- Paperback: 329 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (5 Oct 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 009928944X
- ISBN-13: 978-0099289449
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 13 x 2.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,706,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Understanding Of Jenner Ransfield
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
Jenner Ransfield, a man endowed with a brilliant academic mind, personal magnetism, but no self-control, tormented by demons of Laurentian sexuality and Calvinist upbringing, fumes out his existence on a farm in Somerset, teaching at a lowly Agricultural College, and sporadically tyrannizing his family - his sad, suppressed wife Elspeth, who lives inside a romantic ballad and thinks of Jenner as her demon lover, and his two extraordinary children - May Margaret who carves wonders in wood that no man must see, and Robin who lives to keep the World Wide Web out of the Devil's hands. Into this dark world beams Theodora Potts, blond curls, white smile, pretty and neat as a sea-horse, an Australian veterinary scientist, who knows it all. She intends to study the harvesting of bull semen with the great Dr Ransfield, but nothing goes according to her plan, from the moment there slides into her life and her bed Fergal, an urban warrior whose special form of protest is to hang naked in tree-tops. The cast is now complete for a black comedy of almost Shakespearean richness.
About the Author
Imogen de la Bere divides her time between England and New Zealand, where she writes on a diverse range of subjects, from theatre, through to opera and rock music, to matters of religion. Her first novel, The Last Deception of Palliser Wentwood, was published in 1999.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heart breakingly beautiful, 6 Feb 2004
By Angela - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Understanding of Jenner Ransfield (Paperback)
I wasnt sure I would like this book at first.It isnt what it seems.
It has something for everyone, sex, activism, art.
The ending broke my heart. I actually cried. I had a hard time getting over the way the story ended.
A small warning... this book may be upsetting to those with sexual abuse issues.
3.0 out of 5 stars
A rollicking, blustery feminist tract, 16 Oct 2002
By Steven Reynolds - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Understanding of Jenner Ransfield (Paperback)
This begins like a ham-fisted parody of a conventional romance novel - and it's probably intended to, given that it quickly escalates into something more ambitious, more political, and ultimately more interesting. When Theodora Potts, Australian veterinary scientist, goes to England to complete some research with renowned geneticist and notorious sexual predator Jenner Ransfield, she becomes embroiled with the violently verbose Jenner and his uniquely dysfunctional family: wife Elspeth, devoted homemaker and frustrated mariner; daughter May Margaret, feminist sculptor; and son Robin, web evangelist. There's also Fergal, a sexually abstemious environmentalist whose particular form of protest is to hang naked from trees. Imogen de la Bere uses this unique configuration of characters to explore many issues, but chiefly male-female relations in a post-feminist age. It's a wild, chaotic ride, but not an uninteresting one. And beneath the rollicking bluster of it all, there are some quiet moments of real perceptiveness in de la Bere's prose - she handles flashbacks particularly well, subtly revealing the emotional backstories which make her characters do the things they do. In these passages, she shows a style and a sensitivity she'd do well to develop. If she set aside the desire to shock and amuse, I'm sure a truly great novel would be within her reach. (One criticism: Very lazy substitution of New Zealand for Australian vernacular: we wear "jumpers" or "sweaters", not "jerseys"; and a bloke might play AFL for his "shire" or "region" or even his "county", but never for his "province".)
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.
|
