- Mass Market Paperback: 431 pages
- Publisher: Penguin USA (P) (Feb 1985)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140073213
- ISBN-13: 978-0140073218
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.7 x 2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,711,288 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Thinking Reed
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2 reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful
A Thinking Person's Romance
6 Sep 2000
Format:Hardcover
West is at her most impressive in this little-known but gorgeous novel. Described as one of the first and few genuine "novel of ideas" written by a woman, this is a profound exploration of human emotions, choices and the interplay of fate and free will. It is also a delightful, quirky love story, with an accessible and funny plot and two endearing main characters.
Isabel is a bored, rich, beautiful American woman living a life of luxury in Paris, where excitement comes in the form of a hot-tempered French lover. Vain, snobbish, yet highly sympathetic, Isabel is also fiercely intelligent and in desperate quest of something more from life than pretty clothes and feckless men -- enjoyable as they have been.
Deciding to settle down and pursue a solid life plan, she ends up getting married -- by accident. How this "accident" happens, you'll have to read the book, it's marvelously done and provides the book's key plot point. Suffice it to say, neither the marriage nor its outcome are predictable in the least. Nothing is "traditionally" romantic in any sense. Yet the novel is deeply satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually. the alughter that it evokes is of a particularly rich and knowing quality; it will linger long in your memory after reading it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Romantic novel by Rebecca West
1 Jan 2008
Format:Hardcover
From the bookjacket; "The brillant story of an American woman and her search for a place in the gay, barbaric world of pre-depression Europe." Isabelle Torry, whose story this really is, is a young American widow who has come to Paris to make over her life. In both breeding and character she is exquisitely poised, a woman who never acts in haste or anger, and in reshaping her future she is not of a mind to reshape herself. Almost from the first, however, Paris has meant a love affair with the handsome and secure Andre de Verviers, a fellow so conservative in all important matters of life that he is incurably violent in all trivial ones. Andre's playful melodramas are not to Isabelle's taste, and she determines to break with him and marry an urbane, scholarly American, Laurence Vernon, who has come to Paris to propose. But to break with Andre is not easy, and Isabelle is forced to contrive a melodrama of her own, which unhappily is witnessed by Laurence, and so shocks his values that he is pulled up short. At this moment when she must hold her head high, Isabelle agrees to marry a pudgy French industrialist named Marc Sallafranque, whom she likes greatly, but with whom she is not the least bit in love.
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