Inglorious: A Novel [Paperback]

Joanna Kavenna (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2008

When Rosa Lane, a promising young journalist, impulsively hits the send button on an email to her boss saying "I quit," so begins her pursuit of enlightenment in the jungles of cutthroat London. As she embarks upon her quest for a sense of purpose, she is deceived by her lover, surprised by her friends, turned out by her roommate, threatened by her bank manager, picked over by prospective employers, and tormented by all the bizarre expectations of the modern world. An erudite and darkly comic novel, brimming with lacerating wit and compassion, Inglorious is a truly engrossing character study of a woman walking the edge between self-destruction and self-discovery.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kavenna's grinding first novel arrives a year after her well-reviewed nonfiction debut, The Ice Museum. In the wake of her mother's death, 30-something Rosa Lane walks out of her job as a London critic. When her relationship of 10 years ends (her boyfriend gets engaged to a mutual friend), Rosa's nascent nervous breakdown hits full force. She cuts her life down to the size of a duffle bag, couch-surfs into ever-deeper personal and financial lows and can't bring herself to respond to work inquiries or to ask her father for a loan. Kavenna's all-too-faithful rendering of the fight to stay sane ends as Rosa rouses her strength to confront her ex- before his wedding, and then to board a train to Paris, where she seems likely as not to hit bottom in a city full of strangers. Kavenna is incisive and funny enough to make Rosa convincingly crazy, but Rosa's repetitive, nonresolving woes give the novel an unpleasant quality, something like Leaving Las Vegas meets Groundhog Day. (June)
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From The New Yorker

"You’re depressed," a doctor tells Rosa, the thirty-five-year-old heroine of this début novel. It is one of many simplistic diagnoses offered by Rosa’s acquaintances, who are shocked when, months after her mother’s death, she quits her job as a newspaper writer, is dumped by her boyfriend, and rapidly sinks into debt. To Rosa, her condition feels like anything but depression; she has a sense of excitement, of the tumult of her thoughts, of being "driven towards an end that I do not know." Kavenna pursues the causes and trajectory of a nervous breakdown with a relentlessness that comes close to overwhelming the minimal plot; still, her understanding of the complexity of depression and her evocation of her heroine’s bewilderment are precise, and Rosa, for all her misery, has an appealing and often funny voice.
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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Picador (May 27, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312427883
• ISBN-13: 978-0312427887
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,861,355 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Ambitious Effort, July 29, 2008

By 

Lisa Kenney (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Inglorious: A Novel (Paperback)

Her mother's death and a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the superficiality of her life are the catalysts for thirty-five year old Rosa to impulsively quit her job as a successful journalist for a London newspaper and enter a painfully long meltdown. Rosa has no prospects or plans and her life rapidly disintegrates. A decade-long live-in relationship with her handsome, but vapid boyfriend abruptly ends and she moves in with a friend. She soon finds out that her ex and her closest friend are about to be married. Without income or job prospects (she's not really looking), her debt mounts and she wears out one and then another friend's hospitality. She's reduced her assets down to a few changes of clothes and a copy of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the complete works of Shakespeare as the train wreck continues in painful slow motion.

I wanted to like this book. The US cover art and back cover blurb are misleading and would lead one to believe Inglorious is chick-lit - far from it. Joanna Kavenna won the Orange award for new writers, so my expectations were high. Kavenna is indeed a gifted writer, her prose is beautiful and Inglorious is an ambitious work that just misses the mark. The novel is relatively plot-less and the ending is unresolved and pessimistic. The work feels much more like an open ended character study, than a completed novel and even that I could indulge, but I found there were inconsistencies that kept pulling me out of the often lovely fictive dream the author created and they made me question the veracity of Rosa's thoughts and actions.

Rosa has many of the symptoms of someone entering a deep, clinical depression, but she's got none of the lethargy associated with depression and a version of mental mania that closely resembles logorrhea - if there were a non-verbal kind. She is an obsessive list-maker and letter writer, although she never manages to cross anything off the lists and the letters are promptly torn up and tossed. What keeps one reading is that she is darkly funny. She spends a good deal of the first third of the book wandering the streets of London and we float through her stream of consciousness as she ponders the meaning of existence and tries to work through various philosophical concepts and ideas, while niggling reminders of her need to find employment, lodging and cash continue to intrude. I found myself at times fascinated with her trains of thought, but at other times annoyed that she has the time and energy to wander aimlessly around London, sit in coffee shops writing endless lists and letters, but she doesn't have the inclination to take care of her own basic survival needs. Her symptoms are so incongruous with the forms of mental illness I've witnessed that I found myself distracted trying to identify her pathology in order to resist the idea that she is simply spoiled and self-indulgent.

Rosa's situation goes from bad to worse and she continues to deteriorate and cut herself off from friends and socially acceptable behavior.Again, I found myself wondering about her friends' seeming obliviousness and indifference to her condition.

Readers will be polarized about this book. Some will forgive the lack of conventional story and character and be charmed by the author's keen sense of irony and the admittedly fine writing that often displays flashes of brilliance. Others may find that the references and quotes border on pretentiousness and lose patience. The fact that I had to stop to and consider which camp I was in and my inability to buy into the reality of Rosa's breakdown left me with the feeling that this was a valiant effort, but the author didn't quite pull it off.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book, November 23, 2007

By 

JohnD "JohnD" (Boston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inglorious: A Novel (Hardcover)

Brilliant writing. I liked how the story evolved, it was so undramatic which made the story more powerful and more real. The problems kept piling up, they seemed to gain a life of themselves. I am American but we seem to have this in common with the English, probably with the rest of the world to, is how debt with the interest rates, which I know on credit cards can go as high as 20% or more, can really become overwhelming. The woman in the story has all these other problems and she has the impersonal bank to deal with. Well, I didn't mean for this to become a complaint about the banking system but it seemed apt. In the end the only thing that the protagonist seems able to do is run. In the new world that seems like that will be more and more difficult to pick up and start over somewhere new. But again brilliant writing. I can't wait to read the author's first book and anything she chooses to write.

5.0 out of 5 stars Poignant and endearing, December 15, 2011

By 

Olivia G - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inglorious: A Novel (Paperback)

Extremely well written book about loss, the endless grind of life and the point of it all... Rosa is a very endearing character (intelligent, perceptive, and funny) and her descent into depression and finding her way out of the lost place where she ends up is very touching. For me, Rosa represents going off the deep end of desperation and craziness that we all have felt at one time or another under the strain of loss, rejection, or loneliness, and the appeal of the book is watching Rosa go all they way, an end that many of us are probably tempted to pursue to varying degrees (but usually too practical or cowardly to go to the extreme that she does). Rather than indulging ourselves in our anger or sadness, most of us manage supress our feelings and keep them under wraps in the mundanity of our daily lives.

Bravo.