A Private View

by Anita Brookner

Overview

Brookner explores the complications that arise when one solitary man comes up against a woman who seems determined to invade his solitude. George Bland is an aging bachelor whose existence has been virtually a mirror image of his name—up until now. For into George's life walks Katy Gibb, young, abrasively self-assured, who incites in George the most alarming feelings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307826299
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/15/2012
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	252
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years in Paris, has lived there ever since. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988.

Editorial Reviews

Brookner doesn't disappoint. Her newest novel has an elegantly simple plot unlike her last, the rather involved "Dolly" , but it is suffused with amazingly complex modulations of emotion. Almost everything that takes place in this taut little drama occurs within the conflicted mind of a man named George Bland. George is in his mid-sixties, retired, materially comfortable, and terribly lonely. The only child of rather bitter parents, George was destined for disappointment and has, therefore, assiduously courted it. He failed to marry the only woman he ever loved and formed only one significant friendship with a man named Putnam. The two men had looked forward to enjoying retirement together, but Putnam has died and George is melancholy and resigned. Suddenly a brash and enigmatic young woman appears, literally, on his doorstep and claims to be a close friend of his neighbors across the hall. George suspects that he's being conned, but he lets her in, both repelled and aroused. Katy is obviously a crass and charmless opportunist, but it is her very greed and cruelty that make fastidious and dignified George wish, for the first time in his methodical life, for recklessness and chaos. Few writers can infuse a scene in which two people stand in a hallway without speaking with the suspense and tremendous intensity and delicacy of feeling Brookner achieves. Indeed, she is the poet of the silent skirmishes that rage behind the facade of dignified lives.

Donna Seaman