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This Real Night (1984)

par Rebecca West

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2559103,928 (3.93)55
A new era for women--and the Aubrey sisters--dawns in the trilogy that proves "what an extraordinary, and extraordinarily honest, writer Rebecca West was" (The New York Times). They have put down their schoolbooks and put up their hair, but a talented musician and her kin ponder what being a young woman on one's own will entail. Abandoned by their feckless father, Rose and her family must move beyond their comfortable drawing room to discover a world of kind patrons, music teachers, and concert hall acclaim, but also domestic strife, anti-Semitism, and social pressure to marry.   Set before World War I, Rebecca West's intimate, eloquent family portrait brings to life a time when women recognized their own voices and the joys of living off one's own talents.… (plus d'informations)
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Affichage de 1-5 de 9 (suivant | tout afficher)
Con la marcha de Piers, un marido tan soñador como irresponsable, y la venta de algunos cuadros valiosos, Clare Aubrey parece tomar por fin las riendas de su familia. Rose y Mary siguen formándose como pianistas, mientras Cordelia se ve forzada a trabajar como asistente de un marchante de arte y a renunciar para siempre a sus aspiraciones artísticas, y Richard Quin, el hermano menor, contempla la posibilidad de estudiar en Oxford.

La noche interrumpida continúa la trilogía de la inolvidable familia Aubrey en los albores del siglo xx, cuando la mayoría de edad de las chicas, con su aceptación gradual del amor y la pérdida, se torna aún más conmovedora a medida que se suceden los acontecimientos que desembocarán en la Primera Guerra Mundial y sus dramáticas consecuencias.
  bibliotecayamaguchi | Nov 25, 2021 |
Esta novela continua la inolvidable trilogía de la familia Aubrey en los albores del siglo XX. ( )
  pedrolopez | Jun 17, 2021 |
Gli Aubrey sono antipatici, un po' arroganti, vittorianamente stravaganti e i tempi stan cambiando anche per loro: arriva prima l'adolescenza e poi la Grande Guerra coi suoi sconvolgimenti sociali a spazzar via il mondo che hanno conosciuto e la maniera in cui sono stati cresciuti.
  ShanaPat | Jul 9, 2020 |
This Real Night is the second book in Rebecca West’s Aubrey family trilogy; A Saga of the Century (there are editions which publish all three books together). The trilogy begins with The Fountain Overflows . I read that wonderful book back at the end of February while I was on holiday with friends in Iceland, I hadn’t meant to leave it quite so long before catching up with these characters again. This Real Night and Cousin Rosamond were published in the 1980s following Rebecca West’s death, from the manuscripts that she left behind. The third book I know is unfinished – and while part of me does still want to read it – I can’t get excited about an unfinished novel.

This Real Night starts a few years after the events of The Fountain Overflows, we find ourselves in the 1900s, in those days before the First World War so changed the world for a generation of young people. Cornelia, Mary and our narrator Rose are now grown up, they discover a freedom to being grown up, happy to throw of the bonds of childhood.

“A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness. When one is quite little one labours under just such physical and mental disabilities as might be inflicted by some dreadful accident or disease; but while the maimed and paralysed are pitied because they cannot walk and have to be carried about and cannot explain their needs or think clearly, nobody is sorry for babies, though they are always crying aloud their frustration and hurt pride.”

In the wake of Piers Aubrey’s disappearance, the family fortunes have improved. Clare has a good grip on the purse strings for the first time ever, and the family enjoy the friendship and support of Mr Morpurgo, their father’s friend. The sisters’ beloved younger brother Richard Quin is still at school, he too growing up fast – and considering Oxford in the not too distant future. Cornelia, following the devastation of having to accept that she doesn’t possess the fine musical ability of her mother and two sisters, has become an art dealer’s assistant. Mary and Rose are at music college, desperately trying for artistic perfection.

“Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts. But it is also in terror, because those values are threatened, and it is not certain whether they will triumph in this world, and of course music is a missionary effort to colonise earth for imperialistic heaven.”

