My own copy
ISBN: 0 09 977490 9
Genre: General Fiction
Pages: 250p
Found by Serendipity but also continuing reading the author's works
Rating: ***** *****
What led you to pick up this book?
I saw the title and cover in a charity shop and both instantly appealed. A moment later I realised the author was Sebastian Faulks whose Birdsong is one of my top 150 fiction books.
Describe the plot without giving anything away.
A girl with a mysterious background arrives to start work at a seedy provincial hotel in 1930s France. A Parisian lawyer moves to the countryside. Girl meets boy....
What did you think of the characters?
As well developed and as sympathetic as any to be found in the great classics of literature. They are as real as one's own family but with the difference that Faulks has helped us to understand them in a way that we never understand our own relations.
What did you think about the style?
Classic. One feels that Faulks could set his hand to any plot and make the whole landscape of it live. Emotions are explored in a way that only the very best of authors can do.
What did you like most about the book?
Probably the characterisation but the whole book is first class. It is the sort of book you want all your friends to have read.
Was there anything you didn't like about the book?
Simple answer - No.
Thoughts on the book jacket / cover.
An unattributed picture which I would happily have hanging on my wall.
Would I recommend it?
Absolutely.
Quotations:
In a moment Anne could see in his large hands and the strength of his movements all the other ages of his life, as if his body were a palimpsest on which had successively been subscribed the stories of his childhood, adolescence and youth, none of them entirely effacing its forerunner, so that suddenly the contradictions of his bigness and delicacy became understandable and she found herself seeing through his manly self-possession to the ghost of his vulnerable boyhood.
She was wearing her waitress's black dress and her waitress's smile through which, Hartmann thought as he watched, little bubbles of the private girl kept breaking.
When next you pass the memorial in the Place de la Victoire, stop and look at the list of names. Try to imagine that they're not just letters chipped into rock but that each one has a face, a laugh, a look. My life might just as well have ended with them, too. But yours is possible because of them.
It was a day in which everything around her seemed to be in harmony; it was impossible to imagine that he hedgerows and the fields and the woods and streams and isolated cottages were in any other than their appointed place. Only she, a human, with her illusion of free will, couldn't find her true position in it all.
SEBASTIAN FAULKS (b1953) worked as a journalist for 14 years before taking up writing books full time in 1991. He is the author of A Trick of Light, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, A Fool's Alphabet, the celebrated Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He lives with his wife and two children in London.
