Notes on a Scandal [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Zoe Heller juggles journalism and novel-writing successfully in Notes on a Scandal and manages to say something interesting and complex about moral panics and the people who get caught up in them.

Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this--it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power--he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons.

Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession--and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. --Roz Kaveney -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

Heller's insightful, piercing second novel (her first was Everything You Know [2000]) is narrated by Barbara Covett, a lonely older woman who purports to tell the story of her friend's downfall. When Sheba Hart arrives to be the new art teacher at the school where Barbara teaches history, solitary Barbara is immediately taken with her. Though her initial attempt to befriend Sheba is thwarted when Sheba becomes friends with another teacher, eventually Sheba begins to converse with Barbara. Soon, she invites Barbara over to her house to have meals with her family. Barbara is shocked to learn that Sheba is being pursued by a 15-year-old student and scandalized to find that Sheba has given in to his romantic overtures. But for solitary Barbara, her friend's scandalous life^B is a window to a more exciting one, and vicariously she laps up the bits and pieces Sheba shares, imagining or surmising the rest. The novel builds to a stunning ending that ultimately reveals Barbara's true character as much as it shows the depths to which Sheba has fallen. Both a penetrating character study and a sharp examination of voyeurism, Heller's novel is utterly brilliant. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.

Paperback edition of the novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Award 2003. A chilling and intelligent story of an illicit affair and complex friendships. Will have massive national press advertising campaign. "Breathtakingly acute observations, and much fine writing" "Guardian"

When the new teacher first arrives, Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba is special, and before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent, of course, but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide. So when the liaison is found out and Sheba's life falls apart, Barbara is there...

Zoe Heller's first novel, Everything You Know, was published by Viking in 1999. Zoe Heller writes a column for the Daily Telegraph and was columnist of the year for 2002. She lives in New York.