Cordelia marries early – and everyone seems to think it for the best. Cordelia is the odd one out in the family, she is rather spikey and can be difficult, though it is sad that she always seems to fall foul of her mother and sisters. Cousin Rosamond decides to train as a nurse, striding out towards independence she remains close to the Aubreys and is especially adored by everyone’s favourite Richard Quin. Rose and Mary begins to notice a little change in Cordelia after her marriage – although their relationship remains strained.

“Our enemy had gone away, had not just left our house, but had vanished. Someone whom, it often seemed, we did not love enough.”

One of the things the Aubrey siblings still enjoy more than anything is their visits to Aunt Lily, who they first knew as children, when her sister was convicted of the murder of her husband. Lily’s daughter was a school friend of Mary and Rose, and although she now lives with her dead father’s family (who prevent her from seeing Aunt Lily) the Aubrey’s retain their old affection for the unfortunate woman. Lily works in The Dog and Duck a small inn on the Thames, taken in by her old friends Aunt Milly and Uncle Len. It is a rough, colourful environment – quite at odds with their more genteel, artistic upbringing, but Mary and Rose particularly love their visits. Here they are exposed to all kinds of new experiences. I love this collection of characters, who Rebecca West portrays realistically but with affection, resisting I felt, the trap of caricature that some writers of a certain class have been known to fall into.

As the world descends into war, change comes to the Aubrey household, there is probably an inevitability to the ending – and Rebecca West’s depiction is delicately poignant.

If I am honest, I think, that The Fountain Overflows is a rather better novel, although I enjoyed this enormously – a chance to meet again familiar old friends. This Real Night probably could be read as a standalone novel but if you did, you would miss an enormous treat. ( )
  Heaven-Ali | Nov 11, 2017 |
This Real Night’ was to be the second volume of a trilogy that would tell the story of a century, but the trilogy was never completed. The first book, ‘The Fountain Overflows’ was published in 1956 but this book wasn’t published until 1984, a year after the author’s death and the final, incomplete book was published not long after, with notes suggesting what might have followed.

I loved ‘The Fountain Overflows’ and I was delighted to find that this book picked up the threads of that story not too much further into the future. I was pulled right back …

The Aubrey children have lost their father, who left one day and never came back, but their world is stable, and their mother had been able to sell paintings that she knew were real but had led him to believe were copies for significant sums of money.

The musical daughters, Mary and Rose, were moving towards careers as concert pianists, have were studying in musical academies in London. They suffered some setbacks as they stepped out into the world, but there was nothing that really hindered their progress.

Though that is not to say that they were entirely confident.

“Every time we left our pianos the age gave us such assurances that there was to be a new and final establishment of pleasure upon earth. True that when we were at our pianos we knew that this was not true. There is something in the great music that we played which told us that promise will not be kept.”

They were determined to be independent, and unimpressed by the only alternative that might be open to them:

“Indeed marriage was to us a descent into a crypt where, by the tremulous light of smoking torches, there was celebrated a glorious rite of a sacrificial nature. Of course it was beautiful, we saw that. But we meant to stay in the sunlight, and we knew of no end which we could serve by offering ourselves up as a sacrifice.”

Their elder sister, Cordelia, saw the world rather differently. She had been heartbroken when she had been forced to face the fact that she lacked the emotional understanding of music needed to make it a career. She had picked it up and re-set her course in life, hoping for a secure future as the wife of a successful man, and fearing that her unconventional home and her inexplicably absent father would harm her prospects.

I was sorry that her sisters, her mother and her author completely failed to understand Cordelia, that they had no time or sympathy for her. She could be trying, but she really deserved better.

They had much more time for their cousin Rosamund; maybe because shared their desire for independence and was working towards a career as a nurse, and maybe because they understood that she had talents quite unlike their own. She had played chess with their father, she and her mother continued to sew to support themselves ….

The family was completed by their young brother, Richard Quinn, who seemed almost too lovely, bright and charming to be true.

