- Hardcover
- Publisher: Picador; Fifth Printing edition (20 Jan 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330435892
- ISBN-13: 978-0330435895
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 13.8 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 294,204 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Mother's Milk
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
The Week
'Probably the finest prose stylist in the world.'
The Times
St Aubyn is a staggeringly good prose stylist and evidently has a big and open heart.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
81 of 87 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The story is painful; the setting all too familiar and real; writing suffused with irony, metaphors and witticisms - behold Mother's Milk. Hermoine Lee, the chair of the judges of this year's Booker entries, described this book as "wickedly funny." And she would be right.
I began this book with no particular enthusiasm, but a little research on the internet gave me enough background about the author to place the work in its context. And this work centres around one theme - the place of a mother in, and how it pervades into the depth of every aspect of, a simple family.
Patrick Melrose is suffering from a midlife crisis. His wife, Mary, has just given birth to her second son, Thomas, and has become extremely close to him - to the point of sacrificing her sexual, and to some extent, emotional connection with her husband. Patrick, the lawyer, successfully manages to pass on his sarcasm and twisted daggers of wit straight to his precocious first son, Robert, who, by the age of five, becomes a master in impersonating other people.
While St Aubyn takes us through the functioning of this rather functional family, we see each character in relation to their mother, and how it has shaped their past, present, and future. The contrast between self-sacrificing Mary's self-obsessed mother and the betrayed and disappointed Patrick's philanthropist and neglectful mother is incisive. The novel touches among various aspects of contemporary family life, particularly of parenting, marriage, relationships, trust, adultery, and euthanasia.
The novel is described through wide-ranging narratives during four summers of 2000 to 2003. The beauty of St Aubyn's prose lies in his choice of the person through whom he narrates each section. At first, we hear the funny and sometimes deceptively cruel Robert, and his slow transformation into the persona that is his father. Then comes Patrick himself, with his disappointment with his wife, his self-loathing, and the guilt he feels about committing adultery. Third comes Mary, and we see the maternal side to St Aubyn's story. The final summer is rather nondescript, and serves its purpose well.
The lack of any ciches, be it in the plot, the prose, or the characters, came as a welcome relief. The normality of the characters was most striking. One cannot elevate the moral stature of any character; nor would the intelligent reader. If he did, he is missing the author's loud and clear message.
The criticisms of the so-called New Age practices, and of the American lifestyle, particularly in the post 9/11 era, or as Patrick calls it, the 9/12 era, are well-founded, and in a style much reminiscent of Oscar Wilde mercilessly dissecting Victorian hypocrisies in his play, are explored with unabashed saracasm.
This book may not linger on in your mind as a powerful and evocative novel. But, it does have several thought-provoking ideas which merit consideration... If that is not good enough for you, you ought to read this novel for the sheer beauty of St Aubyn's prose.
I began this book with no particular enthusiasm, but a little research on the internet gave me enough background about the author to place the work in its context. And this work centres around one theme - the place of a mother in, and how it pervades into the depth of every aspect of, a simple family.
Patrick Melrose is suffering from a midlife crisis. His wife, Mary, has just given birth to her second son, Thomas, and has become extremely close to him - to the point of sacrificing her sexual, and to some extent, emotional connection with her husband. Patrick, the lawyer, successfully manages to pass on his sarcasm and twisted daggers of wit straight to his precocious first son, Robert, who, by the age of five, becomes a master in impersonating other people.
While St Aubyn takes us through the functioning of this rather functional family, we see each character in relation to their mother, and how it has shaped their past, present, and future. The contrast between self-sacrificing Mary's self-obsessed mother and the betrayed and disappointed Patrick's philanthropist and neglectful mother is incisive. The novel touches among various aspects of contemporary family life, particularly of parenting, marriage, relationships, trust, adultery, and euthanasia.
The novel is described through wide-ranging narratives during four summers of 2000 to 2003. The beauty of St Aubyn's prose lies in his choice of the person through whom he narrates each section. At first, we hear the funny and sometimes deceptively cruel Robert, and his slow transformation into the persona that is his father. Then comes Patrick himself, with his disappointment with his wife, his self-loathing, and the guilt he feels about committing adultery. Third comes Mary, and we see the maternal side to St Aubyn's story. The final summer is rather nondescript, and serves its purpose well.
The lack of any ciches, be it in the plot, the prose, or the characters, came as a welcome relief. The normality of the characters was most striking. One cannot elevate the moral stature of any character; nor would the intelligent reader. If he did, he is missing the author's loud and clear message.
