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46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lifetime of loneliness, June 23, 2009
Anita Brookner's protagonists invariably take long walks to exhaust themselves and suppress their unwanted emotions. They're more comfortable with books and paintings than with social interaction. And they engage in an endless flow of torturous introspection. In this book Brookner remains true to form.
Paul Sturgis is a 72-year-old retired investment banker. Despite his tall good looks, solid finances and courteous demeanor, he is very much alone in life.
Niceness has somehow condemned him to a lifetime of loneliness. Friendship is too much to hope for, but he attempts to contrive a meaningful connection of some sort with three women: a distant relative by marriage, a former lover who is mysteriously ill - and a rootless and probably predatory woman met in Venice.
He rationalizes why it might be beneficial to relate more definitely with one of these women, all of whom are alarming or disappointing in different ways. The dismayed reader stays on board with the unhappy and indecisive hero, held fast by Brookner's seductively beautiful prose.
Brookner's genius for capturing the poetry of loneliness is unsurpassed in the literary world. If you don't mind a somewhat depressing story line, her exquisite style gives pleasure always. STRANGERS, in any case, holds out a tiny hope that things may be looking up.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Soliloquies in Solitude, June 19, 2009
This review is from: Strangers: A Novel (Hardcover)
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.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A study of isolation and loneliness (3.5*s), July 29, 2009
This review is from: Strangers: A Novel (Hardcover)
This rather short, fortunately so, novel is a seemingly endless monologue/rumination, on the part of seventy-something Paul Sturgis, a Londoner, on a life of solitude and loneliness. Despite its unrelenting dreariness, the book is not without its insights on both personal psychological inadequacies and the sometimes trying nature of social interactions, especially for the aged.
Sturgis may have escaped his miserable childhood in a lifeless household populated by parents completely unsuited for each other, but at the cost of being tone-deaf concerning social behavior. His social overreactions usually manifested in obsessive kindness, attentiveness, and desire to understand other's "inner" selves invariably become an irritant to women friends and lovers. Moreover, he cannot adjust to what he perceives to be their sense of entitlement, neediness, and breeziness, though he is not without admiration of their seeming strength.
Paul cannot be dismissed as a complete social misfit. He is not wrong to perceive pervasive social indifference, which he, on a daily basis, runs afoul of when he seeks to ingratiate himself with too much detail in brief encounters. It is also the basis of his fears of dying in a public venue among "strangers." He does march on without engaging in spells of self-pity. And he is hardly alone. The wife of his deceased cousin Helena regales Paul with her expansive social life when he visits on Sunday afternoons. Upon her death, he discovers that it was all a façade: she too was friendless.
He does fantasize about escaping his unhappy life. Dreams of a romanticized past or taking long walks had more or less worked for years. He becomes convinced that shedding all responsibilities and moving to southern Europe to a life of sun and living in hotels may be the answer.
The book is rather sobering. But it does tend to become tedious and repetitious. One tends to feel bombarded with Paul's unhappy situation. But that is offset by the author's known ability to turn a nice phrase. Paul may be a bit of an extreme case, but if his life is any example, it is rather difficult to simply turn around one's life regardless of self-perception and desire to do so.
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