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Chargement... Night Waking (original 2011; édition 2012)par Sarah Moss (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreNight Waking par Sarah Moss (2011)
Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. ‘’I’m a historian, remember? I’m the Rockind Fellow of St Mary Hall? If you wanted housework, you should have married one of those Clarissas your mother kept scattering at your feet?’’ Sarah Moss takes us on a journey to witness the struggle of an academic to balance her career with the demands of being a mother and a wife. Within the isolated environment of a Hebridean island and under scrutiny from her husband, the locals and the police, Anna tries to find some bloody time to write and she really didn’t need the bones of a baby unearthed in her garden… Moss writes with humour - dry and acute- to communicate an almost unbearable situation but there are various eerie moments when you have the feeling that terrible twists and images are boiling underneath the chaos of family life. What should Anna do? Career, motherhood, housewife chores. This is her claustrophobic environment in the company of a good-for-nothing husband. What about her own mental health? Does anyone care about her? Should we give up our own wishes and ambitions when we become mothers? Is there nothing left of our own personality anymore? Should she accept men lecturing her on motherhood, wanting her to give up her job and research to become a fucking housewife, a mare giving birth by the dozens? No! Fuck you! With every book I read lately, my teenage-old decision never to have children becomes stronger and stronger. My career is enough for me, thank you. And no, I don’t need anyone’s ‘’opinion’’ to verify my decision. I liked Anna, she is a character I could connect with but I couldn’t understand her docility. If I had a bunch of heathens breathing down my neck just because I happened to be an intellectually capable woman with a job (because in the eyes of the male characters of the novel ALL women are STUPID…), I would give them a piece of my mind. Police or no police… Which is why I didn't like the book. The themes did not particularly appeal to me, the characters were indifferent, the repetitive motifs didn’t really move the story forward, Raph’s whining and Giles’s bullshit drove me mad and what was that line about the Serbs as a slaughtering tribe? Give us a break! In the end, the story just wasn’t enticing anymore and I skimmed through the final pages. May’s letters that transport us to the 19th century gave a hint of Gaelic Folklore ( the selkies, the Grey People) but it was too little, too disjointed. I loved Ghost Wall and Summerwater but Night Waking and The Fell disappointed me… I'm a little embarrassed, but I'm going to differ with the bulk of LT and say I didn't particularly enjoy this novel by [[Sarah Moss]]. It's written very well and has an interested double plot line, but the modern-day characters really grated on me. The plot centers around a family that goes to stay on their family island off the coast of Scotland where Giles, the husband, is researching puffins and Anna, the wife, is writing a book. They have two young children and Anna is overwhelmed with trying to balance her work life with her life as a mother. This is familiar to me as a working mom, and I'm sympathetic, but Anna drives me nuts. She's not getting any sleep, but she's also not insisting on any help from her husband. She's not breastfeeding an infant (something admittedly hard to pass off on dad), the kids waking her up are 7 and probably 2. Just wake up your husband and make him take a turn already! I just could not stop thinking about [Invisible Women], the nonfiction book I recently read that talks a lot about the unpaid care work that women are expected to do. Anyway, Anna starts demanding more equal distribution of work at home by the end, but the beginning was so maddening that [[Sarah Moss]] kind of lost me. Back to the plot . . . the family discovers the bones of baby while planting some trees and the mystery of this baby leads to discoveries about the island's history and Giles's ancestors. I liked all of this and thought it came together nicely, but it just wasn't enough to make up for my annoyance at the beginning. When I reviewed Moss's 'The Tidal Zone' I commented: "I found both daughters, but especially the teenager, just a little too precocious to be believable". This book, which pre-dates The Tidal Zone, is even more problematic in that regard. There are two sons in Night Waking, and the older son is unbelievably precocious. The younger is also older than his years but is so aggravatingly demanding that I couldn't help but focus on this aspect of his behaviour. In fact, I almost gave up reading when I was about half way through, because these two boys were just too painful to encounter. That's Moss's skill as a writer though - to draw the reader into the emotions of the situation. The book has many themes running through it, and one of them is parenting. The parenting of these two boys by the main character, Anna, and her partner, Giles, is a focus for much of the book, but is thrown into contrast by the parenting shown by a visiting mother with her anorexic teenager. Both mothers can see the faults of the other but are too emotionally involved in their own family to be able to stand back and see how they could manage better. In the case of Anna - and also the other mother - the relationship to the father of the children is a very complicating factor. I think Moss writes marriage relationships exceptionally well, and the way this marriage relationship develops over the course of the book was the main interest for me. I have a lot of admiration for Sarah Moss - she's clearly a very clever person and there's a lot of depth in this story. History and sociology feature prominently, and I reckon she must do a lot of in depth research to get her story setting right. She's very much an academic at heart, but she knows how to engage readers at an emotional level.
She continues, too, to thread historical research into her fiction in a way that is fresh and illuminating. If, as historian Anna insists, "there is no story in the muddle and pain of real life . . . only a twisted familiarity", it is territory as perilous as any far-flung archipelago, and Moss is a wry, winning guide. Prix et récompenses
Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer and a novelist of great emotional depth. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)823.92Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 2000-Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Along the way, Anna & Raph uncover a child's skeleton in the garden when they were planting trees. This sends Anna, who is a historian, down a path of discovering what happened on the island in the past and fending off the unpleasant questioning and insinuations of the local police. Between the chapters of this contemporary tale are letters from a lady on the island in the late 19th century. These bring you closer to understanding the skeleton and the family's past. It is an example of a dual timeline done well - the two elements support each other but they do not make everything clear until the very end.
I enjoyed this, but the turmoil of emotions that Anna experiences is not for the faint hearted (like parenting itself). ( )