The Clothes on Their Backs [Paperback]

This is a novel about identity. It is the story of Vivien Kovaks, the daughter of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, as she struggles to find her place in British society in the late Seventies as well as understand her past, a past denied to her by her insular parents. By re-establishing contact with her Uncle Sandor, shunned by her Father for his work as a pimp and slum-landlord, Vivien establishes herself as the scribe for his oral autobiography and sets to work typing up the story of his life. In doing so she learns of her parents' past and therfore more about own. The book is her memories of these events from her middle age in a London shocked by the bombings of July 2006. The theme of clothing as a means of establishing or changing identity is not strong enough to provide the title and seems therefore an unusual theme to draw the title from.

Nor does the structure provide any real desire to read to the end. It is difficult to establish which if any of the vaguely interesting events were intended to fix the reader. Vivien, we know from the beginning is middle aged and sensible by the end, and yet she is the only character in which the reader is able to fully invest. The series of events which conclude the novel, therefore, are merely interesting and provide limited climax.

It can only be the detail with which each character is presented which won Grant her Booker nomination. Vivien the lost maybe-punk in vintage clothing with a useless English degree, her parents the timid Jewish immigrants self imprisoned in their flat on the Marylebone Road, Vivien's `play-thing' Claude, a skinny confused young man existing on the edge of sanity and of course Uncle Sandor a labour camp survivor turned pimp,businessman and cake enthisuast all appeal to the curious reader. All are written into life and interact realistically but there is little more to report.

Vivien herself tells Uncle Sandor, as she advises him on his method of dictating his own story; `if a book is to be publishable, it has to be more than chronology, it has to shed light on the human condition.' Grant achieves this in her portrait of the human need for identity and to a lesser extent the need for family, but I feel that an author with her ability to observe detail and write characters should have aimed for more. There are too many events in the book, rushed by in a page which are of more interest to those which provide the major scenes in the narrative. In short neither Vivien's nor her Uncle Sandor's stories are interesting or absorbing enough to provide Grant with the impact which her themes require.

I was suprised to see so much criticism of this book. I found the book moving, and gave a slant on 'the face of evil'. I thought that the characterisation of Vivien created lots of empathy, and her somewhat nilhilistic attitude towards life was quite understandable.
I found the ending satisfactory, and I am not too sure how it could have been ended,apart from the concept of everyone lived happily ever after, and all the members of the family were reconciled to each other. There seemed strong comparisons between Sandor and Rachmann, though I was disappointed that the biography of Rachmann is no longer available, as I felt that this would have made interesting reading.
I have not read anything written by Linda Grant before, but I have just ordered 'We have never had it so good'as the symnopsis looks rather good.
What reviews do tell you is that everyone reads messages differently in a book. I great;ly enjoyed this novel, and its 1970's slant social history, and what live was like living in central London,and thinking about it there are not many novels that write from that standpoint. Would recommend this book as a good read.

The nature of evil has always fascinated Linda Grant. Here, she takes a character (loosely based on the infamous Peter Rachman, the slum landlord of Notting Hill, though Grant's Sandor Kovacs is Hungarian rather than Polish) and explores whether he is really the 'face of evil' as the papers claim when he is imprisoned for his bad work as a landlord. To our surprise we find that Kovacs may have behaved appallingly to his tenants, but that in many ways he is a likeable man, and a great storyteller. Grant splits the narration of her novel between Kovacs's niece Vivian, who has grown up sheltered from the world by her over-protectice parents and told nothing of the family's history, and who is looking for new meaning in her life after being tragically widowed, and Kovacs himself, who after a chance encounter with Vivian decides that he will tell her the story of his life. The sections of the book where Sandor tells Vivian about his childhood in rural Hungary and his life as a roguish young man in Budapest are particularly enjoyable. Whatever evil Sandor may have done in his life, he's certainly a great entertainer. The story of Vivian's relationship with her uncle, with both pretending they don't know who the other is, is also very engrossing.And as one might expect from the title, clothes play a large part in the tale (though they're not as vital a part of the main plot as I think Grant may have originally intended). Grant certainly describes clothes beautifully!

I would give this novel four stars rather than five largely because I didn't quite believe in one of the subplots (Vivan's lethargic affair with the unpleasant and rather dull Claude, one of Sandor's tenants) and because as the novel progressed Vivian became slightly less interesting (almost as though Sandor's vitality caused her to become a more shadowy figure). I would have also liked the book to be a tiny bit longer so that I could have learnt more about Vivian's life after Sandor's death, and how the death affected her. But these are small quibbles: this book is certainly recommended reading for anyone interested in the Jews of Hungary, in life in London in the 1960s and in the question of the nature of evil: a much more complex question than many of us think.