The picture of family life was captivating and rich with detail. Rebecca West wrote beautifully and her writing is full of sentences and expressions to cherish.

Familiar family friends re-appeared; the family’s social circle was small but it cut right across social classes. They often saw Mr Morpurgo, who was both wealthy and generous, and they also regularly visited a riverside pub, where the landlord was an old family friend.

Those friendships allowed Rebecca West to say a great deal about social issues, by means of extended scenes portraying two very different visits.

This book stands alone, but you really should read ‘The Fountain Overflows’ first.

I think that first book is stronger than this one; they are both idiosyncratic and oddly structured, but the first book was more polished, it had a stronger narrative, and I found the characters rather more engaging when they were younger. I can quite believe that Rebecca West hadn’t quite finished with her manuscript when she died.

The ending is perfectly done and heart-breaking. The passing of time has consequences, and the Great War casts a shadow.

This is a story that draws on the authors own life, without being entirely autobiographical; and it does feel authentic. That’s why I feel so attached to this family, why I can love this book for its strengths and forgive it for its weaknesses; and why I want to read the next, unfinished book to find out the future holds for the surviving members of the Aubrey family. ( )
  BeyondEdenRock | Aug 23, 2017 |
Affichage de 1-5 de 9 (suivant | tout afficher)
The whole ghostly, unfinishable saga project now - after her own death two years ago - bears striking witness to what an extraordinary, and extraordinarily honest, writer Rebecca West was.
ajouté par christiguc | modifierNew York Times, Lorna Sage (Aug 18, 1985)
 
The major problem of the novel is perhaps the problem that faces all writers who think it enough to present character and atmosphere. In Ulysses Joyce demonstrated that you could show the current of daily life without much of a plot as long as you found a plot-substitute--in his case a complex symbolic structure. This Real Night has none of that: it reads like part of an exceptionally well composed memoir whose backbone is nothing more than time (and not the philosophical time of Proust). The book says, This is what it was like to live then if you had talent, sensibility, and a little money.

In her second novel, The Judge, written when she was Well's mistress, during the early days of the Great War, Rebecca West, in Well's view, ruined the structure by not thinking her plot through to the logical finish. In her critical book The Strange Necessity Wells was lampooned for a certain slickness and vulgarity. (This led to the end of the relationship.) Rebecca West needed more of that vulgarity: exquisiteness, like patriotism, is not enough.
ajouté par SnootyBaronet | modifierThe Atlantic, Anthony Burgess
 
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The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly.
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A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness. When one is quite little one labours under just such physical and mental disabilities as might be inflicted by some dreadful accident or disease; but while the maimed and paralysed are pitied because they cannot walk and have to be carried about and cannot explain their needs or think clearly, nobody is sorry for babies, though they are always crying aloud their frustration and hurt pride. It is true that every year betters one's position and gives one more command over oneself, but that only leads to a trap. One has to live in the adult world at a disadvantage, as member of a subject race who has to admit that there is some reason for his subjection. For grown-ups do know more than children, that cannot be denied; but that is not due to any real superiority, they simply know the lie of the land better, for no other reason than that they have lived longer. It is as if a number of people were set down in a desert, and some had compasses and some had not; and those who had compasses treated those who had not as their inferiors, scolding and mocking them with no regard for the injustice of the conditions, and at the same time guiding them, often kindly, to safely. I still believe childhood to be a horrible state of disequilibrium.
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A new era for women--and the Aubrey sisters--dawns in the trilogy that proves "what an extraordinary, and extraordinarily honest, writer Rebecca West was" (The New York Times). They have put down their schoolbooks and put up their hair, but a talented musician and her kin ponder what being a young woman on one's own will entail. Abandoned by their feckless father, Rose and her family must move beyond their comfortable drawing room to discover a world of kind patrons, music teachers, and concert hall acclaim, but also domestic strife, anti-Semitism, and social pressure to marry.   Set before World War I, Rebecca West's intimate, eloquent family portrait brings to life a time when women recognized their own voices and the joys of living off one's own talents.

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