Book: The people on Privilege Hill
Jun. 29th, 2010 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Jane Gardam
Details: (c) Jane Gardam 2007; Pub Abacus 2008; ISBN 978-0-349-11845-1
Verdict: The people on Privilege Hill is a thought-provoking and often cynical collection of short stories.
Reasons for reading it: I am a huge, huge fan of Jane Gardam's novels. I thought from the blurb on this that it was a collection of short stories in the same setting as Old Filth, and I wasn't sure that would be quite my thing, though I did enjoy the novel. However it turns out that this is only true of the title story; the others are a varied collection on the general theme of growing old(er).
How it came into my hands: Library.
The people on Privilege Hill really plays to Gardam's strengths, though I previously only knew her as a medium-length novelist. Her amazingly good characterization lets you really care about characters even if you only have a few pages to get to know them. And she tends to write about people who are a bit weird and feel like outsiders, which goes very well with writing about ageing, as old people are often regarded as weird or simply ignored by much of society. She has a very good eye for what it's like to be weird; she really gets into her characters' heads, and simultaneously presents their way of being as normal to them, while making them plausible in being aware of how other people perceive them. The stories are reasonably varied, but I did have some of the typical problem I have with single-author short stories collections, namely that it's too easy to see repeated themes which start to be less engaging when you've seen them several times.
Several of these stories have a really nasty bite to them, to. They seem like fairly peaceful character pieces, but in the denouement slam you with some very cynical observation about society and its prejudices. Again, the impact is slightly reduced by having a similar emotional tone across several stories in the collection. They're funny, not laugh-out-loud funny, but in that way of making you perceive things you didn't realize you knew.
And, well, the world needs more literary writing about people who are not young and beautiful and middle-class, even if an entire book length collection can feel too much of a good thing.
Details: (c) Jane Gardam 2007; Pub Abacus 2008; ISBN 978-0-349-11845-1
Verdict: The people on Privilege Hill is a thought-provoking and often cynical collection of short stories.
Reasons for reading it: I am a huge, huge fan of Jane Gardam's novels. I thought from the blurb on this that it was a collection of short stories in the same setting as Old Filth, and I wasn't sure that would be quite my thing, though I did enjoy the novel. However it turns out that this is only true of the title story; the others are a varied collection on the general theme of growing old(er).
How it came into my hands: Library.
The people on Privilege Hill really plays to Gardam's strengths, though I previously only knew her as a medium-length novelist. Her amazingly good characterization lets you really care about characters even if you only have a few pages to get to know them. And she tends to write about people who are a bit weird and feel like outsiders, which goes very well with writing about ageing, as old people are often regarded as weird or simply ignored by much of society. She has a very good eye for what it's like to be weird; she really gets into her characters' heads, and simultaneously presents their way of being as normal to them, while making them plausible in being aware of how other people perceive them. The stories are reasonably varied, but I did have some of the typical problem I have with single-author short stories collections, namely that it's too easy to see repeated themes which start to be less engaging when you've seen them several times.
Several of these stories have a really nasty bite to them, to. They seem like fairly peaceful character pieces, but in the denouement slam you with some very cynical observation about society and its prejudices. Again, the impact is slightly reduced by having a similar emotional tone across several stories in the collection. They're funny, not laugh-out-loud funny, but in that way of making you perceive things you didn't realize you knew.
And, well, the world needs more literary writing about people who are not young and beautiful and middle-class, even if an entire book length collection can feel too much of a good thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-02 10:29 pm (UTC)