Leaving Home [Paperback]

Anita Brookner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2007

At twenty-six, Emma Roberts comes to the painful realization that if she is ever to become truly independent, she must leave her comfortable London flat and venture into the wider world. This entails not only breaking free from a claustrophobic relationship with her mother, but also shedding her inherited tendency toward melancholy. Once settled in a small Paris hotel, Emma befriends Fran?oise Desnoyers, a vibrant young woman who offers Emma a glimpse into a turbulent life so different from her own. In this exquisite new novel of self-discovery, Booker Prize-winner Anita Brookner addresses one of the great dramas of our lives: growing up and leaving home.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Brookner's narrators often combine a Jamesian inner life with a deceptively blank external one, and Emma Roberts is a paragon of that type. An English doctoral student in the late 1970s whose restraint matches her choice of studies—classical garden design—Emma grew up isolated with a widowed, reclusive mother. "We loved each other greatly," she says, "yet so exclusive was that love that it was experienced more like anguish." Emma is studying in Paris and living as hermetically as her mother; her only acquaintances are a sexually adventurous librarian, Françoise, and a reserved young novelist, Michael. When Emma gets word that her mother has died, she rushes home to London and within weeks finds herself in a muted, epistolary power struggle with Françoise. Meanwhile, Emma meets Philip Hudson, a surgeon whose taciturn nature rivals her own (and recalls a less exalted Mr. Darcy). But things happen in Emma's life only to be swallowed by the deep, silent river of her shyness and her willingness to go along with what others want. This isn't an Austen novel, and even an instant of unalloyed pleasure would seem glib after several pages of Emma's sere circumspection. That circumspection makes the novel very powerful, even as Emma's passivity is sometimes so extreme it feels concocted only to justify a few more elegant sentences. But Emma is among the most delicately rendered heroines in recent fiction. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

It’s more of the same for Anita Brookner’s 23rd novel. The Baltimore Sun calls the Booker Prize winner (for Hotel du Lac [1984]) "an acquired taste, like espresso or olives," an opinion that, for better or worse, carries through the bulk of reviews for Leaving Home. While some critics hail her new novel as another dose of the author’s trademark psychological acuity, others are tired of a style that reads more like a cliché. Comparisons to Henry James, Jane Austen, and Edith Wharton abound, as if Brookner’s modern characters would fit a century earlier. But where Austen, James, and Wharton wrote voluminous prose, Brookner is still every bit the cool minimalist. Recently reviewed: Making Things Better (***1/2 May/June 2003) and The Rules of Engagement (*** Mar/Apr 2004).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400095654
• ISBN-13: 978-1400095650
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,460,706 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It is Short, Concise, Well Written, and Clever; Exciting? No., February 17, 2008

By 

J. E. Robinson - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Leaving Home (Paperback)

This is a short and well written story by Brookner, similar in style to some of her other novels.

Anita Brookner (born 1928) is an English novelist and art historian. She was born in London to Polish immigrant parents. Many of her novels feature links to other European countries and immigrants to the UK.

Brookner was an only child and she never married. In her novels, many of her protagonists lead a solitary life, going through stages of emotional development. For example, her Booker novel Hotel du lac is about a novelist, Edith Hope, who is staying in a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva. The book follows that pattern: she gets involved with the other guests and undergoes emotional changes. Also, her parents were secular Jews, and a few of her characters have Jewish connections.

Without giving away the plot, the present novel follows the pattern of a single woman, again an only child, who grows up in London and moves to Paris.

There are few moments of high anxiety in the story. It is low key but well written and concise. I liked her prose and would recommend the book. She is similar to a few other English writers such a Barbara Pym, but not identical.

I am not surprised that some readers do not like the book. It is to be read and enjoyed for the writing as much as anything.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Tale of Two Cities, March 5, 2007

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Leaving Home (Paperback)

The title and back cover of Anita Brookner's novel suggest that this is about the perennial adolescent drama of breaking away from parental influences and leaving the nest. But this is only a small part of it. Emma Roberts, though younger than most of Brookner's protagonists, is already in her mid-twenties, and her quest is more a search for home than the leaving of it. She begins by moving to Paris as a graduate student of landscape architecture, staying first of all in a horrible student hostel, then taking a room in a small hotel. Later, she buys her own flat in London, and alternates between the two cities, discovering more about herself, even if only by coming to accept what she is not. The one home that she really envies is a country house belonging to the mother of her vivacious friend Françoise -- although the world of the French haute bourgeoisie makes her feel unworthy by comparison.

I suspect that this novel is more autobiographical than most; it also has personal resonances for me, since I was working on my own art history thesis in Paris at a similar age. Although I am a man, while Brookner writes so tellingly about women, I treasure her insight into the female mind. It is true that she confines herself to women of a certain class and mental disposition but, for me, that only increases the sense of authenticity.

Not for nothing is Brookner's scholarly field the late 18th-century watershed between French classicism and romanticism. Her characters always brush shoulders with romance, but opt instead for the comfort and predictability of classic balance, a quality which is also reflected in the cool elegance of the author's prose. This novel is, in effect, an ANTI-romance, a book in which few things actually happen -- or sometimes happen only to be reversed a few chapters later. There is a situation late in the book in which Emma, who has left her own maternal home, suddenly finds herself in charge of Françoise's home and ailing mother, while the daughter appears to have broken away entirely. But a few pages further, the situation has been stood on its head once more.

Such delightful realignments within a basically static universe give me the same fascination as a Calder mobile: a limited range of elements moving in relation to each other, seen now in this configuration, now in that, but always maintaining an essential balance. This applies as much to the delicate rhythm of Brookner's prose as to the subtle push and pull of her emotional plotting. For those who, like me, take pleasure in her quiet aesthetic, her novels create a unique atmosphere: a closed world, perhaps, but one that is totally absorbing and not the least depressing. The title of this book notwithstanding, there is a special satisfaction in completing the emotional circle: coming home again.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars And Going Nowhere, March 21, 2007

By 

Polkadotty (Mountains of Western North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Leaving Home (Paperback)

Classic Brookner. A reclusive, bookish, widowed mother. An introspective, timid, sheltered daughter. The little lives they lead enabled by lack of monetary worries and no real need to "do" much of anything save remain intropective. Emma wanders between Paris and London and falls into whatever situations / lodgings / friendships present themselves most conveniently to her. She's working on a book about classical garden design but remains oddly apart from anything lively and flourishing. She exists in a sort of gray vacuum. Boredom / ennui / lack of motivation is the theme. Even April in Paris can't jog Emma fully awake. Whatever. Reading Brookner is ultimately therapeutic. One's own little life always appears ever so much "more" after doing so. Thank you, Anita.