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Eleanor Rigby
 
 
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Eleanor Rigby [Paperback]

Douglas Coupland
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Harper Perennial; (Reissue) edition (4 Oct 2010)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0007162529
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007162529
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 180,963 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Douglas Coupland
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Product Description

Review

‘A high spirited moving study of loneliness and all its opposites.’ Observer Books of the Year.

‘A powerful and moving examination of a life lived negotiating loneliness.’ Independent

'Eleanor Rigby is one of Coupland's subtlest indictments yet of Yankee-yuppie culture.' Daily Telegraph

'Bristles with acerbic observations of modern life.' Sunday Telegraph

‘Funny, unexpected and fragile, here [Coupland is] the chronicler of our potentials rather than our losses.' Guardian

Independent

‘A powerful and moving examination of a life lived negotiating loneliness.’

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Before I begin this review, I should say that I am a huge Coupland fan. When I saw his new book in a shop window, I had to get it straight away.

This book is similar in style to his later books - especially Girlfriend In A Coma, in that spectacular coincidences are dropped into the main characters life at various moments. Without giving anything away, some very strange events occur, but they are only made clear gradually, so that the reader is left trying to decide what on earth could have caused such an event. It is almost never what you expect.

However, where "Girlfriend" still had a sense of teen-agey angst about it, this book seems more about dealing with getting older. As far as I recall, this is the first book he has written entirely from a female perspective. The main theme of the book is loneliness. His writing style leaves me speechless sometimes - the ability to weave such poetry from the tiniest parts of everyday life, in a way that takes your breath away:

"We cripple our children by not telling them what loneliness is, all of its shades, and tones, and implications. When it clubs us on the head, usually just after we leave home, we're blind-sided. We have no idea what hit us. We think we're diseased, schizoid, bipolar, monstrous and lacking in dietary chromium, It takes us until thirty to figure out what sucked the joy form our youth, that made our brains shriek and burn on the inside, even while our exteriors made us seem as confident and bronzed as Qantas pilots. Loneliness."

But the book is far from depressing - the overall message of the book is distinctly optimistic, with a fair dash of the darkest humour:

"I have trouble with any meat whose name also describes what the meat used to do before it became meat"..."Hi - before I was sautéed in onions, I spent my life refining impurities from a cow's bloodstream".

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The central theme of Douglas Coupland's novel is loneliness. It's main protagonist and narrator is Liz Dunn, a woman left on the shelf. The novel recounts life from childhood in the 1970s to the present, via a possible but slightly fantastical (as with many of the events in his work) plot twist that produces a son to change her life and (temporarily) relive her loneliness.

Liz, for much of the novel, is lonely and at pains to emphasise her plainness, but to the reader she remains warm and pitiless and witty. We feel much sympathy for her (perhaps this is also because of our own fears of being alone), but you feel she would balk at our pity and rarely feels sorry for herself. The narration is typical of a Coupland character, with believable use of language and reference for the narrator, and inspiring imagery.

As in Coupland's other work, the central character is supported by some wonderfully drawn supporting characters, most especially Liz' angrily determined and bothersome mother, and her son Jeremy, whose appearance lights both Liz's world and the reader's. The relationships between children and parents and siblings are strained but loving and eternal, as indeed is the case with most families.

The novel, as so many of his, is set in Vancouver, but I think that this Vancouver is largely incidental; the changes in location are not as important as changes in time, and the locations rather reflect this. Rome and Vienna symbolise the old and Vancouver the new. Indeed in this novel, time is a location, and the differences between the world of the protagonist's childhood and the 21st Century are acute.

The novel explores the difference between a 70s where no-one locked their door and a child could wander miles from home on her own without alrming her parents, and the fearful nature and hyper-security of the post-September 11 world.

Coupland's novel is set partly in the post September 11 world, and in some ways Coupland is preoccupied with that event (not least as he has a new one-man show called September 10, about the 90s and the world prior to those events). This would suggest that a seismic shift has taken place over the world in the three years since then, and this novel does reflect that.

Except once, this shift is not specifically expressed, but as with all his novels, modern life and technology (which as it has 'progressed' from one Coupland novel to his next over the past decade and a half, we see is moving at an awesome pace), impinges on the lives of the characters as with all of us; in computers and communication, transport, medicine, and the impact on everyday lives of people of the events of September 2001.

Some of Coupland's previous work has dealt with apocalyptic themes very overtly (most obviously in Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus, but also in the fear of the Bomb in Generation X and other works). What we have in this novel is a world after an apocalypse has occurred, and we find that life does go on, and while the world does change, people's fears and preoccupations continue.

Loneliness is the central theme of this novel, but also family and death and love and the search for acceptance. Coupland shows us a world in which much has changed, but in which these themes are timeless.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Typical Coupland 5 July 2005
Format:Paperback
Another great novel from Coupland taking on more life-changing events interspersed with small town American culture and just a smattering of fantasy. He tweaks some of those sensitive spots in all of us whilst reminding us of our fragility and potential for so much more. Just ripe for a movie contract I reckon (or maybe a home movie).
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Brave & beautiful
I very much wanted to write a review for this wonderful book but everyone before me has said everything I wanted to say. Read more
Published 19 days ago by Alba52
eleanor rigby
i was quite surprised when it came that it was an ex library book but was on good condition! interesting book though a little far fetched , good on medical details
Published 9 months ago by gillian
Eleanor Rigby
I am told this is a very good book by the person it was bought for as it also was a very fair price and free P&P I will award 5 stars
Published 11 months ago by William Morrison
All the lonely people
Beginning with the era-defining Generation X, I've read almost all Douglas Coupland's books, greatly enjoying his quirky, sympathetic take on the human condition. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Jeremy Walton
Very good and moving in some parts
Although disjoined with leaps back and forward through time, the way loneliness is portrayed is excellent and Coupland's word play and style seems to completely vary from his prior... Read more
Published on 30 May 2010 by Paul M
Beautiful
This novel by Coupland is one of his best yet. Painfully beautiful to read as he depicts the life of a very lonely woman. Coupland have exceeded himself with this book. Read more
Published on 22 April 2010 by CeeCee
"I'm drab, crabby and friendless. I fill my days fighting a constant...
Well, Eleanor Rigby is a definite improvement on Girlfriend in a Coma. The characters are well-drawn and I did care about them: and there are plenty of witty Coupland-esque... Read more
Published on 20 Dec 2008 by A. Furse
I loved it!
Like most Coupland, it was slow to start but it was worth the wait! I loved the initial emotional pain you felt for the aurator and the other main characters, however I also felt... Read more
Published on 9 Oct 2007 by Louise Giblin
Eleanor Rigby
Most of this book is shatteringly good. It portrays the loneliness of a single woman so well it was painful to read - the reality, and the bitter understanding of it, is amazingly... Read more
Published on 5 Jan 2006 by Ms. F. M. Stygall
Couplandtastic
I long awaited for the release of this book and although throughly enjoyable it was a little slow to take off, but once it did it reminded me of why it was worth the wait.
Published on 12 July 2005
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