A spot of bother - BokDraken

390 sidor

På English

Publicerades 2006 av Jonathan Cape.

ISBN:: 978-0-224-08046-0
OCLC-nummer:: 70173224

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.

At 61, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels and listening to a bit of light jazz. Then his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting re-married, to the deeply inappropriate Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has “strangler’s hands.” Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing …

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not at quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood, or manly bonhomie. He does not understand the modern obsession with talking about everything. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life, however, cannot be ignored.

At 61, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building a shed in his garden, reading historical novels and listening to a bit of light jazz. Then his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting re-married, to the deeply inappropriate Ray. Her family is not pleased – as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has “strangler’s hands.” Katie can’t decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling late-life affair with one of her husband’s ex-colleagues. And the tidy and pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover, Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.

Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

The way these damaged people fall apart – and come together – as a family is the true subject of Haddon’s disturbing yet amusing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

A SPOT OF BOTHER is Mark Haddon’s unforgettable follow-up to the internationally beloved bestseller THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME. Here the madness – literally – of family life proves rich comic fodder for Haddon’s crackling prose and bittersweet insights into misdirected love.

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Björn recenserade A spot of bother av Mark Haddon

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My opinion of Haddon from The Curious Incident... is pretty much intact: ho-hum. Bother is a quick read for 375 pages, there's quite a few chuckles and even one or two pretty poignant things about love and aging (though it hammers the fear-of-your-body-decaying theme into the ground without ever coming close to the poignancy of, say, Philip Roth's Everyman). Problem is it's just so incredibly predictable. Once we've gotten to know the characters (hypochondriac father, philandering mother, gay son and his lover, brash daughter and her fiancé whom everyone assumes is an asshole even though he never actually gives anyone any reason to think so) they just plod on like that, whining and being dysfunctional-lite for 300 pages until the end, which turns out exactly as you'd have guessed 30 pages in. A better writer might have made those 300 pages between setup and resolution fascinating in themselves, but here …

My opinion of Haddon from The Curious Incident... is pretty much intact: ho-hum. Bother is a quick read for 375 pages, there's quite a few chuckles and even one or two pretty poignant things about love and aging (though it hammers the fear-of-your-body-decaying theme into the ground without ever coming close to the poignancy of, say, Philip Roth's Everyman). Problem is it's just so incredibly predictable. Once we've gotten to know the characters (hypochondriac father, philandering mother, gay son and his lover, brash daughter and her fiancé whom everyone assumes is an asshole even though he never actually gives anyone any reason to think so) they just plod on like that, whining and being dysfunctional-lite for 300 pages until the end, which turns out exactly as you'd have guessed 30 pages in. A better writer might have made those 300 pages between setup and resolution fascinating in themselves, but here it's mostly the distance we have to travel to get to the end - ironic for a novel about not letting fear of the ending stop you from enjoying life.