| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Pleasured for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Pleasured will undoubtedly draw comparisons with Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, with its brilliant evocation of 80s Berlin and the frustration and ennui which defines its comical, degenerate and often desperate collection of characters. Like Isherwood's novel Hensher vividly captures the Zeitgeist of Germany's painful reunification and the personal impact which the fall of the Wall had in both the East and the West. However, Pleasured is more than a meditation on the state of the German nation. It is also a wickedly observed comedy of manners, embracing drugs, terrorism, childhood, fatherhood and the vicissitudes of sexual identity in a series of elegantly drawn portraits and set pieces. Effortlessly written and beautifully structured, this is a great novel, which confirms Hensher as one of the finest novelists currently writing in English. -- Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'What starts out as a Pinteresque thriller turns out to be a rather touching love story… so good it gives you goosebumps.' Time Out
'Hensher's most ambitious novel to date, it is also his most satisfying' Alex Clarke, Guardian
'Highly original and accomplished… An engrossing read.' Barry Unsworth, Daily Telegraph
'A sublimely structured and sophisticated novel' Independent on Sunday
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Mario and Daphne carry out almost insignificant atrocities against the plague of 'yuppy' cafés spreading across West Berlin in the name of Class War. Daphne has met Friedrich hitching from Cologne with Peter Picker, an English man who plans with Friedrich to bring about the collapse of communism in the DDR by introducing the drug Ecstasy.
The book continues as a series of barely connected events, linked principally to the main protagonists and their pasts. As the Berlin Wall collapses, each of them has to reassess as the political system and status quo that they fought or sheltered under changes forever.
But is anyone ever 'pleasured'? The encounters seem nearly devoid of emotion, as meaningless as they are apparently random. In this respect, Hensher seems too far detached, and prone to let his prose ramble. Then he returns with an insight into his characters, into love, into Germany itself, that goes someway into justifying this ambitious book.
As one of the most important events at the end of the twentieth century unfolds, Hensher questions the impetus behind it, curiously comparing the state endorsed destruction of the Wall with the endorsement of hatred and destruction by a different German state that resulted in Crystal Night over fifty years previously.
But it is in the minutiae, the day to day details of the lives of those who people the book where Hensher succeeds most. This is where the reader can truly be 'pleasured'.
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.
|
