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The Sin Eater (1977)

di Alice Thomas Ellis

Altri autori: Vedi la sezione altri autori.

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
1546176,159 (3.5)11
A troubled family gather at the ancestral home on the Welsh coast, awkwardly awaiting the death of the family patriarch. Polite conversation gives way to sly remarks and bickering in this tense reunion, and the household's respectable surface is scratched away to expose secret warfare, malicious games and viciously funny class-consciousness. In Alice Thomas Ellis's first novel, the caustic wit, brisk pace, and profound insight she is famous for are displayed to full effect.… (altro)
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» Vedi le 11 citazioni

check my copy when home - is setting England or Wales ?
think I bought this from Common Reader ( )
  Overgaard | Jul 23, 2023 |
I didn't think I had read this before, but I'm no longer sure. Maybe I just recognised the unlikeable characters and their contempt for those around them from other books by Alice Thomas Eliis. ( )
  isabelx | Aug 9, 2017 |
The afterword (written by Thomas Meagher, whoever that might be) of my Common Reader edition (Akadine Press) of The sin eater is lyrical about the novel and its author, Alice Thomas Ellis, a kind of enthusiasm I do not share.

Many books have been written by British authors, Welsh, English and Scottish, about groups of characters convening in a countryside cottage or house for whatever resolution, and then go their own ways. Any particular wit (I did not notice), any outstanding dialogue or conversation (must have escaped my attention), any brilliancy otherwise, I could not detect.

Apparently, The sin eater which came out in 1977, is Alice Thomas Ellis' debut novel (the author of the afterword describes how he retrieved a copy from an antiquairian book shop), but her style is reminiscent of the 1930s or 1940s. What makes the novel somewhat unusual, perhaps, at least within the realm of British fiction, is its sense of Christian background, often absent from other English literature.

There wasn't anything that attracted me to this novel. ( )
1 vota edwinbcn | Dec 11, 2011 |
another british writer who seems to be very poorly known here even though her books are fantastic vignettes of british class culture and social manners. Incredibly witty internal and spoken dialogue of everyday characters that we have all met in daily life. The characters and dialogue will have the perfect veneer of manners and decency while their thoughts and often their barbed or veiled comments reveal the true inner thoughts not only of them but that we too all share. Hilariously funny too.
  saligo | Dec 10, 2009 |
Alice Thomas Ellis practices a peculiar form of aesthetic satire: pastiche in domestic decor. Rose, in The sin eater, parodies periods in her rooms: `Part of her fondness for the house was based on the ease with which she could make a fool of it'. Likewise of her guests: `"This is a lovely room," said Angela, ... "It's what I always call a traditional drawing room". The element of pastiche introduced by Rose -- the tropical shells displayed on a small table, the wax flowers under a glass dome -- seemed to have escaped her notice'. Rose stages her meals. Planning a tea to follow the cricket match, she considers, `An Edwardian tea on the lawn, white cloths and the Crown Derby ... a thirties tea on the terrace ... a traditional farmhouse meal ...'.
`Once she had cooked dinner for a Midland client of Henry's ... she had given him prawn cocktail, steak and pretty little chips, and an antipodean thing called a pavlova - the sort of meal the family described as "Uxbridge Country Club" ... he was a nice man and appreciative, and had left happily, sure he had had a splendid evening'.
Ellis's views are based on deeply held traditional moral values (she is a fervent Roman Catholic). She deplores and condemns the vulgar modernization of village life and of the church, bitterly presented in The sin eater as corruption:.
Through the bitter satire comes a yearning for the old, cherished values and ways: `Violets and wild strawberries had grown in that field once, and the ewes with their lambs had found it comforting after the winds on the hills. ... Once, when you went out you could hope to see at least a few beautiful [nuns] in ample shapely robes, veils lifting on the wind real clothes, with the significance clothes should have: reassuring, decisive. Now nuns were the ugliest people on the street.' ( )
1 vota KayCliff | Aug 1, 2008 |
in Alice Thomas Ellis's sly novel of (bad) manners, perhaps the best way to put it is that the book's bipeds walk around as if outfitted in spiked armor. It's Ellis's conviction that the idiosyncratic attitudes by which people live render connections between them impossible. Their pricking interactions inevitably have comic or sad repercussions -- more likely, both.... juicy blend of Anton Chekov and Ivy Compton-Burnett
aggiunto da KayCliff | modificaNew York Times, David Finkle (Dec 20, 1998)
 
Ellis's hilarious narrative moves briskly, helped by prose that is precise and illustrative, without a wasted word.
aggiunto da KayCliff | modificaPublishers Weekly
 

» Aggiungi altri autori

Nome dell'autoreRuoloTipo di autoreOpera?Stato
Alice Thomas Ellisautore primariotutte le edizionicalcolato
Beck, IanImmagine di copertinaautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato
Walsh, JohnIntroduzioneautore secondarioalcune edizioniconfermato

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Titolo originale
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"Goodbye," said Rose. "Remember -- please and thank you, no strangers, and don't fall in the lake."
In the Welsh tourist resort of Llanelys, in an old, ivy-covered, flagstoned house, a familiar drama is brewing. (Introduction)
Citazioni
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`Phyllis's bungalow seemed almost to leap at them as they came to it ... It was made of shiny, unvariegated brick and looked horrifyingly, angrily red perhaps with embarrassment at being so out of place among the old fields and sheep roads. Inside, it had that uniquely rural squalor which results from the attempt to impose urban notions of "luxury" on quite unsuitable surroundings. ... Awful pictures of charging elephants, weeping children and the Boul. Mich. in summer. Jack ... liked to expound on their subtlety of execution and depth of perception. ... `Now they were coming to the building site, where architects had expressed themselves. ... "Don't look", advised Rose.
`"I suppose the people who live in them like them," said Ermyn tremulously, looking determinedly before her. ...
Violets and wild strawberries had grown in that field once, and the ewes with their lambs had found it comforting after the winds on the hills. ... Once, when you went out you could hope to see at least a few beautiful [nuns] in ample shapely robes, veils lifting on the wind real clothes, with the significance clothes should have: reassuring, decisive. Now nuns were the ugliest people on the street.
Once she had cooked dinner for a Midland client of Henry's ... she had given him prawn cocktail, steak and pretty little chips, and an antipodean thing called a pavlova the sort of meal the family described as "Uxbridge Country Club" ... he was a nice man and appreciative, and had left happily, sure he had had a splendid evening.
She was greedy and clever and cynical, qualities essential to a good cook, and sometimes she used her ingredients like a witch, as social comment, to do mischief, or as a benefice.
Ultime parole
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(Click per vedere. Attenzione: può contenere anticipazioni.)
(Click per vedere. Attenzione: può contenere anticipazioni.)
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A troubled family gather at the ancestral home on the Welsh coast, awkwardly awaiting the death of the family patriarch. Polite conversation gives way to sly remarks and bickering in this tense reunion, and the household's respectable surface is scratched away to expose secret warfare, malicious games and viciously funny class-consciousness. In Alice Thomas Ellis's first novel, the caustic wit, brisk pace, and profound insight she is famous for are displayed to full effect.

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