Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Great characters but the book lacks impact, 16 Dec 2008
This is a novel about identity. It is the story of Vivien Kovaks, the daughter of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, as she struggles to find her place in British society in the late Seventies as well as understand her past, a past denied to her by her insular parents. By re-establishing contact with her Uncle Sandor, shunned by her Father for his work as a pimp and slum-landlord, Vivien establishes herself as the scribe for his oral autobiography and sets to work typing up the story of his life. In doing so she learns of her parents' past and therfore more about own. The book is her memories of these events from her middle age in a London shocked by the bombings of July 2006. The theme of clothing as a means of establishing or changing identity is not strong enough to provide the title and seems therefore an unusual theme to draw the title from.
Nor does the structure provide any real desire to read to the end. It is difficult to establish which if any of the vaguely interesting events were intended to fix the reader. Vivien, we know from the beginning is middle aged and sensible by the end, and yet she is the only character in which the reader is able to fully invest. The series of events which conclude the novel, therefore, are merely interesting and provide limited climax.
It can only be the detail with which each character is presented which won Grant her Booker nomination. Vivien the lost maybe-punk in vintage clothing with a useless English degree, her parents the timid Jewish immigrants self imprisoned in their flat on the Marylebone Road, Vivien's `play-thing' Claude, a skinny confused young man existing on the edge of sanity and of course Uncle Sandor a labour camp survivor turned pimp,businessman and cake enthisuast all appeal to the curious reader. All are written into life and interact realistically but there is little more to report.
Vivien herself tells Uncle Sandor, as she advises him on his method of dictating his own story; `if a book is to be publishable, it has to be more than chronology, it has to shed light on the human condition.' Grant achieves this in her portrait of the human need for identity and to a lesser extent the need for family, but I feel that an author with her ability to observe detail and write characters should have aimed for more. There are too many events in the book, rushed by in a page which are of more interest to those which provide the major scenes in the narrative. In short neither Vivien's nor her Uncle Sandor's stories are interesting or absorbing enough to provide Grant with the impact which her themes require.
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27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
'Each generation has to'etc, 14 April 2008
A timely reminder of how a society is re-invented and inhabited (rather like clothes) by its immigrants. Also a revealing study of the alienation the children of those immigrants can evolve into should their parents choose to stop time as a way of integrating. Vivien, the protagonist, is the victim and a co-conspirator in the revealing of a family secret. The process by which this revelation is finally made is fascinating: Linda Grant has constructed a narrative as compelling and disturbing as that of her memoir 'Remind me who I am, again'.
Apart from feeling that the book was too short: I would have liked to know more about Vivien's second marriage; Vivien's relationship with her uncle's lover in the present day could have been made more of; I was left with that lovely feeling of having read yet another excellent book by a living novelist,and that there would be even more to look forward to. My advice is to stay in and stretch it over a weekend. Much food for thought.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lacklustre, although the writing is good, 28 Sep 2008
A rather insipid tale, though Grant is a good enough writer to hold the attention, it's hard to really say what 'The Clothes on Their Backs' is really about. Maybe there's some hugely deep inner meaning that I've completely missed. Although not a lot happens and it's not particularly complex, I still felt that it never really came together to make a consistent whole.
The central character, Vivien, I found very hard to empathise with. Even when tragedy touched her life it was hard to care. It wasn't that she was unpleasant, just rather uninteresting. Vivien's timid immigrant parents and larger-than-life uncle are more vivid characters although they were just a bit too extreme and contrasting to ring true.
The actual writing is good, with nice descriptive passages. The structure also works well. But the ending is rather hurried and out of keeping with the pace of the rest of the story, and the lack of feeling I had for the characters meant I felt remote from the story.
I would read another book by Grant as the quality was decent, it just wasn't a story that particularly drew me in. Whether it deserves to be shortlisted for the Booker prize I'm not so sure, although it is better than some of the other winners I've read. It might appeal more to people with some more personal connection to the events - immigrants (particularly from Eastern Europe), people who grew up in the same era, or people with Jewish heritage, as these are all topics explored in the novel. But for me it didn't really work out.
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