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Notes on a Scandal
 
 

Notes on a Scandal (Paperback)

by Zoë Heller (Author)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (94 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin; New Ed edition (4 Mar 2004)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0141012250
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141012254
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (94 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 123,493 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #7 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > H > Heller, Zoe

Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review

Zoe Heller juggles journalism and novel-writing successfully in Notes on a Scandal and manages to say something interesting and complex about moral panics and the people who get caught up in them.

Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this--it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power--he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons.

Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession--and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.



Product Description

When the new teacher first arrives, Barbara immediately senses that this woman will be different from the rest of her staff-room colleagues. But Barbara is not the only one to feel that Sheba is special, and before too long Sheba is involved in an illicit affair with a pupil. Barbara finds the relationship abhorrent, of course, but she is the only adult in whom Sheba can properly confide. So when the liaison is found out and Sheba's life falls apart, Barbara is there...

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Customer Reviews

94 Reviews
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 (33)
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Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (94 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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58 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars single white female, 5 April 2004
By monlibu "monlibu" (london) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)      
Notes on a scandal is a clever book. Be ready for something slightly different that will drag you in, slowly become addictive and then race you along on a rollercoaster ride of obsession, lust and misplaced loyalty.

Ostensibly it's a novel about a rookie pottery class schoolteacher Sheba joining a north London comprehensive with high ideals but no sense of distance or discipline to her pupils. With a family life of older husband, troublesome teenage daughter and down's syndrome son, she's lost a little of the spark and romance in her life. What once independence was, is left clinging to her hippy dress sense and cycling to work. Sheba needs to make a difference. And so she is easily swayed by an illiterate pupil with a modicum of artist desire and an overwhelming crush on Miss.

But no, this is not what Notes on a scandal is all about. Narrated by Barbara, Sheba's 60 year old teacher colleague, this is a sly diary peek into Barbara's take on the affair and Barbara's world. A disturbing one dimensional slant on Sheba's story and ultimately Barbara's lonely spinstered life.

Notes on a scandal is an exceptional book for the detail and insight into Barbara, who at first, we think to trust and then learn to either despise or feel wholly sad for her prejudiced, narrow and emotionless existence. Barbara craves comfort and love, she needs people to rely on her, she manipulates because she is emotionally bereft. This is what makes the novel so unerringly clever and devious, for we really cannot believe all we are reading about Sheba's plight from Barbara's barbarous interpretation.

Notes on a scandal is witty, cunningly observational about relationships and a stark insight into a warped mind. A great read that'll stay with you for some time. Notes on a scandal II - the Sheba story, would be even more enticing.

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58 of 65 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars I'm a bloke and I liked it, 16 Sep 2004
By OEJ (England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)      
I ordered this book on the basis of its award nomination, having no idea of its subject matter. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, and it won't be for those who like murder mysteries or thrillers - but I liked it from the beginning and by the end, I loved it. Zoe Heller has a real talent for character development, and manages to portray the self-denied loneliness of a sixty-something spinster/schoolteacher in a sensitive and non-condescending manner yet with a good deal of tragic humour as well. I must have completed two-thirds of the book before I realised that the central character wasn't the woman at the heart of the scandal, but her note-maker and grateful friend who tells the story itself. The personalities of both women are artfully and painstakingly developed, along with their working colleagues and families, and for this reason I strongly recommend Notes on a Scandal as an education for other writers on how to tell a story with characters who readers can totally believe in. An astute observation on the trials and tribulations of the lonely, this book deserves its prize nomination and gets my strong recommendation.
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32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent, macabre tale - hope it makes the Booker shortlist, 9 Sep 2003
By A. Craig "Amanda Craig" (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Notes on a Scandal (Hardcover)
Zoe Heller's second novel has had all the praise her first deserved, and did not get - which only goes to show that most critics are herd animals who trample all over the tallest poppy. Devotees of her column won't need to be told that she's ruthlessly honest, very funny and has a razor-sharp take on details of modern urban life. She's also brave, because she dares to make her characters unlikeable. Whether you want to stay with them is a test of intelligence, and nerve - because this story, like it's predecessor, is about someone hurtling towards disaster.

Narrated by Barbara, a schoolteacher/spinster from hell it is ostensibly about her beautiful colleague Bathesheba's affair with a 14-year-old pupil. Where Bathsheba (note the Biblical name)known as Bash to her older husband and Sheba to her friends, descants on the beauty of her teenaged lover, the loathsomely funny Barbara can see only his squalid, mundane,lower-class worthlessness. Sheba's grand passion may be perfectly undetstandable - who wouldn't jump into the sack with a teenager, she thinks - it is a grubby little secret which inevitably ends up with both women sacked and trapped in a grisly folie a deux. Barbara is obsessed by class: her observations on middle-class families as they call out "what;sa the rice situation like?" and their easy assumption that everyone has a little house in France ticked away are an acid that eats through the pages. Set in the uneasy area of North London where I happen to live, it's hideously and hilariously recognisable.
At a deeper level, though, Heller isn't just writing about class, or even about the educational failure that inevitably (it seems)awaits the children of the poor. She's writing about power, and its abuse not only in the sexual sense but by a whole class. Bathsheba is a good person trying in her hopelessly ineffectual way to make a difference. She fails, partly through moral weakness and partly becuase of the intrinsically corrupting nature of the system. This is the kind of subject that modern British novelists rarely address - oddly, another excellent if more hopeful novel along similar lines called Sky High by Helen Falconer came out the same month. If you're fed up with a vision of Britain that is all bonnets and bustles, or all glamorously ethnic, Heller's novel is a good place to start, and Falconer's should follow it. And stuff all the critics who sneered at her two years ago. This girl has got what it takes.

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