In the reclusive and sensitive Mrs. May, Anita Brookner has created a character of utterly memorable proportions. Though no one is allowed behind the high walls of her inner world, the reader is invited to spend a week there: the impressions of this experience stick. Brookner's prose is flat but fertile, a golden plain that rustles in the breeze and is ripe for harvest. And other characters frequent these pages: the young as viewed from the treetops of age; the old and their shifting grasp on life; the dead exhumed and examined in the light. And all cry out to be heard, some with a genteel wave of the hand, others with self-satisified, irritated shouts. To know Mrs. May, one must begin to think the way she does, and perhaps this is the real brilliance of this novel: one is given a roadmap to her mind and urged to use it. It is difficult to believe that the "visitors" themselves could be as oafish as they are; this novel is also a meditation on the smiling thoughtlessness of youth. Age, too, must undergo rigorous cross-examination in the courtroom of this book, and the testimony given makes fascinating reading. Brookner is so smooth, so pleasant to imbibe, that one forgets she is a complex and sophisticated drink. Don't let the readability of "Visitors" fool you; this novel is fun, but hardly kidstuff.

An editor of mine once said to me that he didn't think a wholelot happened in an Anita Brookner novel. "It's like somebody takes a painting off the wall and contemplates the patch of wallpaper that hasn't faded. That's the book."

He was right--and he was very wrong.

Lives in Brookner's novels almost always follow the same arc as that wallpaper--from bright possibility to faded reality, and her characters are struck by the contrast of hopeful past and dim present. That is, the characters she most sympathizes with. Because in Brookner's world, there are the quiet, compliant, resigned types (who sometimes long to be bolder), and then there are brash heedless people who like FitzGerald's Daisy and Tom Buchanan smash things and people because they don't care what others think.

The painful and sometimes humiliating interaction of these two types is the source of the drama. Brookner's often compared to Henry James, and like James, she posits that adventures of consciousness, travels of the mind and heart, are as strange and threatening as any other trips we might make.

Brookner's newest novel, her seventeenth, is a gloriously moving example of her insight into this paradox, written as always in witty and crystalline prose, and with her usual poetic psychological precision.

Dorothea May grew up very quietly in a London suburb, and it shaped her values: "One ate plain food, was careful not to give offence, and stayed at home until one married." This outwardly sedate spinster's life--in which trips to Europe were as uneventful as trips to the library--was interrupted by an accidental meeting that lead to a happy fifteen-year marriage. But when her husband Henry died, Dorothea slipped back into the silence and virtual isolation she had been so accustomed to. While she had dearly loved her husband, when she at last got rid of his things, she "felt a sort of elation on realizing that in the future she would not be disturbed."

Well-off at seventy, in reasonably good health, but fighting recognition of her body's growing frailty, she's also profoundly aware of "approaching the end of life, and that silence was appropriate." Brookner captures the sustaining rituals of Dorothea's narrowed life with heartbreaking and at times comic accuracy. While her own family is gone, she does have rich in-laws left, and doesn't really mind providing them with a conversational "diversion" due to her perceived oddness.

These same in-laws--careful to phone her every week to check on her health, but never coming much closer--disrupt the reverie-filled life she's sunken into. Her sister-in-law's granddaughter has decided to come back to London from Massachusetts to get married, and Dorothea is pressured to offer her hospitality to the best man. The idea of a stranger in her home is appalling, but Dorothea can't say no to this surprising request.

Until now, she has been "moving through her shadowy rooms undisturbed, as though she were her own ghost." But the presence of a houseguest who is young and somewhat opaque to her, along with the oncoming wedding and the immersion in the present, is enough to change her life. That change is Jamesian: Dorothea comes to see her childhood, her parents, her marriage, her one brief affair in a completely new light. She emerges radiant with understanding, and can heroically face growing old: "the country without maps." It's an almost breathtaking series of insights and discoveries, and Visitors is that rare book: a literary page-turner.

Brookner's great gifts as a novelist are on lavish display in Visitors. Few authors can communicate as deftly and subtly as she can the shocking passage of time, or the baffling way friends can drift apart, and the quiet lies and evasions of family life. What's most amazing is that the quality of her work has been so consistently high year after year. If you haven't read any of her novels, Visitors is a wonderful introduction to one of our best and most consistently enjoyable contemporary novelists.

