“On Wednesday 23rd March 1983 there appeared in the Guardian the following report: ‘An inquest is to be held on the two elderly women whose bodies were found on Monday in the dilapidated North London house they shared with a man who was the brother of one of them and the brother-in-law of the other. Postmortem examinations yesterday revealed that they had both died from natural causes – but that the older woman had been dead for up to a year.’ ” No one incorporates black ironic humor into novels about earnest, often batty, elderly people better than the British, and Benatar is one of the best of the best. Paying special attention to characters who are dealing with significant emotional stresses, he fills his novels with psychological insights and feelings the reader understands, even as his mordant wit draws the characters to the edge, allowing the reader to watch them cross the line into darker and darker worlds of their own. Focusing primarily on Daisy and the havoc she wreaks, the novel starts at the end and works its way back to the beginning, jumping back and forth among time frames as the backgrounds and the entire histories of each character are laid bare. Brilliant dialogue reveals attitudes and interactions in this ironic and darkly funny novel of dysfunction. If this were a Hitchcock film, Betty Davis would have been perfect as the scheming Daisy.
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Elsa Ahlqvist is dying, something she learned only six months ago. A seventy-year-old psychologist married for fifty years to Martti, a well-known artist, Elsa is being attended at home by her physician daughter Eleonoora (Ella) and her granddaughters, Anna and Maria. As each member of the family reacts to Elsa’s declining health, the entire family dynamic unfolds. Elsa tries to keep the mood light, recreating the past and its happy memories. When her grandmother playfully suggests that they play “dress up,” as they once did, Anna goes to the closet and discovers, not the dress she used to wear when she pretended to be “Bianca from Italy,” but one which she has never seen. Anna soon learns that it belonged to Eeva, a stranger to her, who, she discovers, lived with her grandparents and mother for three years, over forty years ago. The characters’ behavior and emotional reactions to living together are explored with sensitivity, but since the story is told in retrospect, Eeva’s long term effects on the main characters’ lives are obvious to the reader from the beginning. There are, however, surprises, as the relationships with Eeva unfold, and lovers of psychological novels will not be disappointed.
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Cocky and self-confident on the surface, Neapolitan attorney Vincenzo Malenconico is a personal failure by most objective standards. His psychologist wife has left him, his sometimes troubled kids have their own lives and don’t want his “help,” and he lives in a lonely apartment. He has few, if any, clients and no private office, sharing office space with numerous other failures. He dithers, constantly imagining different outcomes for situations he has already faced, rewriting conversations which have ended badly for him, and perpetually reviewing his own past history. He makes hilariously ponderous philosophical observations and messes up his life royally. Though he has a new love with whom he shares passionate encounters, she seems far too clever to become involved with him and keeps him constantly worrying about the future. Now, for reasons known only to himself, he has decided to tell his story, but as he ponders what to say, he even imagines himself in the role of one of his own readers asking, “Why should we go to the trouble of understanding you? We don’t want to do your work for you. Why don’t you take us for an enjoyable ride someplace.” Winner of the Naples Prize for fiction for this novel, author Diego DeSilva is also a writer of plays and screenplays, and his sparkling dialogue and sense of dramatic irony reflect this experience.
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In lush and often lyrical language, author Gail Jones creates a consummately literary novel which takes place on Circular Quay, surrounding the Opera House, during one hot summer day in Sydney. Four major characters are dealing with personal losses and memories of the past which make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to participate fully in the present. Deaths haunt them all, and as they gravitate individually towards the Opera House, they relive events from their lives. Time is relative as the novel moves forward and then swirls backward during each character’s reminiscences. Only Ellie and James know each other. The other characters lead independent lives, and any connection among them will be just a glancing blow, a random event – one of the minor acts of fate. A mysterious fifth character, who materializes without warning in the conclusion, serves as a catalyst to bring the novel to its thematic conclusion. Literary and artistic references pepper the narrative, adding depth to the themes of love, loss, and death. Sometimes the prose is weighed down by the elaborate imagery, but the novel still offers much of interest to those who enjoy highly literary novels, and the thematic focus and the setting are unusual and intriguing.
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Many readers will find How It All Began the best novel Lively has written so far, primarily because the characters and their issues sound so familiar. With characters who comment insightfully and often ironically about their lives while dealing with their latest crises, the novel also features graceful prose and sparkling dialogue to give this novel a thematic heft which is rare in current fiction. The novel opens with the mugging of Charlotte Rainsford, age seventy-eight. Her subsequent recovery from a broken hip at the home of her daughter and son-in-law begins the cycle of change from which ripples radiate for the rest of the novel. Charlotte’s daughter Rose works part-time as a personal assistant to Lord Peters, an elderly former history professor who spends his time doing obscure historical research. Rose’s need to stay home with Charlotte at the beginning of her recuperation leads to the arrival of Lord Henry Peters’s niece, Marion Clark, who comes to Lord Peters’s estate to fill in. Marion, a successful interior designer, is having an affair with the married Jeremy Dalton, who feels no qualms about betraying his wife. When Jeremy’s wife Stella discovers a revealing text message from Marion on Jeremy’s cellphone, “The Dalton’s marriage broke up, [all] because Charlotte Rainsford was mugged.” Rippling out, the novel studies how one random event can permanently affect the lives of dozens of people.
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