Told with urgency, intimacy, and piercing emotion, this New York Times bestselling novel is the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and abandoned by a desire for a world beyond her own.
Nora Eldridge is a reliable, but unremarkable, friend and neighbor, always on the fringe of other people’s achievements. But the arrival of the Shahid family—dashing Skandar, a Lebanese scholar, glamorous Sirena, an Italian artist, and their son, Reza—draws her into a complex and exciting new world. Nora’s happiness pushes her beyond her boundaries, until Sirena’s careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal.
A New York TimesBook Review Notable Book • A Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year • A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book • A Huffington Post Best Book • A Boston GlobeBest Book of the Year • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book • A Goodreads Best Book
jayne_charles: Not many parallels between these two books plot-wise, but they had a strikingly similar tone and while reading one I was constantly reminded of the other.
In this ingenious, disquieting novel, she has assembled an intricate puzzle of self-belief and self-doubt, showing the peril of seeking your own image in someone else’s distorted mirror — or even, sometimes, in your own.
This imprecision is also true of the characterisation. Nora seems more a construct, a collection of female stereotypes, than a rounded character. She's a spinster schoolteacher, dutiful daughter and handmaiden to an artist. There's a nod to Ibsen's A Doll's House in both her name and the little confining rooms of her art, and references to tragic women from Virginia Woolf to Jean Rhys are scattered around. The problem and the promise of this novel lie with Nora, whose yearning for a heightened life could be pushed beyond her obsession with Sirena and her enchanting family. She needs to be less a composite of women and more herself.
The interplay between reality and imagination in this textual hall of mirrors makes for a deft study of character underpinned by a gripping narrative. Messud writes beautifully and wryly (a crowd of tourists visiting an art gallery with audio guides are described as "a mass that drifted slow and imperturbable as oxen") but the real achievement of this novel is to imbue every chapter with thought-provoking questions surrounding the place of women in literature, society and – most importantly – their own minds. Female anger has never been so readable.
There is no doubt Messud will garner accolades for her brutally honest portrayal of a kind of everywoman made deliberately vague in her physical description, and imbued with emotions and desires that will resonate powerfully with many readers ...Likewise, you cannot fault Messud’s prose. Nora’s strong voice carries the novel, and it is marked by a frankness of tone and realistic emotion. Indeed, Messud gives each character, even little Reza, such a distinct voice you can practically hear the accents, though they are written without affectation.
If only the book wasn’t such a slog. At 290 pages, it reads more like 400.
A Georges et Anne Borchardt et, comme toujours, Ã J. W.
Premiers mots
PREMIÈRE PARTIE
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Jusqu’où va ma colère ? Mieux vaut ne pas le savoir. Personne n’a envie de le savoir. [...]
Citations
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality.
I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure--the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit--is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me.
No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say "Fuck off" to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. men have generations of practice at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what must--and must first--be done.
But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I've learned it's a mistake to reveal her at all.
It doesn't even occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.
It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves.
Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying--valiantly, fruitlessly--to eradicate.
But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.
Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through.
Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais.Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Told with urgency, intimacy, and piercing emotion, this New York Times bestselling novel is the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and abandoned by a desire for a world beyond her own.
Nora Eldridge is a reliable, but unremarkable, friend and neighbor, always on the fringe of other people’s achievements. But the arrival of the Shahid family—dashing Skandar, a Lebanese scholar, glamorous Sirena, an Italian artist, and their son, Reza—draws her into a complex and exciting new world. Nora’s happiness pushes her beyond her boundaries, until Sirena’s careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal.
A New York TimesBook Review Notable Book • A Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year • A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book • A Huffington Post Best Book • A Boston GlobeBest Book of the Year • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book • A Goodreads Best Book
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> LA FEMME D'EN HAUT, par Claire Messud (Gallimard, 2016, Poche, 416 pages). — Nora ressemble à votre voisine du dessus, celle qui vous sourit chaleureusement dans l'escalier mais dont vous ignorez tout, car elle ne laisse paraître aucun désir, de peur de vous contrarier. Lorsque la belle Sirena, accompagnée de son mari et de son fils, fait irruption dans son existence d'institutrice dévouée, elle réveille un flot de sentiments longtemps réprimés.
Au fil des mois, Nora réinvente sa vie et se réinvente elle-même, projetant sur chacun des membres de cette famille ses désirs inavoués : maternité, création artistique, sensualité. Mais échappe-t-on réellement au statut de femme de second plan?
Tout en s'attaquant aux vicissitudes des rapports familiaux et à la cruauté du monde de l'art, Claire Messud brise avec acidité le mythe de la femme sans histoires, pour la révéler grinçante et en colère, habitée d'espoirs fous et, inévitablement, de fracassantes désillusions.
Sélection prix Femina.
—Johnny Gimenez (Culturebox)