socially aspirational accoutrement that its paying customers might demand. Especially those who are paying for Marina. These are the three elderly Hungarian relatives she has left behind in west London: her formidable lingerie-selling grandmother Rozsi and two great-aunts, the glamorous Zsuzsi and comforting Ildi. There is plenty of plot and movement in Almost English, many changes of scene and points of view. It all adds to the book's considerable energy, but is not its main achievement – indeed, there are some particularly madcap developments that it might have been better to rein in. It doesn't matter. Mendelson is wonderful on the fraught mother-daughter bond and on both the claustrophobia and delights of domestic family life, which are rendered in sentences crammed with telling incidentals. (This is perhaps my favourite pair: "Zsuzsi, watching through her gills, unwraps another marron glace. She has been waiting all day for Laura to paint her toenails Havana Moon." It's the "gills" that does it. Or maybe the Havana Moon.) But where Mendelson succeeds is in the way she shows us how hard we will fight to escape what we love most; how we jeopardise it even when we want to protect it more than anything.  The novel is also a tragi-comedy but not in the usual sense. Its tone and plot wavers dramatically between a cartoonish, Posy Simmons kind of social comedy...None of these moments manifest into fullblown tragedy - in fact, there is something dissatisfying in the way every disaster is so conveniently averted – but they sit at odds with the comic tone in the book. The greater failing though, is the characterisation of mother and daughter, and the lack of distinction between their voices....That there are flaws in the narrative does not necessarily make the novel a wholly unsatisfactory read. The comedy works at times and Mendelson gives her reader reasons to turn the page. Auszeichnungen
Longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Home is a foreign country: they do things differently there. In a tiny flat in West London, sixteen-year-old Marina lives with her emotionally delicate mother, Laura, and three ancient Hungarian relatives. Imprisoned by her family's crushing expectations and their fierce un-English pride, by their strange traditions and stranger foods, she knows she must escape. But the place she runs to makes her feel even more of an outsider. At Combe Abbey, a traditional English public school for which her family have sacrificed everything, she realises she has made a terrible mistake. She is the awkward half-foreign girl who doesn't know how to fit in, flirt or even be. And as a semi-Hungarian Londoner, who is she? In the meantime, her mother Laura, an alien in this strange universe, has her own painful secrets to deal with, especially the return of the last man she'd expect back in her life. She isn't noticing that, at Combe Abbey, things are starting to go terribly wrong. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
Aktuelle DiskussionenKeineBeliebte Umschlagbilder
 Google Books — Lädt ...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt: (3.11)
Bist das du?Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor. |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2013 Booker longlist: Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson
7
I did my best to finish the book but gave up. Oh nothing wrong with the writing, Ms Mendelson is a skillful writer, she has a way with words and creates vivid settings. BUT her two MC women characters drove me nuts! I could not believe in a 17 year old student, Marina, aiming for Cambridge, so must have some brains, who is so bloody stupid that she believes a boy, a senior student at her school, who does not know her from Eve, but she has a crush on, will turn up at her home in London. He doesn't even live in London!
As for her wet, vacillating drip of a mother! Oh dear! Laura I found weak and just plain pathetic. The kind of person it is kindly said of that 'they do not know when to come in out of the rain.'
The London home, a flat belonging to the in-laws, is a vivid setting. Those Hungarian in-laws are larger than life characters and nicely 3D and comic, but the main characters...! Ah me! How can I empathsise with a woman who has remained living squeezed in to her in-laws' flat on a sofa bed because her husband disappeared some years ago. Her poor daughter she neglects and the pair of them droop and drip whilst their Hungarian in-laws stampede through life.
I am sure there will be lots of readers who roar with laughter as they read the novel and regard it as a literary 'Bridget Jone's Diary', another book I found unreadable. But I am sorry, I cannot feel for those MCs and the book is wasted on me.