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The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories (2014)

par Hilary Mantel

Autres auteurs: Voir la section autres auteur(e)s.

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1,0017220,580 (3.62)120
"In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel's trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display. Her classic wicked humor in each story--which range from a ghost story to a vampire story to near-memoir to mini-sagas of family and social fracture--brilliantly unsettles the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way. Mantel brutally and acutely writes about gender, marriage, class, family, and sex, cutting to the core of human experience. Unpredictable, diverse, and even shockingly unexpected, each story grabs you by the throat within a couple of sentences. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers"--… (plus d'informations)
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Anglais (72)  Arabe (1)  Toutes les langues (73)
Affichage de 1-5 de 73 (suivant | tout afficher)
OK after reading the first few stories and not liking it I decided I'd finish it and I sort of came around to it? Best are probably...

Harley Street, which has a sort of obvious ending that I rolled my eyes at a little but after thinking about a little found really satisfying good version of a vampire story and connecting it to the seeming vampiric nature of doctors seeing steadily declining health wise patients in a private practice... it works well and feels very satisfying, How Shall I Know You? - a little bit weird but the feelings of isolation and failure come through well - pitying and being pitied and how we judge other people as lower than us, The Heart Fails Without Warning touching story about living with a sibling with an eating disorder

The School of English is depressing but mostly I felt a little weird about her writing a story about a live in maid who doesn't speak English very well given she's obviously... not anywhere near that - attempting to mimic the slightly different style of an ESL speaker is something hard to do well anyway. There's actually a couple bits of racism put in the mouth of this person who clearly isn't white too - it's definitely uncomfortable. Also major trigger warning for rape

Terminus doesn't really work - hard to say what she was going for but nothing really comes through

Comma feels like it's missing a lot as explained below, Sorry to Disturb feels like I'm missing a lot.

The rest is all pretty decent, not top tier and maybe missing that sparkle but I thought they were pretty enjoyable thinking on it. If I read it again I might give it 4 stars - it's hard to explain but the first two stories really put me in a bad mood reading the rest .

-old stuff below-

Got this out the library but don't know if I'll finish, I feel like I'm missing something - only read the first 3 stories so far but I was left thinking "huh?"

EG first story is a British woman in Saudi Arabia with her husband who is working there. And then there's some guy who's pretty pushy about being social with her. And well. The plot doesn't really go anywhere from there. Apart from being pushy and therefore kind of creepy nothing he does is actually sinister in any way yet the narration implies it is. You could interpret this as her own fear of being out of control in a deeply patriarchal society, her own subconcious racism (he's not white) or something, I don't know. Except... she finds her furniture constantly moves in the night?? It's implied maybe the drugs she's on make her cotton headed and maybe she does stuff in the night without realising it but it doesn't really connect together or say anything. And the story just ends with her husband writing a letter to the guy telling him to stop, he does, and she goes "well that thing back then was weird". Weirdest part is he kind of pressures her to reveal where the publisher of her novel is, she says it's near Trafalgar Square, later he goes off to London and when he comes back he says he was in that area and it's like oh I was so shocked... but nothing happens?? That was it?? I just felt like I was missing something - there were pretty obvious themes around being a woman in a very patriarchal society but it felt like it was setting stuff up that didn't happen and it didn't really connect.

