Altered States (Spanish Edition) (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Booker Prize winner Brookner excels at rendering the stoic, muted lives of lonely people. In another of her coolly rendered but immensely absorbing novels, she trains her keenly observant eye on the fear of facing old age alone. Her 16th novel (after Incidents in the Rue Laughier) is also a stunning study of obsessive passion and of the ways one man's promising life is irrevocably altered by an unwise but irresistible attraction. Narrator Alan Sherwood, a conventional, dutiful London solicitor, now in his mid-50s, looks back on events that shaped his life over 15 years earlier: his reckless, mad lust for and one-night liaison with scornful, self-centered Sarah Miller (granddaughter of his father's first wife); his loveless marriage-on-the-rebound to prim, clinging Angela Milsom; the still-birth of their infant daughter, which Angela unfairly blames on Alan's absence (he was off secretly pursuing Sarah); and Angela's subsequent suicide. Using Alan's soul searching as the framework of her narrative, Brookner explores the discordant ways men and women view each other and the world. Alan, who mythologizes calculating, ruthless Sarah as a "passively demonic" pre-Raphaelite vision, later comes to understand that childishly dependent Angela, who inhabits the other end of the spectrum, is as aberrant a personality as Sarah. Indeed, it is a little disconcerting that Brookner's view of female nature here seems essentially uncharitable and extreme. All the women in this book, including Alan's mother and his uncle's new wife, create some sort of havoc in trying to balance their needs for intimacy and independence. Yet Brookner makes them credible, and her story of a decent man forever adrift in "intense and hopeless longing" is alive with tension and heartbreak.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

With predictable regularity, Brookner (Incidents in the Rue Laugier, LJ 11/15/95) produces a brooding, atmospheric novel every year or so. And with equal predictability, her quaint, old-fashioned characters tend to aging parents, take unexciting trips abroad, and conduct unsatisfactory love affairs. A loyal reader may be forgiven for feeling that, over time, Brookner's plotlines and characters begin to merge. Her latest protagonist is Alan Miller, a middle-aged widower who works as a solicitor, pays dutiful visits to his mother and her new husband, and pines away for an unrequited love. His obsession with Sarah, a distant cousin and a callous free spirit, progresses from admiration to stalking. After he accepts that she is out of reach, he settles into an unhappy marriage with her friend, Angela. But Sarah continues to drift in and out of his life, and Alan remains besotted with her, eventually putting his marriage at risk. Despite similarities to previous Brookner novels, expect a demand and purchase where necessary.
-?Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., Ontario
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (October 1998)
• Language: Spanish
• ISBN-10: 0140255923
• ISBN-13: 978-0140255928
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a compelling psychological novel about obsession, April 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Altered States (Hardcover)

Altered States continues to haunt me two weeks after I finished it. The main character, an intelligent and prosperous British attorney, encounters a sexual obsession that has the tenacity of inexorable fate. The story is told entirely from his point of view, and it's the reader's job to decide how credible his point of view is. Brookner's writing is precise and cutting. While her conclusions about human existence are shocking, she treats her flawed characters tenderly.

I'm reminded of the old Hitchcock TV shows and of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. It's a short book, very much worth reading.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tragic Yet Tender..., October 12, 2002

By	"celiatraum" (Knoxville, TN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Altered States (Paperback)

A literary tapestry of passion, obsession, melancholy and despair, Altered States cuts straight to the heart of the human condition. So resonant is this brutally poetic saga of innocence lost, the reader cannot help but to reflect upon her own experiences with tenderness and perhaps a degree of sorrow.

A respected attorney and co-inheritor of the law firm of Sherwood Smith, Alan Sherwood treasures his solitude and unwavering ability to keep emotional entanglements at bay. Yet, his well-developed defenses prove useless upon his encounter with the beautiful and utterly disingenuous Sarah, his niece by way of his mother's marriage. Indeed, Sarah's capabilities for emotional indifference are a cut above Alan's own.

As his obsession intensifies, Alan finds himself falling ever more deeply into the abyss until, in a moment of physical and emotional exhaustion, he surrenders. No longer able to endure the turmoil inherent within his quest for the ever-elusive Sarah, he concedes to marry Angela, a meek young woman of impeccable culinary talents with not-so-subtle domestic yearnings and a most tender soul.

It is not long before the match proves tragic for all involved.

Yet, this extraordinary novel is far more than a tale of unrequited love. Rather, it is an exploration into the depths of the human soul and its ability to endure - as well as to succumb.

Altered States is certain to touch any reader who has experienced the exploitation of her own vulnerabilities within careless hands and has seen her beloved illusions shatter beneath the harsh light of day. She may contemplate the past with tender reminiscence yet also look ahead with a fair inkling of hope for somewhere within there resides a longing to embrace those illusions once more.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Conventional man longs for passion and spontaneity., August 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Altered States (Hardcover)

In this stream-of-consciousness novel a modest, conventional man longs to have passion and spontaneity in his life. Although Alan, a lawyer, is often perceptive about other people's character and motives, when he is with them he prides himself on being inattentive -- the "trick of mental absence," he calls it -- in order to avoid being bored or inconvenienced.

Preoccupied with fantasies of the seductive Sarah, he ends up married to dull Angela, who turns out to be afraid of sex. Their domestic 'contract' wears thin very quickly. "I was sent out every morning like a schoolboy, while Angela set to with Hoovers and dusters...." (p. 95) Then Angela becomes pregnant, and takes to her bed. Alan gets tired of cajoling her and dashes to Paris hoping to spend a few hours with Sarah, who doesn't show up. Angela has a miscarriage and slides into a suicidal depression. After her death, Alan manages to see Sarah, but she has no interest in him. At that he gives up entirely, feeling that alienation and passivity must be his fate.

This book is rich in themes: old age, growing up, the extent of personal responsibility, the rigidity of social roles, what a real man or woman is -- and it is not hard to identify with Alan's wistful desire for love, happiness, and feeling truly alive. (Of course he goes about it all wrong.) "Altered States" is a witty and insightful book, filled with deft turns of phrase and flashes of dry humor, e.g. "For a moment I wondered what [my aunts] were doing at Angela's wedding, until I remembered that it was my wedding as well." (p. 104) or "...explanations for absence that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been...." (p. 30)