Paradise [Hardcover]

A. L. Kennedy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 8, 2005

From one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, a comic but terrifying love story about two alcoholics alternately battling and embracing their addiction, and each other.

Everything in Hannah Luckraft’s life is tinted amber: her dreary job selling cardboard boxes; her strained relations with a beloved younger brother, who is about to give up on her; and especially her incipient relationship with Robert, a man who understands what it is to drink. They become constant companions, and she drinks up his tender affection with the same soul-ravaged thirst she brings to her search for paradise–the paradise of self-annihilation, a reprieve from the howling loneliness and difficulty of waking life. Together and then alone, she and Robert spiral through the beauty and depravity of a love affair with alcohol and with each other. From Scotland to Montreal, and onward, Hannah travels beyond her limits, beyond herself, in search of the ultimate altered state, the place where she can be happy: her paradise.

No one writes with greater intelligence about the human predicament, about the comic dilemmas of consciousness and the mind divided against itself, and no young writer brings a greater gift of language to our concurrent pursuits of debasement and ascension. Paradise is a novel of dark extremes, rich in emotion–Kennedy’s most gripping and immediate work of fiction yet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. When a dull neighbor asks Hannah Luckraft what she does for a living, Hannah can barely refrain from answering honestly: "Oh, a little theft, monstrosity, credit-card fraud, and my hobbies include giving blow jobs to unpleasant men while I'm semi-unconscious. I also drink a lot." With her fifth novel, Kennedy proves herself—again—to be a master of extracting searing beauty from patently ugly truths. Awash in whisky, 30-year-old narrator Hannah is the consummate professional screwup: she drinks with ferocity and harbors no pretenses about her self-destructive impulses or their horrendous consequences. Her wry, wary commentary has no right to be anything but gut-wrenchingly sad, yet her savage wit and chilling self-awareness transform even unspeakable misery into something howlingly funny. Blacking out becomes "master[ing] the art of escaping from linear time," rehab is reduced to "being slapped down into a grisly ring of pink Naugahyde armchairs and made to discuss [our] personal lives with a dozen emotional vampires" and paradise itself is revealed to be "an untouched bottle and the man who loves me, the man I love." Of course, Hannah knows that happiness can't last, so when a charming drunk named Robert stumbles into her life, her bed and her head, no one dares to hope for a happy ending. Their thirst for oblivion, sobriety and oblivion again is the story of paradise found and lost a thousand times over. "How it happens is a long story, always," but rarely is it so jaw-droppingly good as this. (Mar. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

If there’s one point of consensus in reviews of Kennedy’s latest novel, it’s that she is a masterful stylist. The fork in the road for critics of Paradise, the British author’s fifth U.S. release, is the subject matter. Her supporters are impressed that the book avoids a tumble into bleak self-pity. Hannah is a perceptive, funny guide to her own dissolution. But the detractors—a distinct minority—see Hannah’s ability to express herself and her inability to solve her problems as a narrative failure. In the end, this seems less a criticism of the book than a judgment about its main character. Maybe Paradise hits too close to home, but, if the ayes have it, that’s simply a testament to Kennedy’s skill.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (March 8, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400043646
• ISBN-13: 978-1400043644
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,865,552 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars great style evokes more literary appreciation than feeling, April 29, 2005

By 

B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paradise (Hardcover)

Paradise is one of those books I wanted to enjoy more than I did. Stylistically, it's simply fantastic-the language, the poetic phrasing, the original descriptions and metaphors, the structure and its allusions to the stations of the cross are all evidence of a prose stylist at the top of her craft. Much of the writing is simply gorgeous. But unfortunately it all felt to little purpose to me. The whole was less than the sum of its parts.
One expects a bit of distance from a book whose main character and narrator is a drunk. There's the inherent distance of not really understanding what that entails (beyond the stock cliches which Kennedy does a fine job of avoiding), the distance of willful repulsion ("who would or could live like that?"), and the narrative distance of having a story communicated by someone who slips in and out of time and who is often attempting (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to anesthetize herself.
But there was more than that operating here and though I can't put my finger on just why, I never felt really pulled in by Hannah's story, never compelled by either the sorrows of her life (the fall from middle-class grace, the on-and-off love affair with a fellow drunk, the on-and-off affair with gainful employment or detoxification, etc.) or its accordant joys (the drink obviously, the aforementioned love affair, the recognition that her family still somehow loves her). More and more I found myself appreciating not what I was reading but how it was being communicated.
The book never really took off for me and then noticeably slowed past the two-thirds point. It seemed over long by then and somewhat repetitive, even if that repetitiveness was part of the point. And since we usually know how these things go, there wasn't much suspense or much to compel interest with regard to the two major storylines--her affair with a Robert, a drunken dentist with issues beyond the drinking-- and the various attempts at detox. The stations of the cross references were interesting in a literary fashion (though a bit too blunt at times), but again, never seemed to add much to the story beyond that and so felt more crafted, more artificial, than part of the natural story.
In the end, it's impossible not to appreciate Kennedy's talent, but I found it nearly as impossible to care much for its use here. If I were to recommend a moving book about a few drunks, I'd much more highly recommend Ironweed by William Kennedy, who also displayed a flair for language but wove for me a much more human story from it.

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't get through the book after three sittings, June 14, 2005

By 

Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paradise (Hardcover)

I've enjoyed some of the books in the "Customers who also bought this book" list, so I picked this one up. The back of the book touts the amazing prose and supreme literary talents of the author. I read about 1/3 of it and I couldn't appreciate any of this terrific prose because the action seemed to be going absolutely nowhere at all. I had a series of disjoined snapshots of an alcoholic's life, all of which were just sad and confusing as a whole. I couldn't see where this was all going, and I wasn't compelled to keep turning the pages.

This book may be technically amazing, and you could admire each sentence on a stand-alone basis, but fantastic literary devices do not a good story make. There wasn't enough cohesive action for me to want to stick with Hannah and her story. I'm sorry I don't have more information to offer, but no one else has reviewed this book yet, so I wanted to get some comments out there.

As for the "funny" parts, I didn't find any of those in the 180 pages I read.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional writing, April 4, 2005

By 

J. DAVIDSON (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paradise (Hardcover)

This is a remarkable novel. Kennedy is a superb stylist--each sentence gives me a pang that I didn't write it myself--and the narrator is funny and endearing and maddening even as the story she's telling gets bleaker and bleaker. I really, really liked this book. (I liked Augusten Burroughs' "Dry" too; that's a great story, well-told, though he's not on this level as a stylist; but this, though it's fiction rather than memoir, is ultimately a more realistic and painful picture of life as an alcoholic. Not to knock Burroughs. Read that too! But this novel's amazing in a completely different way.)