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Spiderweb (Paperback)

by Penelope Lively (Author)
2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 218 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (4 Nov 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140256946
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140256949
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 1.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 501,648 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #37 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > L > Lively, Penelope

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Product Description

Product Description

A novel about an anthropologist who retires to a small Somerset village, where she finds that life is as subtle and elaborate as any she has encountered in her work. In particular, she tries to fathom her fierce neighbour who governs her family with a menacing force. From the author of BEYOND THE BLUE MOUNTAINS and HEAT WAVE.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Straying out of her middle-class comfort zone, 11 Sep 2009
By E. Shaw "Kokoschka's_cat" (Leeds, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Stella is a retired anthropologist and decides she should try to put down roots at last after a long career of following the available work from country to country throughout the world. She was at Oxford at a time when it was rare, but finally acceptable, for a woman to aspire to a career and her memories of her first friend Amy, with whom she only sporadically kept in touch, are interspersed with events as she settles in a cottage in the West Country.

Along with more anodyne neighbours, there are the Hiscocks, who own a feed merchants and repairs business at the end of the lane, and Lively gives us episodes within their lives. These are unpleasant people, with a manic mother, a taciturn father and two teenaged sons who are both mistreated by their parents and, in turn, go in for setting fires and shooting animals.

Along with the nasty events that befall Stella, simply because she is there and vulnerable, the reader is subjected to disquisitions about anthropology, which are not that interesting, frankly, and memories of friends and two love affairs. Stella does not regret not getting married, and has never wanted children. She seems, perhaps inevitably, rather self-centred, though one would want to like someone who has resisted the lure of marriage and family life, the fact that she has no regrets (what, not even a little one?) seems a trifle unrealistic.

I didn't much like the protagonist, I have to say, and nor did I like the over-simplistic picture of the lower-class Hiscocks. The book left me wanting a more nuanced and explanatory account of these people. Straying out of her middle-class comfort zone is sometimes problematic for this writer.
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