Читать книгу The Means of Escape - Penelope Fitzgerald, Simon Callow - Страница 3

From the reviews:

‘The Means of Escape is full of obscure adversity. There is a dogsbody caretaker with a dubious past, a clerical assistant who is given the sack and who returns to haunt his persecutor in a ghost story of extreme, even gleeful, ghoulishness. Fitzgerald’s world is luminous, dark and unflinching but the stories are filled with her characteristic tender, humorous apprehension of human oddness and ordinariness’

HERMIONE LEE, TLS

‘The sense of something colossal at the last being revealed through a tiny turn of phrase, or even a single word, proved one of Fitzgerald’s most remarkable devices. At the end of many of her most marvellous things there is a sense of a great window suddenly opening. That visionary final twist of the screw is unforgettably indulged in these stories. If you miss the significance of the word “a watch” in the last paragraph of “The Red-Haired Girl”, you will not just not understand the depth of love the heroine bears for its painter hero, but miss the point of the whole story … This is a small book, but a remarkably rich one. It sets the seal on a career we, as readers, can only count ourselves lucky to have lived through’

PHILIP HENSHER, Spectator

‘Eerie, spry, and comic. Each piece expands miraculously in the mind’

Harpers & Queen

‘This collection is excellent … a revelation. “Desideratus” – the story of a poor boy, a lost medal, and an ordeal in a great mysterious house – is strange, magical, moving … the sense of things beyond the grasp of intellect’

ALLAN MASSIE, Scotsman

‘This collection contains some of Fitzgerald’s best observations. Each precise word earns its worth, and the prose falls upon the inner ear with deceptive simplicity. A great writer, an ironist in the tradition of Jane Austen, as alive as Henry James to the covert power-play which makes up so much of human intercourse’

SALLEY VICKERS, Financial Times

‘In the world of these stories, fellow human beings bristle with indefinable menace. Their motives and purposes are incomprehensible, even to a comical degree. Life itself, these stories seem to say, is a delicate equipoise, kept aloft by all manner of imperceptible motions, and the journey from A to B is a graceful navigation through horrors. This is a wonderful collection – terrifying, beautiful and funny’

The Tablet

‘A farewell of undiminishing grace … spare, witty and understated’

Boston Globe

‘“There is nothing really lasting, nothing that will endure, except the sincere expression of the actual conditions of life,” a character quotes. “Conditions in the potato patch, in the hayfield, at the washtub, in the open street!” This is what Fitzgerald captures in her writing, and why she will endure’

Los Angeles Times ‘Best Books of 2000’

‘I’m profoundly envious of people who haven’t read Fitzgerald. There are such treasures in store for them … The stories collected in The Means of Escape are a distillation of her formidable talent. They display that blend of truthful observation and deadpan comedy that stamped everything she wrote’

The Age (Australia)