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Title: A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0-8112-1457-5 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.9 (10 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Good Advice
Comment: Mrs. Hawkins, the narrator of A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON constantly offers the reader her advice. I can't hope to match her hilarious (and in the end, thought-provoking) precepts, but I humbly offer this: my advice is to read this book.
Muriel Spark playfully and skillfully manages the plot, characters, and voice here--her sound moral sense underpinning the entire structure, and her sense of fun keeping the reader engrossed. A (literally, as usual with Spark) devilish scheme by a literary fraud is the driving force behind Mrs. Hawkins' narrative, but the evil isn't allowed to take the book over, and it certainly isn't enough to daunt the narrator.
Indeed, her repeated dismissal of the plotter is one of the most enjoyable running jokes I've ever encountered, and is only improved in its humor by its fundamental truth. A FAR CRY FROM KENSINGTON is wise and witty and not a page too long.
Rating: 5
Summary: Quirky and wonderful
Comment: Muriel Spark is a writer's writer. Don't miss this quirky book with unforgettable characters that come together in a boarding house in odd and touching ways.
By turns hilarious, witty, sarcastic, and wryly endearing, it's a masterpiece.
Rating: 5
Summary: Delightful
Comment: In a novel narrated by a character who believes it her life mission to dispense advice, author Muriel Spark has her counsel a would-be writer to imagine confiding in a letter to a personal friend and to write the story that way. Spark has followed her own advice and it works delightfully. The best part of her approach is that she puts out some dramatic irony so that the reader is not just a passive listener accepting of everything the narrator asserts but is aware that not quite all of her advice, nor her assessment of herself, is always on target. There is a sly wit and spot-on social observations in full bloom here.
This is the story of a woman told looking back to 30 years before, to 1954, to a rooming house in Kensington, London, a far cry from her present circumstances. In 1954, she is "Mrs. Hawkins," no first name, with the heft of a zaftig figure and the tragedy of being a war widow. Everyone knows who she is though she does not always know them in return; she is expected, she believes, to hand out advice, to take care of others, and commensurate with this station in life, she is a mid-level editor in publishing. She has lots of plates twirling on sticks: her world at the rooming house, her job, herself. Then along comes Hector Bartlett who embodies what she hates the most: an ambitious but grossly untalented writer, a sycophant. The upright Mrs. Hawkins, loyal to the truth as she sees it, nails him with a particularly appropriate French vulgarism that becomes a refrain for her has he periodically intrudes on her life, a vulgarism that keeps costing her jobs. Because of Hector, her story becomes a series of reversals, from the tragic to the comic.
There are many characters, many amusing episodes, many trenchant observations going on in this book. I've been debating about how many stars to award only because Spark has outdone this book with others, including the recent REALITY AND DREAMS and the not-so-recent THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS. What the heck, I'll give it 5. I wasn't disappointed in the least.
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Title: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214745 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Bachelors (New Directions Classics,) by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0811214249 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark ISBN: 081121379X Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: Aiding and Abetting : A Novel by Muriel Spark ISBN: 0385720904 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 12 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Behind the Scenes at the Museum : A Novel by Kate Atkinson ISBN: 0312150601 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 12 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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