The next story Comma is also weirdly insubstantial. It conjures up the image of hot summer days well and then the title "Comma" is a baby who looks a bit weird? and then the friend of the narrator throws a rock *near* it, as far as I can tell not hitting the baby, and that's... it. And then there's an "epilogue" where the friend is now 30 years older and... has kids of her own? And her face is a full stop? And narrator's parents say the house which has the baby is bad but don't expand? And the narrator's parents say not to hang out with narrator's friend - presumably because she's unclean or something but it's not clear. Just none of it makes sense, there's no satisfying conclusion and none of the parts fit together plot wise or thematically - there's no suggestion of something that jars it's just. Nothing. ( )
  tombomp | Oct 31, 2023 |
A set of fairly generic short stories that look to have been written over a period of about twenty years, but with a few nice, unexpected touches. "Sorry to disturb", for example, a story about an expat-wife in 1980s Saudi Arabia who gets involved in a misunderstanding-laden friendship with an Asian businessman, looks deceptively like a simple reworking of the plot of A passage to India, but comes with so much unexpected detail that you have to assume that there is a real personal experience behind it. "Harley Street" and "Offences against the person" both recast conventional workplace dramas in witty ways to show us what they might look like from the receptionist's desk (and the latter, in particular, has some clever lines of Mancunian dialogue that wouldn't have been out of place in a Victoria Wood script). "The heart fails without warning" picks up the theme of eating disorders that Mantel used in a different way in her novel An experiment in love, and "How shall I know you?" is a clever take on the writer-on-tour theme. And that title story: well, it poses the reader with an interesting moral challenge. What would you have done if someone had barged into your apartment with a sniper rifle in 1983, intent on shooting the Prime Minister from your window? In the abstract, I'm sure many of us would feel as though we might have said "go right ahead", but of course it's not so straightforward when you actually imagine yourself in that situation... ( )
  thorold | Jul 7, 2023 |
This is a collection of short stories from a wonderful novelist. All the stories are good, several are great and they all have a level of menace or creepiness about them that is occasionally quite unsettling. ( )
  rosiezbanks | Mar 23, 2023 |
Wow, great writing! Never read her before, but I want to read more. Good mixture of funny and creepy and the writing is almost musical. ( )
  steve02476 | Jan 3, 2023 |
Freed from the meshes of history, Mantel's mind can careen off into unsettling, even creepy, territory. She has long been fascinated with ghosts and things unseen, and they get full play here. "Sorry to Disturb" is indeed disturbed by an unwanted visitor to a woman locked ("we were big on bolts and shutters, deadlocks and mortises, safety chains...") behind doors like coffin lids, peering through a spyhole. She is haunted by migrainous visions and furniture that seems to frolic in the night. "Comma" finds two girls lurking to spy on a mysterious being kept in the local mansion. In "Terminus," a woman sees her dead father through a train window and then tries to track him down through the chaotic bumping, rushing, menacing crowds of Waterloo Station - a busy modern train terminal becomes a hellish place. Spouses are often oddly distant and wordless, children observe and ponder inexplicable situations and people. A perfectly horrid bed and breakfast inn is worse than my recent visit to an Albuquerque Motel 6, and that's saying something! (Appalled, I refused to stay there and left.) There is frequently a sense of dislocation, of being an estranged witness to mundane happenings (a taxi ride, a visit from a putative plumber, a father's mistress fishes out an aspirin with a "pearly claw") that turn weird and threatening.

Not light reading, in short. But vivid, glowing with a lurid sort of light that shows us things in everyday life that we may prefer not to see - but can't look away from. ( )
  JulieStielstra | Oct 1, 2022 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 73 (suivant | tout afficher)
This new book is less explicitly semi-autobiographical and more stylistically daring than her earlier collection of stories. Many of these stories are told by characters musing about the ruptures in their own past — unsettling turns, betrayals and losses — ranging from the dislocations of the expat life or of grave illness to discoveries of adultery (leading to memorable incidents with broken glass and then to broken families) to unexpected acts of kindness that diminish or shame the recipient. And, as so often in Mantel, the dead have unreasonable demands, except when, saddest of all, they want nothing to do with the living.
 
Most of these stories have murky endings that leave readers scratching their heads. What's clear, though, is that the writing is cinematically exquisite. You may not like the disturbing images Mantel's popping into your head, but, like the woman who helps Thatcher's would-be assassin, you can't help but get sucked in. Mantel seems to know the darkness within us all too well, and readers will find her aim is true.
 
Neither “Wolf Hall” nor “Bring Up the Bodies” is the Hilary Mantel book most relevant to “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher,” her new volume of short stories. Instead, the germane book is her 2003 memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost.” That book describes a woman who is passive, illness-plagued and spooked. The narrators of these stories are much more like Ms. Mantel’s description of herself than like the ironclad Machiavellians who dominate her Thomas Cromwell trilogy-in-progress.
 

» Ajouter d'autres auteur(e)s (7 possibles)

Nom de l'auteurRôleType d'auteurŒuvre ?Statut
Hilary Mantelauteur principaltoutes les éditionscalculé
Carr, JaneNarrateurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Willems, IneTraducteurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
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"In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel's trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display. Her classic wicked humor in each story--which range from a ghost story to a vampire story to near-memoir to mini-sagas of family and social fracture--brilliantly unsettles the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way. Mantel brutally and acutely writes about gender, marriage, class, family, and sex, cutting to the core of human experience. Unpredictable, diverse, and even shockingly unexpected, each story grabs you by the throat within a couple of sentences. The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers"--

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