|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
The White Family
und über 1 Million weitere Bücher verfügbar für Amazon Kindle .
Erfahren Sie mehr
| ||||||||||||||||||
Wird oft zusammen gekauft
Produktinformation
|
Mehr über den Autor
Entdecken Sie Bücher, lesen Sie über Autoren und mehr
› Besuchen Sie die Seite von Maggie Gee auf Amazon
› Besuchen Sie die Seite von Maggie Gee auf Amazon
Produktbeschreibungen
Amazon.co.uk
Conforming to Philip Larkin's famously acidic sentiments about parenting, Maggie Gee's The White Family offers a bleak, but piercingly honest, portrait of an "ordinary" British family. The novel's patriarch, Alfred White, is a curmudgeonly London park keeper who has presided over both the park and his home-life for 40 years. A fan of "the good old days", his misty-eyed sentimentality is augmented with a racism of the unthinking kind. When he's struck down with a stroke his family are forced to come to terms with a life without him. For his gentle, bookish if submissive wife, May, loneliness is the greatest fear. However, Alfred's brand of fathering has left more painful legacies for their three children. Firstborn Darren, the golden child and now a successful journalist in America, still bitterly resents his father's beatings. Daughter Shirley, whose relationships with black men led to violent conflicts with Alfred, is more forgiving but no less damaged. The youngest child Dirk has absorbed his father's worst opinions and become a shaven-headed, misogynistic fascist.
Like Graham Swift's Last Orders, Gee makes judicious use of a multi-voiced narrative. This inventive structure provides a disturbingly intimate understanding of the emotions and prejudices of the Whites, while contributions from subsidiary figures such as Darren's childhood friend, the failed novelist Thomas Lovell, help to extend the vista beyond the immediate family. With the possible exception of Dirk, whose suppressed homosexuality is overblown, her characters are richly drawn; imbued with truly human strengths and failings. Dirk's venomous racist rants, which later spill into violence, are deeply shocking, but Gee's real achievement is to examine the more subtle and insidious forms of racism (and of homophobia) in British society today. --Travis Elborough -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Taschenbuch .
Pressestimmen
'Outstanding ... tender, sexy and alarming.' Jim Crace'One of the year's finest novels.' Literary Review'Compulsively readable.' The Guardian'Astonishing ... beautifully written.' Big Issue'A transcendent work.' Daily Telegraph'Intensely touching.' Financial Times
Tags(Was ist das?)Bei einem Tag handelt es sich um ein Schlagwort, das zum Produkt passt.
Tags erleichtern allen Kunden die Suche und die Sortierung ihrer Lieblingsprodukte. |
Kundenrezensionen
Es gibt noch keine Kundenrezensionen auf Amazon.de
5 Sterne
4 Sterne
3 Sterne
2 Sterne
1 Sterne
Die hilfreichsten Kundenrezensionen auf Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 Rezension
The father hath eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge
12. Dezember 2010
Format:Taschenbuch
Alfred White is seriously ill in hospital. His family - wife and three children - come to visit, and the various chapters relate how they really feel about him. May, his wife, loves him, in part for his sense of duty, and despite his choleric and imperious temper and his crude race prejudice. Shirley, his daughter, had escaped his control at the age of nineteen after he had committed an act of violence against her. She had been driven, first, into a disastrous one-night stand; but later she had been able to make a happy marriage with a Ghanian. He had died and she was now living with a Jamaican partner. Nothing could have enraged her father more. The two sons have inherited their father's explosive temper: Darren is a successful international journalist, but is on his third bad marriage; and Dirk is a foul-mouthed failure and is as racist as his father. The sons have never dared to stand up to him.
Alfred and May are rather lost in the modern world and, in their different ways, nostalgically look back to an older England which, in their memories at least, was more personal, more cohesive and less challenging.
While May is nearly pure goodness (her only failing a lack of courage) and Shirley is a genuine counter-point to all that racism, the men are all pretty unlikeable figures; but they are all damaged and vulnerable, and one comes to feel sorry for them all. Alfred and the children often seem consumed by hatred; but there are also moments when we see that Alfred is capable of love, and his children's attitude towards their father is also quite ambivalent; so the scenes around Alfred's hospital bed are taut with emotions. Two of the children do some very dramatic things on their way back from the hospital. The novel started rather slowly, but it steadily gathers pace, power and pathos.
Maggie Gee is a terrific writer!
Alfred and May are rather lost in the modern world and, in their different ways, nostalgically look back to an older England which, in their memories at least, was more personal, more cohesive and less challenging.
While May is nearly pure goodness (her only failing a lack of courage) and Shirley is a genuine counter-point to all that racism, the men are all pretty unlikeable figures; but they are all damaged and vulnerable, and one comes to feel sorry for them all. Alfred and the children often seem consumed by hatred; but there are also moments when we see that Alfred is capable of love, and his children's attitude towards their father is also quite ambivalent; so the scenes around Alfred's hospital bed are taut with emotions. Two of the children do some very dramatic things on their way back from the hospital. The novel started rather slowly, but it steadily gathers pace, power and pathos.
Maggie Gee is a terrific writer!
Ist diese Rezension hilfreich?
Wir wollen von Ihnen hören.
Kunden diskutieren
|
Das Forum zu diesem Produkt
Fragen stellen, Meinungen austauschen, Einblicke gewinnen Aktive Diskussionen in ähnlichen Foren
Kundendiskussionen durchsuchen
|
Ähnliche Foren
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Lieblingslisten
Ähnliche Artikel finden
Anhand des Sachgebietes nach ähnlichen Produkten suchen:
Ihr Kommentar
Möchten Sie die Produktinformationen aktualisieren oder Feedback zu den Produktabbildungen geben?
|