Lev Raphael, author of LITTLE MISS EVIL, 4th in the Nick Hoffman series...

In an age when most novels deal with issues in the heavy handed rhetoric of psychotherapy, it is a joy to see Brookner filter her observations with such subtelty and taste. And when most editors mandate that their authors "dramatize" every scene with clunky dialogue (as if we were children and could not get the message any other way!), I found it a meditative pleasure to read a novel so deeply steeped in a character's inner life. Yet, when dialogue appears, it is flawless.

Brookner is a supremely subtle writer. For example, many of Thea's differences with her husband's cousins are due to the fact that she is a gentile who married into a close-knit family of Jews. Yet, the word "Jew" never apears once. She manages to handle the issue delicately, without offending anyone, grinding an axe or drawing too much attention it.

It was an enlightening change to see life through the eyes of a seventy-year old, and unlike some of Brookner's novels, this book had a gently upbeat ending.

This novel was truly depressing. It was all about the childhood dreams of the two main characters, Maud and Edward, and how their small dreams never came to fruition. Throughout the book the characters strive for and constantly fall short of what they desire, which in both cases is freedom and love. Neither can relate to the other which leaves them both emotionally stunted and unable to fully enjoy what should be a good life together. One of the biggest problems I had with the book was the timescale. It seemed to me that the dates given really didn't match with the attitudes or style of living described in the book. I fully believed that the book was taking place around the early 20th century and was shocked when it finally declared itself to be set in 1971. All in all this is not a bad book, although I myself did not really care for it. It is well written and the story is interesting, although depressing and tragic. Incidents in the Rue Laugier seems to me to be a bitter book written about lives lived in dissatisfaction and regret. By the end of this book, I have to admit that I was really depressed and disliked the characters intensely. I could not empathise with them at all. However, by the fact that it left me sad and angry it is clear that it certainly made an emotional impact on me.

Few writers ever attain the depth of character and emotion so succinctly captured by Anita Brookner. Her characters beckon us to read on for as we examine their lives, we find we cannot cannot help but be moved to investigate the deepest feelings and motivations in our own lives as well. Within the novel,Brookner herself becomes philosopher as she wonders about the mystery of our emotional desires and why the events of our lives turn out the way they do. Brookner captivates the reader with her own special magic; with prose that seems almost poetic and with characters so beautifully drawn they are unforgettable.

For fans of Anita Brookner, this one is almost the best. Did not find it depressing at all, on the contrary. The elegance and persuasiveness of the language is sheer pleasure, not a single false note in the characters. Ms. Brookner is a genius, ranks up there with Virginia Woolf.

Anita Brookner refers to this trilogy in her introduction to the NYRB edition as "a masterpiece," and it is quite clear from reading it that L.P. Hartley intended this as his artist's summa. The works are not as well known, however, as Hartley's THE GO-BETWEEN, and I think there is a reason for that: although the acccomplishments of the EUSTACE AND HILDA trilogy are genuine, it is not as polished a work as THE GO-BETWEEN. The principle problem with the trilogy is that almost all of the characters (including Hilda) exist only as they are perceived by the timid, pleasure-loving, and deeply narcissistic Eustace: thus they do not wholly "live" for us, and though Eustace himself seems quite real, he is so very sensitive that (to paraphrase Christopher Durang) you'd like to hit him. Eustace's fascination with the wealthy and with luxury inevitably bring to mind Marcel Proust, who clearly seems a model for Hartley's trilogy. The trilogy also seems modelled on Galsworthy and Meredith, however, and at times it makes for a very strange melange. It does have some fantastic set pieces, however, including Hilda's trip in the airplane with Dick Staveley and her later breakdown and its aftermath.

I cannot imagine how I manged to go through college, a graduate program in English, and many years of teaching British literature without ever having read this book. The character development is excellent, and even when the characters are being aggravating (as they sometimes are), the reader truly cares about them and wants to see what happens next. I highly recommend this book to all fans of the well-crafted British novel. Furthermore, I recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in the ways, both healthy and unhealthy, that siblings interact.

