- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Picador; New edition edition (24 Mar 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330371193
- ISBN-13: 978-0330371193
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,421,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Elena Lappin's short stories are as compact, sly and surprising as that scene in Rear Window where Grace Kelly lifts an elegant gauzy night-dress and satin slippers from an impossibly small suitcase. Lappin's writing too is a trick of compression. A lot gets said and done in spare, slanted sentences.
The Foreign Brides are imported from Eastern Europe; married "sight unseen" from Russia; have left Prague, Israel and Boston and ended up in grey London, buzzy New York, spacious Ottowa, border hopping and hoping for something better. But things are generally cramped: "Everything was neat and clean but there was absolutely no room to move."
Some of the characters survive by subtle sabotage: Noa in the "Noa and Noah" buys un-kosher meat for her devout family and has an affair with the butcher to brighten up her boring days; Vera in "Peacocks" buys an A-Z and gets a job driving a taxi, leaving her butler husband at home. Emma in "Michael Farmer's Baby" invents a phantom pregnancy--morning sickness as a cure for home sickness. Others, like Julie in "The Gladstone Brothers", become "immobile, sphinx-like, almost mute" with the dislocation of exile.
The characters, just like Grace Kelly, are entering strange territory, with weighty expectations and hopes, squeezed into tight cultural and emotional spaces. Lappin's gift is to travel light and pack in the irreverent detail. Very stylish wear from honeymooning foreign brides. --Eithne Farry --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'Lappin's work is rich and pretty fearless' Time Out 'Elena Lappin is a natural storyteller . . . A fearlessly well-crafted mystery and a compelling novel' Helen Davies, Times Literary Supplement '[One of] the book's charms is its unusually sunny, affectionate and believable portrait of the early years of a marriage . . . Lappin's real gift seems to be zestful absurdist comedy. But her book still bravely attempts serious points. Guilt and innocence are more widely distributed than zealots like to imagine; racist fanatics are alive and well' Maggie Gee, Sunday Times 'An entertaining and satisfying read. Funny too, despite the subject matter, and with a gravity-free inventiveness' Stephen Blanchard, Time Out
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Ms Lappin's writing has all the wit and fear found in the work of Roald Dahl, but she manages to go beyond the pain of her heoines in this collection of short stories and presents them as three dimensional sentient beings each with a history, a heritage and a home.
The theme of the collection explores the lives of women who leave their homelands and their experiences of love, marriage and family life in countries and cultures not their own. No stereotypes emerge only challenges to our own perceptions of life. Bizarre, hilarious and tragic things happen amidst the apparent normality of these women's lives.
The language is simple and expressive, each story is expressed in the voice of the heroine, each woman absorbs the reader into her feelings, thoughts and emotions.
This is a super book.
Format:Hardcover
Foreign Brides is a marvellous collection of stories that is witty wise and wonderful set around the world and featuring a variety of Europeans all trying to find love and advancement. Get in early at the start of a fine career
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Dull and unappealing stories
9 Sep 2004
Format:Hardcover
The common denominator for all the short stories in the book is that the main character is always a foreign bride.
To me there was something dull and unappealing in the stories. Perhaps because the first story set the tone: the bride is too young to know what she is doing, and marries the groom in a whim and then regrets is dearly. I must admit that the story was well written, because it transmitted the sense of defeat and despair that a young woman in a foreign country and a loveless marriage must feel.
One of the stories, Black Train, has an interesting passage: "All émigrés have the same basic story to tell: there is that small death when they leave their home country, there is that short-lived euphoria when it looks like they've been blessed with a chance to rewrite their scripts in a free society, and then comes the life-long sadness once they realize that they have made an irreversible choice to cut themselves off from their roots. They can appear successful and lead exciting lives - but they will always feel like second-class citizens, wherever they are. And that huge void inside will never, ever be filled."
This got me thinking, because i am an émigré, yet i don't subscribe to those thoughts. Maybe if i had left my country for political reasons, and could never go back, but in this day and age, where you can be on the opposite corner of the world in a matter of hours, where's the trouble? As time goes by, boundaries blur and distances shorten. This reminds me of a long-forgotten song, titled "My Country, my shoes".
To me there was something dull and unappealing in the stories. Perhaps because the first story set the tone: the bride is too young to know what she is doing, and marries the groom in a whim and then regrets is dearly. I must admit that the story was well written, because it transmitted the sense of defeat and despair that a young woman in a foreign country and a loveless marriage must feel.
One of the stories, Black Train, has an interesting passage: "All émigrés have the same basic story to tell: there is that small death when they leave their home country, there is that short-lived euphoria when it looks like they've been blessed with a chance to rewrite their scripts in a free society, and then comes the life-long sadness once they realize that they have made an irreversible choice to cut themselves off from their roots. They can appear successful and lead exciting lives - but they will always feel like second-class citizens, wherever they are. And that huge void inside will never, ever be filled."
This got me thinking, because i am an émigré, yet i don't subscribe to those thoughts. Maybe if i had left my country for political reasons, and could never go back, but in this day and age, where you can be on the opposite corner of the world in a matter of hours, where's the trouble? As time goes by, boundaries blur and distances shorten. This reminds me of a long-forgotten song, titled "My Country, my shoes".
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Defintiely not a Must-Buy
30 Dec 2001
Format:Hardcover
Good, but not especially memorable stories of women who made foreign marriages: either Americans who married non-Americans, or non-Americans who married into American families. I read the book several months ago, and none of the stories remains clear in my mind. Worth a trip to the library, but don't bother to buy it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
almost great, short stories too dang short
28 Dec 2000
Format:Paperback
I have a foreign bride, Jewish Ukrainian and I'm Jewish American, so I was drawn to the title. I found the writing quite good and stories sometimes hilarious. But any of the stories could be more developed into something a bit meatier. The first and last story are connected and cleverly done. I like her general attitude about marriage: it might be a bit haphazard, but it can be an anchor for our lives and fulfilling despite the apparent randomness of mate selection. I liked it.
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