I love Anita Brookner and find her women intensely relatable but frustrating; they diagnose their own misery perfectly but flatly refuse to attempt to relate to life differently. Hotel du Lac is a book that has meant a lot to me, but Providence is my favorite of hers.
I'll try to read Providence sooner rather than later! The little blurb for it looks very good.… I'm also sort of curious to read a book from a male POV from her—it seems like she has a few—the men in Fraud and Hotel du Lac are really pretty awful. In both books I felt like getting married might not be terribly hard but getting married to somebody you liked was impossible.
Hotel du Lac I really thought was a perfect book… so perfect I had nothing to say about it here haha. I did think at the end Edith found a path forward that was not going back to exactly how she was before but which also rejected the almost Satanic offer put to her. So I found the ending hopeful.
I love Anita Brookner and find her women intensely relatable but frustrating; they diagnose their own misery perfectly but flatly refuse to attempt to relate to life differently. Hotel du Lac is a book that has meant a lot to me, but Providence is my favorite of hers.
I'll try to read Providence sooner rather than later! The little blurb for it looks very good.… I'm also sort of curious to read a book from a male POV from her—it seems like she has a few—the men in Fraud and Hotel du Lac are really pretty awful. In both books I felt like getting married might not be terribly hard but getting married to somebody you liked was impossible.
Hotel du Lac I really thought was a perfect book… so perfect I had nothing to say about it here haha. I did think at the end Edith found a path forward that was not going back to exactly how she was before but which also rejected the almost Satanic offer put to her. So I found the ending hopeful.
Yeah, the choice prevented is usually between being lonely or being with someone totally terrible or inadequate.