- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Viking (29 July 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0670886378
- ISBN-13: 978-0670886371
- Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.5 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 894,436 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Undue Influence
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
A new Anita Brookner book is unlikely to surprise, unlikely to shock or disturb. Yet her work continues to be utterly compelling. This, her 19th novel, follows the usual pattern: a single, bookish woman, whose literary life is dominated by loneliness and the seeming impossibility of marriage, has her forlorn equilibrium disturbed by an unsuitable attraction.
Claire Pitt, at 29 one of Brookner's younger alter egos, is financially independent, clever, emancipated but empty. When Martin Gibson comes down to the basement in the second-hand bookshop where she works, Claire is beguiled. Her desire to be part of the story she tells herself about Martin's probable life leads her to provoke the quiet crisis so indicative of a Brookner dénoument.
Brookner, who is seen by some critics as the embodiment of Jamesian exactitude, as almost prissy, is really quite the opposite. An almost pathological writer, Brookner returns again and again to her notion of the inability of modern women to think of marriage as something that will rescue them--and yet who are pulled towards the ideal (an ideal they easily deconstruct) of a romantic saviour. The ubiquity of a particular, melancholic despondence saturates her work; disappointment dominates. Despite the humour, the erudition, the classical elegance of her prose, Brookner is a modern, bitter writer. Few writers have the ability to create such complete characters and then dissect their motives so clearly. Few writers have the skill to delineate the emotional complexity of the domesticated manners that mark our inability to communicate with one other. Undue Influence is another triumph of profound, psychological investigation from one of England's finest writers. --Mark Thwaite
Product Description
Enigmatic Claire is 30 and lives alone in Marylebone. She is content with her life, although she recognises she has become more reserved and independent since her wilder student days. Her life changes when she embarks on an affair with a widower.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another wonderful Brookner,
By Mark Stockwells (England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Undue Influence (Paperback)
I thought "Undue Influence" a joy to read - finding myself immersed in Claire's thoughts and life - just how a good book should draw the reader in. Life can be - and often is - full of disappointment and not every person fits the media-pushed image of the shiny, plastic couple-with-kids. Thank God that Brookner is the one novelist I know who acknowledges this truth. Even though I guessed the surprise at the end, I identified with Claire in her shock and disillusion. Brookner's consummate skill is to make the thoughtful reader empathise with her heroines.
Regarding some of the earlier, scathing reviews - I have some thoughts on why these reviewers have such difficulty: I think only certain people can appreciate Brookner novels - those with some kind of inner life and sensitivity. People who rely on external events to keep them alert - and without such stimuli fall asleep like a parrot with a cloth over its cage - will not be able to understand these books. I'm sorry to have to state this, but so it is. Brookner's novels depict characters with depth - those wishing for something more superficial but "page turning" could try something like Mills and Boon.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
It isn't Mills & Boons,
By
This review is from: Undue Influence (Paperback)
I liked the book very much and anyone who is familiar with the style and prose of Anita Brookner would appreciate the way the story unfolded. Claire Pitt is not unusual in lacking or not wishing to use all the femine wrys to secure at all cost the notion of a complete adult with a family life.What was wonderful about the way Anita Brookner writes is that it takes you through the character's range of emotions and at the same time does not require the reader to acknoledge her as a heroine. It allows room for one to accept that life is not Mills & Boons.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Wanting it both ways,
By A Customer
This review is from: Undue Influence (Paperback)
This is the first Brookner I've read, and I'm very disappointed. While the writing is beautiful, the whole thing does not work. The heroine is supposedly a contemporary young woman, contemplating the freedom she enjoys and comparing her situation with that of her mother and her elderly spinster employers when they were her age. The problem is, all the characters except one act and speak like characters out of a post-War British black-and-white film. They drink tea, communicate by notes, and regard money as a vulgar necessity. Their mores, and consequently their dilemmas, are those of the gentility of an earlier age, which undermines the premise of the book. The plot is non-existant, the heroine a drip. She even uses a typewriter! She even uses a typewriter! She and the author should get out more.
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