The criticisms of the so-called New Age practices, and of the American lifestyle, particularly in the post 9/11 era, or as Patrick calls it, the 9/12 era, are well-founded, and in a style much reminiscent of Oscar Wilde mercilessly dissecting Victorian hypocrisies in his play, are explored with unabashed saracasm.
This book may not linger on in your mind as a powerful and evocative novel. But, it does have several thought-provoking ideas which merit consideration... If that is not good enough for you, you ought to read this novel for the sheer beauty of St Aubyn's prose.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a beautifully written and sharply comic short novel. The main pleasure of reading this novel is St Aubyn's precision with words; there's rarely a wasted sentence, and long winded and pointless descriptions of the environment or the characters that inhabit it are refreshingly absent. He is a prose stylist like John Banville, but the scales tip more to the comic than the tragic with St Aubyn's writing, and as a result the plot and characters seem a bit insubstantial at times. In many ways, overlooking the sex and language, Mother's Milk is a very Edwardian novel in the way it treats these fairly unlikeable upper class English characters--at times dismissive but sympathetic to their plights. The narratives of Robert, Patrick and Mary are crisp, wry and often very funny. Robert's entry to the world in the first section of the book is a sharp and startling introduction to the novel. Whilst it is not a book that will linger long in the mind of the reader, it is nonetheless a rewarding read.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
I bought this book on the recommendation of a colleague, who had not yet read the book, but had read many reviews that were full of praise. Maybe it's unfair to write a book review about a book that one couldn't finish reading, (I must admit I gave up at page 30), but maybe it will help you save your money. Let me give you two extracts that may help you decide whether this book is for you or not:
Extract no1: "She guided the baby's head towards her nipple and he started to suck. A thin stream from his old home flooded his mouth and they were together again."
Extract no2: "Sometimes he imagined he was the thing he was looking at, sometimes he imagined he was in the space in between, but the best was when he was just looking, without being anyone in particular or looking at anyone in particular, and then floated in the looking like the breeze blowing without needing cheeks to blow or having anywhere particular to go."
If you think these extracts are poetic and fascinating then this book is just right for you. If they've made your toenails curl (as in my case) avoid it.
Extract no1: "She guided the baby's head towards her nipple and he started to suck. A thin stream from his old home flooded his mouth and they were together again."
Extract no2: "Sometimes he imagined he was the thing he was looking at, sometimes he imagined he was in the space in between, but the best was when he was just looking, without being anyone in particular or looking at anyone in particular, and then floated in the looking like the breeze blowing without needing cheeks to blow or having anywhere particular to go."
If you think these extracts are poetic and fascinating then this book is just right for you. If they've made your toenails curl (as in my case) avoid it.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Another one not finished
Started well and an interesting concept and kept me for a while....especially the child's view. Then it started to pall a bit as the child's voice did not seem so authentic. Read more
Published 17 days ago by Contrary mary
No use crying
How could I have left this book to languish on my shelf for years before reading it? At first, I was bowled over by the sharp, witty prose, striking descriptions and amusing... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Antenna
Painfully boring
A book that i'm most glad to have finished reading. From the beginning, I was very confused of the characters and their situations and there was still a lack of clarity even... Read more
Published 7 months ago by Stepping Out of the Page
Practically anything was less complicated than being a successful...
Sharply sardonic and witty throughout, this devastatingly honest novel had me laughing aloud as it described the home life of Melrose family, moving effortlessly from one denizen... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Eileen Shaw
Mother's Milk
Well written and certainly a book to keep your attention and a book to keep you reading it. I will read more books by this author.
Published 9 months ago by Lisa C. Thomas
Wonderful book
This is a marvellous follow on from Some Hope. It's too good to demean such profound and vivid writing with bland opinion. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Linda Peterson
Vituperous, biting writing, and gets inside the mind of a clever child
The writing standard is generally high vituperous, biting, about people I would take no pleasure in meeting in real life. Read more
Published 11 months ago by R. Brocklehurst
Mother's Milk
Following on from the Patrick Melrose trilogy (The Patrick Melrose Trilogy), we meet Patrick again when he is 42. Read more
Published 13 months ago by S Riaz
A disappointment..
Waiting for something to happen - right up to the last page...
Oh dear..
Oh dear..
Published on 29 April 2008 by Leeds lass
Disappointing
The book is very fragmented and seems to go nowhere.
The writing is good but I fail to understand the views that it is so funny. Read more
The writing is good but I fail to understand the views that it is so funny. Read more
Published on 5 Feb 2008 by D. A. Storer
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