Certainly the most complicated and complex set of charcters in literature. And that THE charcters count up to only two only serves to underline the essence of the book. The trilogy is basically an exploration of releationship between a very unforthcoming and rather narcisstic Eustace and the domineering Hilda. "Shrimp and the anemone" starts off the tale from their childhood and culminates with "Eustace and Hilda". Both are certainly doomed to disappointments - neither can look beyond the other. For all Hilda's success at the hospital, it is Eustace's guardian that she sees herself - moral as well as the economic guardian.
One never senses any feeling in Eustace to escape this bond.Rather he is as much a slave to Hilda as she wills all to be. As the story progresses towards an intriguing climax, the tables are turned as Hilda now becomes dependant on Eustace for her medication. Eustace gears up to it gamefully - and it is reeally the final chapters of the book which explore the relationship at a direct level.
All in all, it is a wondferful read. Recommended for those who love words and who do not mind a leisurely pace. A masterpiece !

The characters in A Closed Eye are so real and ring with such truth that they haunt me days after finishing the novel. Rarely has an author so clearly explained her characters' emotions. Anita Brookner is not interested in a gripping plot line. Instead she creates real people whom we compare to ourselves and to our neighbors. She challenges us to reevaluate our own lives, to try to understand our own motives as well as we understand those of her characters. Although detailing the small, mundane lives of her characters, Brookner reminds us that all people face frustrations, failed dreams, and lives of compromise. In a strange way that becomes supportive to the readers and helpful to us in coping with our own troubles. This book is not for romantics looking for fairy tale endings. Reading A Closed Eye is an intense, cathartic experience. I felt Brookner's characters' loneliness and understood their compromises and their choices. I returned from the book to my own world less judgmental and more tolerant of others and of myself. I mourn the lost lives of these characters as I would my friends. Art changes one's perception of the world; that is what this book did for me.

The first half of the book contains, as do almost all Brookner books, a compelling word-picture of a girl, growing to maturity in a social landcape of seemingly appalling emptiness. Her rather distraught mother, sensing her daughter Harriet's inability to manage anything like a full life, manages to get her married off to the safe Freddy (whose safeness seems somewhat perverted in the bedroom - in one small , laconic and chilling scene , Brookner obliquely describes Freddy's style, characterised by the infliction of careless rather than deliberate pain and the sotto voce commands of " quiet!" and "keep still....") Still, it seems enough for Harriet despite her intuitive feel that it must be possible for it to be better.When her daughter Imogen is born, both she - and in a lesser and perhaps more pathetic way Freddy - bring the child up to be a perfect monster of selfishness and ingratitude. One can almost SEE Immy, prancing and demanding as an infant, self-centred and contemptuous as a girl. Imogen is beautiful, shallow, not particularly intelligent but full of what it takes to succeed.One of her chief 'attributes' is her ability to reduce her ageing father to humiliated shame at daring to be the father of such a beauty and he mother to fruitless pleadings to be allowed into her life. Harriet is doomed,it seems, to a life half-lived in matters of love. Her friend Tessa ( a bit of an Imogen herself as a girl) had married Jack, a deeply attractive man of the sort our mother warned us about - uncomitted to the point of pathology. Anita Brookner's admiration for this character is apparent, especially the part where she gives him terse-but-manly lines to say on Tessa's deathbed. Of course Harrriet is in love with him, always has been, but true to her usual style, never manages much more than a kiss, though it is an apocalyptic one. (Germaine Greer once said that as a girl she thought that apocalyptic kissess in novels should be understood as full blown sex....??). Jack and Tessa's daughter Lizzie (about whom I both wanted to hear more but was afraid to do so in case she turned out to be a life not even a quarter lived..) has been semi brought up by Harriet, mostly due to the fact that Tessa regarded Lizzie as a kind of hostage for Jack's eventual return(s) and needed somewhere safe to park her. Poor Lizzie, forever in the shadow of the unspeakable Immy; did she know her moment of Phyrric victory when she is carried away on Jack's shoulders and Immy sees that Lizzies father is so superior to poor old Freddy? It's scenes like this that keep me reading Anita Brookner , no matter how cross and depressed the heroines make me. Imogens death in a rather banal car crash scenario ( why, I wonder - would not death-by-botched abortion, a scene perfectly possible, given the grounds already laid for it with the cool and distanced Lizzie, have been better, dramatically speaking?) sets Harriet free - if freedom to take your decaying and cantakerous husband to Swiss health spas can be called freedom. His death really sets her free, but for what? The novel ends with Harriet asking Lizzie to come and stay with her (providing Immys name isn't mentioned) in her European villa. She, Lizzie - (depicted as living upon low-fat yoghurt when she remembers to eat at all) and Harriet's new-found friend an aging but jaunty old boy of the type Elzabeth Taylor the English novelist described so well, are left at the end of the novel, poised to become a trio, all with inner emptiness held at bay by each others doubtful company and those little tricks known to all lonely people which make the day pass. Why does one keep reading Anita Brookner and engaging with these bloodless heroines? Because she writes SO damn well and just when you least expect it, provides a little vignette which flushes the corpse with life!!!

