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Sto caricando le informazioni... Small Pleasures (2021)
Informazioni sull'operaSmall Pleasures di Clare Chambers (2021)
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. This book is so damn wholesome, so pure. It's fluff and wonderful and then... then after 3/4ths of pure goodness we get, uh... UH! Hello, 911, I'd like to report so many crimes. This book just went straight into chaos. Spoilers before the line. ___ So basically the mysterious virgin pregnancy is the brother of the head doctor(I think that's who) and the brother somehow magically raped the virgin mother while she was asleep. I've no idea how he managed this, it's very unclear to me and I wanna go with how my brain works: she took sleeping pills and fell into a deep sleep. As someone who takes pills to help me sleep, I've slept through earthquakes, literal earthquakes, as well as storms. So he sneaks into her room, and rapes her, then wanders off. I'm gonna ignore the many questions I have but here is the series of them in no order: Did he dress her back up after raping her? Did he only climax inside of her and nowhere else? If he didn't climax inside of her, isn't it weird she had these stains on her clothes? Did she sleep completely naked? Did she wake up half-undressed and just shrug it off? Often rape has sore and aching aftermath, as does casual sex, isn't she sore? She didn't even have a vague dream about being violated or a weird feeling something was wrong? Seriously, there's just a guy who rapes sleeping women scurrying about out there? The fuck this guy so slick at sneaking in, then sneaking out? Jane the Virgin vibes ahoy until that end. Basically a horribly violent rape, then a horrific train accident happens. Boom! Violent death ending, woooo! I've handled My Sister's Keeper, but this one didn't have that energy. MSK had a dark and dreary theme the entire book. Small Pleasures was wholesome and wonderful and good! It had no dark underlying energy. This came out of nowhere, just like the train! nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Premi e riconoscimentiElenchi di rilievo
Fiction.
Literature.
Historical Fiction.
HTML: In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett??an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion. "With wit and dry humor...quietly affecting in unexpected ways. Chambers' language is beautiful, achieving what only the most skilled writers can: big pleasure wrought from small details."??The New York Times LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It's a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape. That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen's gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives...with unimaginable consequences. Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a literary tour-de-force in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfillment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.92Literature English English fiction Modern Period 2000-Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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Media: Audio
Read by Karen Cass
Length: ~10 hours
I have no idea as to how this book landed on my tbr list. The only clue I had as to its contents was its cover that looks very much like a late 1950s swap-card. Swapping cardboard cards with pictures of flowers and pretty little girls in hoop skirts and braided hair is what girls used to do for fun in the late 1950s in Australia. Simple times. Flat times. I remember those days in black and white. The pastel-colored cards were the bright lights of our beige lives.
Gen X-er Clare Chambers has done her homework. She tells us so in the “Credits” in the audio version. Her 1950s facts are spot on. Her style and plot are flat and go with the period, lacking subtlety and depth. Textureless. I doubt this was on purpose. Perhaps the dreariness of those bleak times got to her.
The main characters are of the Silent Generation, and here Chambers falls down. While the environment - the buildings, cuisine, fashions - are portrayed accurately, the adult characters are surprisingly aware and supportive of Gen-X values.women’s independence, sex outside marriage, gay sex, tolerance of atheism. But their inner lives are bland like their food and the architecture of the time. All a bit scrambled up.
I read somewhere that Claire Chambers has been likened to Kate Atkinson. Poor Kate.
Back to the book. There are two storylines. A beautiful woman (Silent gen) believes that her daughter is a product of parthenogenesis, that is conceived without the participation of male sperm. Gretchen writes a letter claiming this to a regional newspaper in Kent. The letter is picked up and a woman journo (Jean) takes it on as a virgin birth story. Jean does her background research while she partakes of a lot of Silent gen things. She uses pay phones that connect to human operators, she eats meat with three veg for “tea”, smokes, and is surprised when children say cute things.
While researching for her virgin birth story Jean has it off with the salt-of-the-earth husband of the beautiful Gretchen, who happens to be a closet lesbian. This affaire between Jean and Gretchen’s husband is the second story of the novel, and runs along in parallel with the virgin birth.
I read till the end. I thought of how it was for my parents back in the late fifties and how we kids had no idea of what troubles they had in their younger lives. I felt sorry for the pre-pubescent me with my swap-cards..
I gave this book a 3, 2 for research and 1 by default. ( )