Strangers

by Anita Brookner

Book Overview

'He was haunted by a feeling of invisibility, as if he were a mere spectator of his own life, with no one to identify him in the barren circumstances of the here and now.' Paul Sturgis is a retired... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400068347
• ISBN13: 9781400068340
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Excllent book!

This is an excellent book but you may need to be 'a certain age' to appreciate it. I did not like the author's Hotel Du Lac but Strangers is mature, well written and very introspective for those facing the last chapter of their lives. As you approach the end of the book, you think the main character will make one of two decisions but he surprises you and I applauded him! I have already recommended this book to several friends. Again, excellent book!

The Choices We Make

Anita Brookner has been my "therapist" for well over the last decade, and I tend to keep this a secret. When a visiting friend has discovered one of her books in my apartment, I am tempted to wrestle it away from them . I believe she does not write for the majority. She is unique. Her work does not remind me of Henry James nor Proust in the slightest. Her novel "Strangers" addresses topics which other acquaintances and I are discussing at this time. Retirement from the work force, solitude and possible withdrawal from the world while continuing to exist. The majority of us do not have time to spend for much introspection because we are being swept along on a furious tide of activity. While I feel the increasing nervous tension around me, I attempt at this stage in my life to pace myself and feel grateful that I am at leisure to do so. Unless one has an unkind and devious nature, this is not the book to give to an individual, who has just shared with you that they are concerned about their pending retirement from the structure of their work life. It might confirm their deepest fears. What I would emphasize is the importance of one's environment and safety net which Anita Brookner addresses exquisitely in her highly realistic way. I hope that she is presently writing her autobiography for her admirers and loyal readership.

PW's ignorance

Any professional reviewer who could write a line like this one in the PW review cannot be trusted because that reviewer is anti-intellectual: "While the novel happens in the current day, the occasional mobile phone feels as out of place as it would in, say, one of the Henry James novels that could be the inspiration for this tedious exercise in drawing-room politesse." That's dated, vapid contempt: James = boring. I expect more from a reviewer than cliches. Brookner isn't always at her best, but she is the poet of silence and isolation, with a genius for illuminating lives of quiet desperation. Richard Russo writes big deep books about larger, enmeshed lives; Brookner writes books about singletons struggling to find a place in the world. The House of Fiction, to quote James, has room for both.

A lifetime of loneliness

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.

Soliloquies in Solitude

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.

Soliloquies in Solitude

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, indeed, long spun-out indecision, with rapid fire confrontational dialogue where 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.