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Product Description
MAGGIE O’FARRELL, Independent
‘Duncker is a mistress of suspense . . . a writer of fascinating versatility'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'These tales are night-pieces... amoral, vindictive and unforgiving... The seven tales were written to disturb and provoke. I want my readers to revisit the cliches of sexuality and violence, to read them afresh - and to think again' Patricia Duncker
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Sensual, uncompromising, bold and irreverent, Patricia Duncker has a fertile imagination which she uses with sinister and sinuous skill in this short collection. But it often turns out that the lighter stories are both more convincing and enjoyable and the last in the collection, My Emphasis, is almost entirely comic and nothing to do with either sex or death, even given that it features a performance of King Lear during which an actor is assaulted by members of the the audience. Of an almost hallucinatory power, The Strike, describes the breakdown of civic order when a strike by almost all public services causes mayhem on both sides of the Channel, laying to waste huge tracts of the European continent.
Ironically enough, the stories which are serious about sex and death are the least convincing, although one, Small Arms, is a haunting depiction of a wasted life where the urge to gain money and luxury through attachment to a successful man deprives an intelligent woman of any sense of self-worth and ends with a machine-gun massacre by just the kind of revolutionary loner she used to believe herself to be. Other stories concern life in the French countryside and are not overtly about either sex or death. This is an uneven collection, not uniformly successful, but Duncker's panache and sense of mischief carries the reader through. In some sections you might want to use Google's translate service to get the gist of some of the French dialogue. Demanding, but not difficult, this is an intriguing collection of provoking tales that I definitely want to read again. I found myself still thinking about some of these stories long after reaching the last page.
Ironically enough, the stories which are serious about sex and death are the least convincing, although one, Small Arms, is a haunting depiction of a wasted life where the urge to gain money and luxury through attachment to a successful man deprives an intelligent woman of any sense of self-worth and ends with a machine-gun massacre by just the kind of revolutionary loner she used to believe herself to be. Other stories concern life in the French countryside and are not overtly about either sex or death. This is an uneven collection, not uniformly successful, but Duncker's panache and sense of mischief carries the reader through. In some sections you might want to use Google's translate service to get the gist of some of the French dialogue. Demanding, but not difficult, this is an intriguing collection of provoking tales that I definitely want to read again. I found myself still thinking about some of these stories long after reaching the last page.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I really dislike this collection of `stories'... it is definitively not one of Duncker's best publication. After the first story (acceptable...) the decline is fast and irrevocable. Everyone dies, one way or another, and some have sex... occasionally... and this is supposed to be the link between these disjointed and utterly boring narratives...? I think not! Erotic...? Absolutely not!
Some of these stories are obviously Francophile and tediously so... And I resent the unnecessary Q & A sessions, full of clichés and just thrown in for effect (such as on p.161): "How many are there? Two people, both wearing dark glasses. Does Monsieur Barthez advertise? Yes, in Le Monde, the holiday supplement. No water in it, though? Or has he filled it up? Of course he's filled it up." And so on, all this in the course of half a page...
In this `book' Duncker is definitively scraping the crumbs off her bottom drawer...
Some of these stories are obviously Francophile and tediously so... And I resent the unnecessary Q & A sessions, full of clichés and just thrown in for effect (such as on p.161): "How many are there? Two people, both wearing dark glasses. Does Monsieur Barthez advertise? Yes, in Le Monde, the holiday supplement. No water in it, though? Or has he filled it up? Of course he's filled it up." And so on, all this in the course of half a page...
In this `book' Duncker is definitively scraping the crumbs off her bottom drawer...
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
These tales give us all the hallmarks of Duncker's fine writing and I couldn't put it down - wonderfully erotic and powerful stuff. Definitely one I'd recommend!
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