A Card From Angela Carter
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Review
'[An] exquisite jewel of a book ... Clapp skilfully weaves Carter's pithy correspondence into a moving account of her life ... It is inquiring, irreverent, kind and often quirky [and] will send you scurrying back to the bookshelves to rediscover the work of one of England's brilliant baroque novelists' ----Sunday Times
'An amazing book. I read it cover to cover and learned so much - you don't need an 800 page biography of someone to paint a really sharp picture of them. In fact, I shall remember this book much more than if I had waded through a tome. It's a gem - adorable. And [it has] a wonderful epitaph' ----Victoria Hislop
'Colourfully characterised through ribald and sardonically surreal postcards sent to friends from her travels, commenting on her activities and attitudes. There will be other, bigger biographies, but none more evocative than this sampler precisely stitched in literary petit-point' ----The Times
'Gives a unique insight into one of modern literature's most original and best-loved authors' ----Evening Standard
'Short and sweet ... captures [Angela Carter's] humour, and describes her obsessions, travels, lefty politics, cats, her husband and son, her works and their author - witty, unpredictable, fierce ... A Card From Angela Carter is a slim book, but big hearted. Unapologetically reverential, it sings with love' ---- The Spectator
'An amazing book. I read it cover to cover and learned so much - you don't need an 800 page biography of someone to paint a really sharp picture of them. In fact, I shall remember this book much more than if I had waded through a tome. It's a gem - adorable. And [it has] a wonderful epitaph' ----Victoria Hislop
'Colourfully characterised through ribald and sardonically surreal postcards sent to friends from her travels, commenting on her activities and attitudes. There will be other, bigger biographies, but none more evocative than this sampler precisely stitched in literary petit-point' ----The Times
'Gives a unique insight into one of modern literature's most original and best-loved authors' ----Evening Standard
'Short and sweet ... captures [Angela Carter's] humour, and describes her obsessions, travels, lefty politics, cats, her husband and son, her works and their author - witty, unpredictable, fierce ... A Card From Angela Carter is a slim book, but big hearted. Unapologetically reverential, it sings with love' ---- The Spectator
Product Description
Angela Carter was one of the most vivid voices of the twentieth century: much studied, copied and adored. When she died at the age of fifty-one, she had published fifteen books of fiction and essays; outrage at her omission from the shortlists of any Booker Prize led to the foundation of the Orange Prize. February 2012 will be the twentieth anniversary of her death but no biographical work has yet appeared. Susannah Clapp and Angela Carter were friends for years. The postcards that Carter sent to her form a paper trail through her life. The pictures she sent were sometimes domestic, sometimes flights of fantasy and surrealism. The messages were always pungent. From Stratford, Ontario, she explained that Canada was 'like Scandinavia, with liquor'. From the States, where she was smarting from a critical onslaught in the London Review of Books, where Susannah then worked, she sent a terrifying picture of Texan chili, with the message: 'Carter's reply to the critics ...goes through you like a dose of salts ...I'd liked to feed it to that drivelling wimp...' Through the medium of her postcards - small documents that are the emails of the twentieth century - Susannah Clapp will evoke Angela Carter's anarchic intelligence, her fierce politics, the richness of her language, her ribaldry, the great swoops of her imagination; she will also say something about her life. Intimate, funny, unexpected, it will catch this unique artist on the wing.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
In this slim memoir Susannah Clapp, Angela Carter's friend and literary executor, paints a vivid portrait of the writer, her reminiscences prompted by the postcards Carter sent her during the course of their friendship. Carter comes across as warm, fierce, funny, and high-minded; we frequently hear her voice through fragments of letters and remembered conversations and the reader can re-experience the pleasure that her original addressees must have felt.
Clapp, one of the founders of the London Review of Books, is also a fine and often very funny writer and I thoroughly enjoyed being transported into the world of Carter and her circle for a few hours. By the end, Clapp's description of Carter's memorial service left me in tears. As mentioned by another reviewer this is a very short book, and I can imagine that this would be a disappointment for those expecting something longer. The postcards Clapp describes are reproduced, albeit in black and white. On the basis of this work I'm looking forward to exploring more of Carter's writing (for example her radio plays about Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank, the latter with contributions from Ewan MacColl) and reading Clapp's earlier memoir With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer.
Clapp, one of the founders of the London Review of Books, is also a fine and often very funny writer and I thoroughly enjoyed being transported into the world of Carter and her circle for a few hours. By the end, Clapp's description of Carter's memorial service left me in tears. As mentioned by another reviewer this is a very short book, and I can imagine that this would be a disappointment for those expecting something longer. The postcards Clapp describes are reproduced, albeit in black and white. On the basis of this work I'm looking forward to exploring more of Carter's writing (for example her radio plays about Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank, the latter with contributions from Ewan MacColl) and reading Clapp's earlier memoir With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I heard some of this on Radio 4 and found it interesting enough to buy. I liked the personal memory approach and the format of each postcard. Susannah has taken the postcards that her friend wrote to her during their friendship for her observations which are presented under an appropriate title for each card section.
It is well written.
The problem for me was I was not expecting so slight a book.
I was expecting a memoir type of book and had not realised that it is a very concise book. Whilst nice to hold with a good feel about it there are only about 100 very small pages with the actual cards in black and white so you do not get much sense of what they originally looked like or their time period as a result. I can see that the point is to keep it all brief in keeping with the concept and style idea of the book.
So I think I will have to do a little more actual reading of the work of the author she is talking about and then come back to it. If you already know a lot about Angela Carter then you will probably make a better connection than I did as a lot is assumed and I needed a bit more information in places. However this probably reflects my own current lack of knowledge about the details rather than a failing on the books part. Perhaps part of its purpose is to stimulate you to find out more about Angela Carter and her writing which it has certainly done.
It is well written.
The problem for me was I was not expecting so slight a book.
I was expecting a memoir type of book and had not realised that it is a very concise book. Whilst nice to hold with a good feel about it there are only about 100 very small pages with the actual cards in black and white so you do not get much sense of what they originally looked like or their time period as a result. I can see that the point is to keep it all brief in keeping with the concept and style idea of the book.
So I think I will have to do a little more actual reading of the work of the author she is talking about and then come back to it. If you already know a lot about Angela Carter then you will probably make a better connection than I did as a lot is assumed and I needed a bit more information in places. However this probably reflects my own current lack of knowledge about the details rather than a failing on the books part. Perhaps part of its purpose is to stimulate you to find out more about Angela Carter and her writing which it has certainly done.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Such a slight work that you might well feel cheated, even at Amazon's reduced price.
The 'lapidary volume' referred to by other reviewers is actually Susannah Clapp's other memoir of Bruce Chatwin. I certainly wouldn't describe this one as 'lapidary' ... cheap paper and excruciatingly poor picture quality.
The 'lapidary volume' referred to by other reviewers is actually Susannah Clapp's other memoir of Bruce Chatwin. I certainly wouldn't describe this one as 'lapidary' ... cheap paper and excruciatingly poor picture quality.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
food for thought
I don't think I ever much liked Angela Carter's work, it was too gory for me, but this small volume on the postcards she sent to her friend Susannah made me not only want to re... Read more
Published 2 months ago by murmuration
A pocket-sized slice of heaven
Finally! Angela Carter was and is one of my favourite novelists. Her short stories and novels are full of fast adventure, larger than life characters, razzle dazzle plots and the... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Pale Jesson
Knew I should have kept this review on a lead
Thought I'd get in early with this in view of its R4 serialisation. Why do Cartersians always go on about what she looked like? Read more
Published 3 months ago by Simon G. Barrett
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