Altered States download epub

by Anita Brookner

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ACCLAIM FOR ANITA BROOKNER AND Altered States Brookner’s vision of human behavior is scrupulously honest, without ever being cruel. Hilma Wolitzer, Chicago.

ACCLAIM FOR ANITA BROOKNER AND Altered States Brookner’s vision of human behavior is scrupulously honest, without ever being cruel. Acclaim for anita brookner and. Altered States. Brookner’s vision of human behavior is scrupulously honest, without ever being cruel. Hilma Wolitzer, Chicago Tribune. remarkably beautiful prose and psychologically adept characterization. Altered States the vast lonely plains upon which women and men meet.

Anita Brookner CBE (16 July 1928 – 10 March 2016) was an English award-winning novelist and art historian. She was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge from 1967 to 1968 and was the first woman to hold this visiting professorship. She was awarded the 1984 Man Booker Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac. Brookner was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London.

With her compassionate portrait of a man who has paid a terrible price for his folly, Anita Brookner gives us a novel that it at once harrowing and humane. In the traditions of Henry James and Thomas Mann, Altered States is a beautifully rendered tale of loneliness, guilt, and erotic obsession.

FREE shipping on qualifying offers. Standing on a railway platform in a Swiss resort town, sensibly clad in his Burberry raincoat and walking shoes.

One learns that one’s continuation cannot be taken for granted, or, as the poet puts it, never glad confident morning again ateful and tender-hearted. Above all I was grateful for Angela’s care, which remained constant. I accepted the fact that she now took charge of my comfort and, incidentally, of my flat; I would arrive home in the evenings to find her scrutinising swatches of fabric and colour charts

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Standing on a railway platform in a Swiss resort town, sensibly clad in his Burberry raincoat and walking shoes, a man thinks he may be looking at the woman for whom he ruined his life many years earlier.

I was foolish enough to think that I was strong enough, and cheerful enough by nature, to avoid unhappiness. Books related to Altered States. Painting the Darkness.

Comments: (7)

Mikarr

What is passion or the loss of it; what do the routines we fall into say about us and how we pursue life? And is it comforting or otherwise to know how those pursuits are resolved? This is an extraordinary narrative that both disturbs and comforts.

Burilar

Not my favorite of Brookner's books, but one that grows on you as you read it.

Clandratha

I really like Anita Brookner's books and writing style. This one was a little quirky (but I guess they all are) but I thought the ending was a bit dramatic. Actually the female characters were drama queens. It's an okay story, and believeable.

Ucantia

Alan Sherwood, a middle-aged solicitor is spending a holiday in Vif, a somnolent village on the Franco-Swiss border. As he catches a glimpse of a woman on the platform of the station, he is reminded of Sarah Miller who he once passionately loved.

Little by little the reader discovers who this woman was as Alan's recollections of his youth slowly unfold. The pattern of their relationship was quite strange because as soon as Alan saw Sarah, he knew that he should eternally seek to attract her attention. Though beautiful, Sarah was vain, unreliable, feckless, insouciant and literally unable to take any matter seriously, always eluding Alan's questions and never being quite capable of concentrating on the subject at hand. An elusive femme fatale, always expecting the world to attend to her needs, her only consistency being her extremely inconsistent nature. Perhaps that was partly why Alan was so irresistibly attracted to her. In any event Sarah never quite responded to his advances so Alan ended up by marrying Angela and in the course of the plot we discover that she died only after eleven months of marriage and after having given birth to a stillborn girl.

Mrs Brookner admirably shows through the numerous characters in her novel how people's states alter depending on whether they are in love, lonely, married, young, old or, like Alan, haunted by the memory of a woman he could never possess. The maturity and the depth of the author's perceptions are mesmerising and her fiction is powerful and disturbing.

Zovaithug

This is another attempt by Ms. Brookner to chart the vagaries of the male soul in the first person. She does a pretty good job for that stratum of stiff-upper lip Brits that she knows best - this time a "solicitor" or as we would say a "damned lawyer". Alan tries so hard to be "good" that we can almost laugh at his keeping-up-appearances missteps. To believe that a real person would shred his soul so completely simply to do the right thing is a bit much, and Ms Brookner can't quite give us the reason why. This is because the female characters with whom Alan gets involved are so utterly charmless that it is hard to see why he persists with them, let alone marries one (Angela) and pursues another (Sarah). Angela becomes so intolerable right after the marriage (and was essentially intolerable to Alan before it!) that few men would sustain the relationship. Sarah is intolerable all the way through. While she obviously provides Alan with the only decent sex he's ever had in his life, Sarah's inability to utter a single empathetic sentence would give any man pause in the pursuit of more complex interpersonal relations. Alan's pathetic adventure to Paris to meet his "mistress" is thus a foregone conclusion: it will be a disaster (and is particularly well described). The responses of the family members is quite hilarious - particularly Aubrey, representing some stereotype of the tweedy banker phenotype so beloved by British humorists - poor Alan is held responsible for his wife's miscarriage! "I say old chap, one doesn't do that sort of thing..." sanctimonious claptrap. In a way I was reminded in this book of "Damage", a much more melodramatic but paradoxically more believable tale of adultery among the brit middle class. Of course, Ms Brookner is a better writer than Ms Hart yet the literariness of "Altered States" (an unfortunate title, given that it was already taken for a markedly different work) works against it in the end. The audio tape is well read by Crossley who does a very creditable job with the voices - note there are a few unforgivable slips and aberrations with the miking in spots. Even so he must have been wishing. as did I, that Ms Brookner's publishing house would have exercised better editorial judgment over this overblown tale.

Hra

A literary tapestry of passion, obsession, melancholy and despair, Altered States cuts straight to the heart of the human condition. So resonant is this brutally poetic saga of innocence lost, the reader cannot help but to reflect upon her own experiences with tenderness and perhaps a degree of sorrow.
A respected attorney and co-inheritor of the law firm of Sherwood Smith, Alan Sherwood treasures his solitude and unwavering ability to keep emotional entanglements at bay. Yet, his well-developed defenses prove useless upon his encounter with the beautiful and utterly disingenuous Sarah, his niece by way of his mother's marriage. Indeed, Sarah's capabilities for emotional indifference are a cut above Alan's own.
As his obsession intensifies, Alan finds himself falling ever more deeply into the abyss until, in a moment of physical and emotional exhaustion, he surrenders. No longer able to endure the turmoil inherent within his quest for the ever-elusive Sarah, he concedes to marry Angela, a meek young woman of impeccable culinary talents with not-so-subtle domestic yearnings and a most tender soul.
It is not long before the match proves tragic for all involved.
Yet, this extraordinary novel is far more than a tale of unrequited love. Rather, it is an exploration into the depths of the human soul and its ability to endure - as well as to succumb.
Altered States is certain to touch any reader who has experienced the exploitation of her own vulnerabilities within careless hands and has seen her beloved illusions shatter beneath the harsh light of day. She may contemplate the past with tender reminiscence yet also look ahead with a fair inkling of hope for somewhere within there resides a longing to embrace those illusions once more.

Contemporary

Author: Anita Brookner
ISBN: 0140255915
Category: Literature & Fiction
Subcategory: Contemporary
Language: English
Publisher: Penguin Putnam~trade (January 30, 1997)
Pages: 224 pages

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