Duet
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Product Description
Daily Telegraph
'Shields is about the best we have.'
Review
‘Carol Shields sings with the charm of a true siren.’ Guardian
‘Carol Shield’s prose is addictive. Her writing is both smoothly intelligent and sensually immediate, conflating concrete domestic realities with the elemental and miraculous.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Her perceptions are so quick, her style is so acute, that she can tack a breath to the page and skewer a thought on the wing. It is her speciality to isolate moments that remain distinct in the mind for years, perhaps for a lifetime.’ Hilary Mantel, Sunday Times
‘Shields is about the best we have. She does not just express what oft was thought; she snags the shadows of those thoughts, the thoughts we did not know we had. The effect – at once elating and visceral – feels like a conjurer pulling a handkerchief from your heart.’ Daily Telegraph
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book (or two books), blew me away. It started slowly, with Judith and Martin and their two children, who have returned to Canada from a year in 'a cold, filthy flat in Birmingham' where Martin, a university professor spent a sabbatical year. Slowly we learn that Judith is a biographer, not, as yet, hugely successful. Martin seems worthy if a little unexciting, there is a teen-age daughter who is sparky and sensitive and a twelve-year old son, apparently enamoured in a pen friendship with the daughter of the Birmingham family who spent the father's sabbatical in Cyprus, and who he has never met.
You might not think that an exciting premise for a novel, but the prose gets under your skin. The family begins to matter. We are puzzled with Judith when she makes a strange discovery in Martin's desk, about which she forgets to ask and only remembers when he is not around. The strands of the story weave together; a friend, Furlong, a writer of fiction, at last achieves recognition with his latest book to the surprise of Martin and Judith, who both put off reading it, until the fateful day when Judith is shamed into the task and discovers the plot; two close unmarried friends decide to separate and the female half goes into hiding.
As Judith says, 'It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping; our lives are steamed and shaped into stories...'
And later, 'For me dreams are no more than rag-ends caught in a sort of human lint-trap, psychic fluff, the negligible dust of that more precious material, thought.'
The second part of the duet is in her sister, Charleen's viewpoint, a poet and single mother. This is an equally fascinating story and the two sisters meet together when their mother announces the fact that she is getting married again, something that staggers the daughters, especially in view of the fact that the event follows quite quickly after a mastectomy. Their mother is difficult and has affected them both in quite different ways, but they come to understand and accept her in a satisfying denouement.
A memorable book that joins the other twenty or so that are in my 'best book' collection on my Kindle.
You might not think that an exciting premise for a novel, but the prose gets under your skin. The family begins to matter. We are puzzled with Judith when she makes a strange discovery in Martin's desk, about which she forgets to ask and only remembers when he is not around. The strands of the story weave together; a friend, Furlong, a writer of fiction, at last achieves recognition with his latest book to the surprise of Martin and Judith, who both put off reading it, until the fateful day when Judith is shamed into the task and discovers the plot; two close unmarried friends decide to separate and the female half goes into hiding.
As Judith says, 'It's the arrangement of events which makes the stories. It's throwing away, compressing, underlining. Hindsight can give structure to anything, but you have to be able to see it. Breathing, waking and sleeping; our lives are steamed and shaped into stories...'
And later, 'For me dreams are no more than rag-ends caught in a sort of human lint-trap, psychic fluff, the negligible dust of that more precious material, thought.'
The second part of the duet is in her sister, Charleen's viewpoint, a poet and single mother. This is an equally fascinating story and the two sisters meet together when their mother announces the fact that she is getting married again, something that staggers the daughters, especially in view of the fact that the event follows quite quickly after a mastectomy. Their mother is difficult and has affected them both in quite different ways, but they come to understand and accept her in a satisfying denouement.
A memorable book that joins the other twenty or so that are in my 'best book' collection on my Kindle.
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