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My Tango with Barbara Strozzi
 
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My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (Paperback)

by Russell Hoban (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
Price: £7.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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  • This item: My Tango with Barbara Strozzi by Russell Hoban

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Product details

  • Paperback: 176 pages
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (17 Nov 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0747592713
  • ISBN-13: 978-0747592716
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 615,531 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #50 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > H > Hoban, Russell

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Product Description

Review

'I urge anyone who thinks of arming or improving themselves with this year's Booker shortlist to tuck up instead with the collected works of Russell Hoban and a bottle of Glenfiddich. He is fun, shrewd, humane; and unique' Spectator 'Hoban is that rare bird: a writer whose voice is utterly his own. For my money, his wonderfully original novels will endure long after most current high flyers have hit the dust This is an eccentric, sharply observed, kind book. We need writers like Hoban' Salley Vickers, Independent 'My Tango With Barbara Strozzi is a haunting: exasperating, funny, sad and elegiac. Catch it before it disappears' Guardian 'A deceptively complex novel of ideas, about reality, identity and ontology, that is only masquerading as a sweetly simple boy meets girl story' Independent on Sunday


Product Description

Recently separated, Phil Ockerman falls hard for Bertha Strunk at a tango lesson in Clerkenwell. Bertha also bears a strong resemblance to the seventeenth-century Venetian singer and composer Barbara Strozzi (with whom Phil happens to be obsessed), to the point where Phil is no longer sure which is which. Navigating several London underground lines and considerable planetary activity, Russell Hoban's intriguing romance tangos its way through a world of infidelity, artificial eyeballs, baseball bats and music - never missing a daring, seductive step.
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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Vastly entertaining, well written, but desultory, 21 Jun 2008
By T. D. Welsh (Basingstoke, Hampshire UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
This review is from: My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (Paperback)
Russell Hoban is probably incapable of writing badly. No matter what subject he tackles, he finds amusing if improbable new facets to it. This novel is a case in point. You might even regard it as a pot-boiler, but it's so well written and fascinating that it's hard to care. The protagonist, Phil Ockerman, is himself a novelist who has temporarily lost the thread. According to his ex-wife Mimi, his latest book "Hope of a Tree" is "a put-together thing trying to pass itself off as a novel". It would be unfair to say anything quite so strong about this book, but it certainly is eclectic and lacks a strong central theme.

Phil meets Bertha Strunk at a tango class for beginners, and is struck by her startling resemblance to the brilliant 17th-century Venetian composer and singer Barbara Strozzi, whose best-known portrait adorns the cover. Strongly attracted to her, he soon learns that she is on the run from a violent husband - but there is much else that he still does not know. The book is told in the first person, with alternate chapters from Phil and Bertha's point of view, which provides an interesting stereo effect. Bertha is depicted as self-willed but attractive - fascinating, even - and the action revolves around the open question of whether she and Phil have a future together. Along the way we get plenty of banter as well as lashings of art, literature, music, a baseball bat, astrology, London, Paris, HMS Victory, artifical eyeballs, a serious brush with the law, and cleverly sustained sexual tension.

There! I've tried to avoid any actual spoilers, while telling you enough to tempt you. It's not great literature, but I expect you'll enjoy reading it.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A witty and eccentric romance, 16 Jan 2009
By Annabel Gaskell "gaskella2" (Nr Oxford, UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
"This was my first visit to Hobanville - why it's taken me so long I don't know, but I'm keen to go again really soon. Underlying My Tango with Barbara Strozzi is a traditional boy meets girl romance, cleverly told by the two would-be lovers' voices alternating chapter by chapter, but on top are layers of quirkiness. Just the thing for me then!

Phil is a novelist and newly single. His wife left him because his writing was boring. Bertha Strunk, a painter of glass eyes, is newly separated and is flatsharing with a friend who worships Cliff Richard. Phil has just developed a little obsession with a 17th century Venetian musician and composer Barbara Strozzi when he saw her portrait in a museum, (I wiki'd her and she's real). Phil's astrologist predicts interesting conjunctions in his chart, so he ventures out to a tango class in Clerkenwell. Here he meets Bertha who has an uncanny likeness to Barbara, and thus begins a rather unconventional courtship!

This novel is at once tremendous fun, terribly erudite yet geeky (in a nice way), and you always know exactly where you are geographically! It also has an edge, there's an undercurrent of violence, that will keep you reading breathlessly to see what this couple's fate will be. At just 162 pages, it can be read in one sitting. A witty, original and eccentric novel and I long for more."
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