With an unmistakable air of dignity and deliciously wry insight, British novelist Anita Brookner once again tweaks the microscope on the human psyche as she examines the intricacies of life, love and friendship within contemporary society.

It is April, and Blanche Vernon finds herself divorced and alone in her Park Lane flat after twenty years of marriage to a man who had once found her too exuberant for his tastes. Yet, her efforts in cultivating a drier, more serious countenance had little effect upon his regard for her-or lack thereof. Rather, Bertie Vernon left his wife for a passionate though shameless young woman by the name of Mousie.

Maintaining a simple yet respectable existence, Blanche finds herself spending many an afternoon at the National Gallery, where she lingers before masterpieces depicting the hedonism of the gods and the virtue of the saints. So absorbed is she within the solitude of her circumstances, Blanche sees little possibility of amending her routine until one particular day in which she encounters Elinor, a child of boundless seriousness who has never uttered a word, and her step-mother, Sally, a beautiful yet artless woman of little conscience, in the outpatient ward of the hospital where Blanche volunteers twice a week. Immediately taken with the unusual demeanor of the child, Blanche finds her curiosity and desire to do good drawing her into a world wherein she becomes an unwilling accessory to and victim of petty manipulations and self-aggrandizing agendas.

Illuminating the ageless tug-of-war between freedom and responsibility as well as the perpetual struggle between humanity's hedonism and saintliness, The Misalliance lures the reader into an internal dialogue within which she very well may begin to contemplate her own nature as well as the motivations of those to whom she bestows her trust.

I'm a fan of the writing of British women, with few exceptions, and I was long overdue in trying Anita Brookner. In this novel Brookner exhibits strong literary prowess in her impeccable use of the language. Nary a word is wasted in this tight, fast-moving novel. I was entirely immersed in this book for the gripping nature of the plot as well as the empathy I felt for the characters. An absolutely fabulous read! I'm now onto _Hotel du Lac_ and have no doubt it will be an equally engaging read.

Anita Brookner knows how to focus her readers' attention powerfully on the principal characters of her books. In this regard her skills are akin to those of an immense magnifying glass which condense the sun's wide rays into a small hot center of light: after a few chapters, her characters burst into flame under the steady gaze of the reader's scrutiny. George Bland of "A Private View" is one of those. Though he appears to live a dull and uninteresting life, the author's examination of why he does so makes for heartily provocative perusal. This novel is written in the grand tradition of other books which explore the carnival folly of desperate old age willing to immolate itself on the indifferent bonfires of youth. One is reminded of Thomas Mann's "The Death in Venice," for example. Some of the usual Brookner appetizers and entrees are on offer here: the intense internal monologue; the snake oil placebo of tea for what ails; the visits to the shops when boredom constricts; the useless days of people who have nothing to do and no one to do it with. After cavorting for awhile with George Bland and other Brookner pals, one may begin to think of England as a place inhabited solely by elderly people crushed under the weight of gargantuan checkbooks and pointless days. But it is the author's vivisectional analysis of what makes such people tick, persued with rather gleeful abandon, that makes for such riveting reading. This reviewer's advice: spend some time with George Bland and his funky fascination, Katy Gibb. One or the other of them may leave you reaching for the bicarbonate of soda, but their unsettling company is absolutely worth the experience.

