Strangers (Audible Audio Edition) Anita Brookner Stephen Thorne Audible Studios Books
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Paul Sturgis is a retired bank manager who lives alone in a dark little flat. He walks alone and dines alone, seeking out and taking pleasure in small exchanges with strangers the cheerful Australian girl who cuts his hair, the lady at the dry cleaners. His only relative - and only acquaintance - is a widowed cousin by marriage, herself a virtual stranger, to whom he pays ritualistic visits on a Sunday afternoon.
Trying to make sense of his current solitary state, and fearing that his destiny may be to die among strangers, Sturgis trawls through memories of his failed relationships and finds himself longing for companionship, or at the very least a conversation. But then a chance encounter with a stranger - a recently divorced and demanding younger woman - shakes up his routine, and when an old girlfriend appears on the scene, Sturgis is forced to make a decision about how (and with whom) he wants to spend the rest of his days....
Anita Brookner was born in South London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her 24th, Strangers, in 2009. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.
Strangers (Audible Audio Edition) Anita Brookner Stephen Thorne Audible Studios Books
Anita Brookner has been my "therapist" for well over the last decade, and I tend to keep this a secret. When a visiting friend has discovered one of her books in my apartment, I am tempted to wrestle it away from them . I believe she does not write for the majority. She is unique. Her work does not remind me of Henry James nor Proust in the slightest. Her novel "Strangers" addresses topics which other acquaintances and I are discussing at this time. Retirement from the work force, solitude and possible withdrawal from the world while continuing to exist. The majority of us do not have time to spend for much introspection because we are being swept along on a furious tide of activity. While I feel the increasing nervous tension around me, I attempt at this stage in my life to pace myself and feel grateful that I am at leisure to do so. Unless one has an unkind and devious nature, this is not the book to give to an individual, who has just shared with you that they are concerned about their pending retirement from the structure of their work life. It might confirm their deepest fears. What I would emphasize is the importance of one's environment and safety net which Anita Brookner addresses exquisitely in her highly realistic way. I hope that she is presently writing her autobiography for her admirers and loyal readership.Product details
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Strangers (Audible Audio Edition) Anita Brookner Stephen Thorne Audible Studios Books Reviews
If you are looking for a pick me up I would not recommend this! I found it gloomy with the protagonist exhibiting very little richness in his inner life in fact, I did not like his character and found him somewhat mean spirited with a thought life that was quite banal. This was not a uplifting depiction for the twilight years ..
Am I missing something?..or is this meant to be a tale of existential despair and where the absence of a spiritual life can lead a person. Is that all there is?
Novelist E.M. Forster exhorted us to "only connect," meaning that anything else would leave us deeply dissatisfied.
Brookner's novels ("Strangers" is number 24) seem to amount to case studies of people who can't connect. They'd like to; they are deeply aware of their deficiencies. Yet connecting does not seem to be part of their DNA. Thus, her characters seem destined to lead solitary, lonely lives.
In this newest iteration, retired banker Paul Sturgis lives alone in London, despising his comfortable flat while devising more and more elaborate ways to escape his stifling existence. He takes long walks, eats in restaurants, visits museums, and fantasizes about living in a hotel somewhere where he will be free of even these obligations. He has missed out on so much of life by substituting a dull and boring form of niceness for any real engagement or passion. His life has devolved into seeing a distant cousin-in-law every few weeks for desultory conversation. Each has an unspoken awareness of a lack of real interest in the other.
When the cousin-in-law dies, Sturgis meets a mercurial woman, Vicky, during a solo trip to Venice. Around the same time, Sturgis also has a chance encounter with an old flame, Sarah, now in her own state of disinterest and decline. The sole thread of tension in the novel is whether either of these women offers a chance of revivification for Sturgis. It would be giving nothing away to Brookner readers to say that this chance for "carpe diem" turns into a "carpe didn't."
Fans of Brookner will enjoy her facility with language and her vaunted ability to explore the interior landscapes of people who teeter on the cusp of breaking through their own emotional constraints. Despite the bleakness, there is considerable humor here, especially if you identify at all with the tentativeness of Brookner's characters.
Brookner is now 84 years old. For those who may be waiting for future protagonists to ignite the booster rockets and escape their own internal atmospheres, I would say don't hold your breath.
This was not one of my favorite Brookner novels. I really, really like her work, but this story didn't grab me as other stories have done. She is still one of my all-time favorite authors, tho.
it was a little slow.
Anita Brookner truly know how to develop characters with all the complexities which each human has. I learn life lessons and new ways of looking at life in each of her books.
There is no getting around it, this is a novel about old age and loneliness. Like all Brookner's novels, the hero/ine is solitary, well off, and given to melancholy mental soliloquies. As always, the protagonist's choice of company is unsatisfactory, the few elderly people who have sparsely peopled his past and who are egotistical, selfish and argumentative, or a 50-ish woman who loudly presents claims and demands, amply self justified, of course. So the alternatives are unfulfilling company and the demands that company makes, or isolation and solitary cogitation, indeed fear of dying alone. Brookner skillfully juxtaposes pages of inner thoughts and anxieties, long spun-out indecision, with rapid fire confrontational dialogue as the protagonist tries ineffectively to placate acquaintances who reject his politeness and counter with forthright rudeness and renewed demands. This is a longtime Brookner theme the quiet, peaceable and well-behaved are at the mercy of charming, gregarious users, out to exploit the quiet householder, turn him out of his or her house in the guise of a short term arrangement, and extract financial advantage from the protagonist's innocent friendship. Though every novel is a variation on this theme, there is no sense of repetition. Miss Brookner's novels are each distinct, each a quiet universe of feeling, with naifs and monsters vying unequally in an indifferent London. Always there is London, bleak, chill, raining, even springtime a disappointment. The protagonist's London is always contrasted with Paris or southern France where he seeks the warm deliverance of the sun. Somehow I never find these novels depressing. Miss Brookner is master of her constricted landscape, but her bleak worldview is not for everyone.
Anita Brookner has been my "therapist" for well over the last decade, and I tend to keep this a secret. When a visiting friend has discovered one of her books in my apartment, I am tempted to wrestle it away from them . I believe she does not write for the majority. She is unique. Her work does not remind me of Henry James nor Proust in the slightest. Her novel "Strangers" addresses topics which other acquaintances and I are discussing at this time. Retirement from the work force, solitude and possible withdrawal from the world while continuing to exist. The majority of us do not have time to spend for much introspection because we are being swept along on a furious tide of activity. While I feel the increasing nervous tension around me, I attempt at this stage in my life to pace myself and feel grateful that I am at leisure to do so. Unless one has an unkind and devious nature, this is not the book to give to an individual, who has just shared with you that they are concerned about their pending retirement from the structure of their work life. It might confirm their deepest fears. What I would emphasize is the importance of one's environment and safety net which Anita Brookner addresses exquisitely in her highly realistic way. I hope that she is presently writing her autobiography for her admirers and loyal readership.
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