Holiday
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Review
Praise for Stanley Middleton:
"As with everything Middleton writes, a great deal rustles beneath the surface." -- "Guardian on Brief Garlands"
"Middleton strips away the surface of people's lives, revealing complexities which in real life we prefer to keep hidden." -- "Scotsman on Sterner Stuff"
"At first glance, or even at second, Stanley Middleton's world is easily recognizable. . . . The excellence of art, for Middleton, is an exact vision of real things as they are. And because he is himself so exact an observer, his world at third glance can seem strange and disturbing or newly and brilliantly lit with colour." -- A.S. Byatt
"As with everything Middleton writes, a great deal rustles beneath the surface." -- "Guardian on Brief Garlands"
"Middleton strips away the surface of people's lives, revealing complexities which in real life we prefer to keep hidden." -- "Scotsman on Sterner Stuff"
"At first glance, or even at second, Stanley Middleton's world is easily recognizable. . . . The excellence of art, for Middleton, is an exact vision of real things as they are. And because he is himself so exact an observer, his world at third glance can seem strange and disturbing or newly and brilliantly lit with colour." -- A.S. Byatt
Book Description
The Booker Prize-winning Novel
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Stanley Middleton's 1974, Booker-Prize winning novel "Holiday" is worth the trip.
Our hero, Edwin Fisher, has retreated to the sanctity of seaside resort town where his parents vacationed when he was a boy. Here Edwin licks his wounds after yet another row with his wife. He ponders whether to return or to take his new-found freedom and run.
Middleton adroitly takes us through the thought processes of Fisher.
At 240 pages it's not a tomb but not beach reading either.
It is a worthy Booker winner. As an American reader the idiom of Middleton some times intrudes but this is an intelligent treatment of a topic which most people have pondered.
Our hero, Edwin Fisher, has retreated to the sanctity of seaside resort town where his parents vacationed when he was a boy. Here Edwin licks his wounds after yet another row with his wife. He ponders whether to return or to take his new-found freedom and run.
Middleton adroitly takes us through the thought processes of Fisher.
At 240 pages it's not a tomb but not beach reading either.
It is a worthy Booker winner. As an American reader the idiom of Middleton some times intrudes but this is an intelligent treatment of a topic which most people have pondered.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you like the English realist novels of Stan Barstow or Barry Hines, you have a treat in store in Stanley Middleton. Middelton writes perveptively about a provincial 'real life'; his characters suffer classic class displacement as education separates and alienates them from their origins and each other. Middleton also writes brilliantly about failing relationships, be they between man and wife, father and son or guests in a seaside boarding house.
Holiday is a good place to start with Middleton: this Booker Prize winner from 1974 has an emotional darkness and complexity at the heart of it which contrasts brilliantly with the trappings of the English seaside. Fisher, the main character, takes a holiday in an attempt to clear his head following terrible marital strife. When his in-laws turn out to be holidaying at the same resort, wanting to patch things up, matters only worsen.
What I really love about Middleton is not his plots or even his actually rather sophisticated style, but the way he captures the 'feel' of provincial English life in thr recent past. When other modern writers write of provincial life, it is invariably with a sort of mild contempt; you can always feel they have their tickets for London literary life booked. Middleton combines the soucial nous of Eliot's Middlemarch with the sensitivity of Philip Larkin. That he is so little known says much about our Londoncentric cultural elite.
Holiday is a good place to start with Middleton: this Booker Prize winner from 1974 has an emotional darkness and complexity at the heart of it which contrasts brilliantly with the trappings of the English seaside. Fisher, the main character, takes a holiday in an attempt to clear his head following terrible marital strife. When his in-laws turn out to be holidaying at the same resort, wanting to patch things up, matters only worsen.
What I really love about Middleton is not his plots or even his actually rather sophisticated style, but the way he captures the 'feel' of provincial English life in thr recent past. When other modern writers write of provincial life, it is invariably with a sort of mild contempt; you can always feel they have their tickets for London literary life booked. Middleton combines the soucial nous of Eliot's Middlemarch with the sensitivity of Philip Larkin. That he is so little known says much about our Londoncentric cultural elite.
1 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I found this book to be dreary - the prose seemed stilted and the characters unengaging.
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