I loved this book. As someone who also wonders how books we read affect our perceptions of ourselves and the world, I thought Brookner did a wonderful job illustrating this idea. The novel is beautifully written; the words will resonate in your mind as you this. This is not a stuffy British text at all. I highly recommend it.

While Anita Brookner is very adept at character analysis, I found the book and the characters to be quite dull. As to the mystery of the story...yawn...Was supremely disappointed with the end...

A book by Anita Brookner is always depressing. I can't read more than one at a time. But why read them at all? A friend asked me this question and after pondering it I thought: Because when you open a Brookner, you know what world you're in. It's a discreet world of well-educated, upper middle class people (mainly women) living in comfortable circumstances. Yes, they're also desperate and blighted people. Someone is usually dying but meanwhile sitting up in bed in a very perky peignoir. Once that elderly mother dies, though, things get much worse for the unmarried daughter or son left behind. "Fraud" follows all of Brookner's usual conventions yet it resolves itself strangely quickly, without a firm foundation, after an intriguing beginning suggesting a mystery. If you like Brookner, you'll like "Fraud."

This book is wonderful. Although the characters don't DO much, it's their inner world that counts.

Just when you think Anna is lost forever, she manages to find some inner resource to turn her life around. Hooray! And those that she leaves behind will have to face the honest truth about themselves, or risk living a wasted life.

The author is so very adept at exploring the differences of how we act, in order to be socially acceptable, and how we really feel--what we'd do if we didn't live in "polite society."

(Can I say it without sounding sexist? I suppose not.) Yet another self-loathing woman author with a feminist axe to grind.

A good author with tremendous control over her art form, but tiresome nevertheless. The main character is so self absorbed that everything else is barely two dimentional.

I'd much prefer Alice Munroe for a protrail of individuals and relationships with depth and solidity. Someone who understands [or tries to] the world beyond herself.

Brookner never opens the door, not to let heself out or to let others in.

How sad Fanny has made her life. What strikes me odd is that she is quite intelligent yet doesn't see that she may be to blame for the unimportant life she leads.

This novel is not the typical formula novel. There is no huge plot, no large turn in events, but just the thoughts of a young single girl in London. She is quite perceptive, if not overly contemplative when she meets and makes temporary friends with Nick and Alix. Then she meets James, and things don't seem so gloomy for her, for now she has reason not to hurry the days away.

I think this is a great book for what it's worth. Great literature minus a huge plot. The author does a great job in making a memorable character without having the reading see her through countless events.

Some authors create characters so memorable that they refuse to be dislodged from our brains. These literary sailors scamper up into the rigging of our imagination and unfurl huge sails to carry us far. Such is Fanny Hinton of "Look at Me." Brookner makes the reader feel her embarrassment and anguish so deeply that, were the room in utter darkness and no one else present, one would still feel a pounding blush spread over one's face to read of it. "Look at Me" will grip you and not put you down. Unlike life itself for Fanny, it will not disappoint, for this novel's author is brilliant. She writes fiction the way a veteran cowpuncher rides the range: smoothly, with velvety confidence and her eyes fixed quietly on the certain goal ahead. Some Brookner themes are recurrent and, though effective, can become tiresome: the child of wealthy parents who, though plain in appearance, is as overwrought as a rococo clock; the tea and crumpets which are whipped out whenever anyone catches a chill or a bad case of rejection; the doddering housekeeper who aggravates but is always there in a pinch; the people who take to their beds and become professional invalids whenever the fillet of life toughens into jerkey. This book is not free of these and other fare on the standard Brookner menu. At times they can be too predictable and something of a yawn. But Fanny Hinton of "Look at Me" will remain in the reader's memory long after the more washed-out characters of lesser writers have faded into amnesic oblivion. In just about any novelistic talent show going, she can justifiably stand up tall and take her bow: though quiet as a cloud, this character is made up of one hundred percent pure electricity.