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Incidents in the Rue Laugier

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Incidents in the Rue Laugier

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Overview

Maud Gonthier yearns for an escape from the cocoon of the bourgeois modesty. The splendid, caddish David Tyler appears to offer one. In this stylish, deeply knowing novel by the author of Hotel du Lac, Maud's seduction creates a chemistry of longing, sensuality, and betrayal—with a surprising climax. 240 pp.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307826305
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/08/2012
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	322,077
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.

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Editorial Reviews

Six cryptic journal jottings in her French-born mother's hand drive Maffy, initially the narrator of Brookner's (Dolly) potently crafted novel, to fabricate Maud Gonthier Harrison's single ardent girlhood affair. Having reproduced the mysterious inscription in Maud's notebook (``Dames Blanches. La Gaillardier. Place des Ternes. Sang. Edward.'') and a scrap of Proust, Maffy teasingly begs the reader, ``Please accept me as an unreliable narrator,'' then vanishes, to appear only ``inadvertently'' in the tale that follows. Now in a third-person voice, Maud's story takes on a pulsating reality, involving her with charismatic ``scoundrel'' David Tyler and his friend since Cambridge, Edward Harrison-the man Maud finally marries. The triangle, erotic and latently homoerotic, forms during a sensual, heat-drenched season of the 1950s in the French countryside; then the three drift to a borrowed house on Paris's rue Laugier. Lost in love's delirium, Maud sees Tyler as an ``Apollo,'' a careless divinity who descends to sport with her and Edward, while emotionally damaging them forever. With delicate brilliance, Brookner probes Maud's and Edward's early family lives (Tyler, in contrast, appears from nowhere, born of mythically rich parents) to reveal how they become so entrapped. Like other Brookner heroines, Maud has a controlling mother whose tie with her is as intricately knotty as Maud's relationship is with the men. Edward, inflamed by Maud because of Tyler, grasps his own bewildering role as voyeuristic, feminine, childlike, servile and protective. With Tyler's withdrawal, Maud and Edward grow resignedly chill as they refashion their lives and tilt their relationship into a new imbalance, while the reader turns pages compulsively for a dazzling read in which every sentence seems clairvoyant. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After relating the life of a boring, angst-ridden man in A Private View (LJ 2/1/95), Brookner turns the tables with this passion-filled story of a woman whose beau suddenly disappears while in Paris.

Library Journal

Brookner's novels are emotional petri dishes filled with complex little cultures, and her authorial eye functions like a microscope as she observes all the squirming and twisting that goes on as her characters form and dissolve relationships. This novel, this microcosm, is particularly intriguing. As usual, Brookner reveals the passions percolating behind the facade of proper lives: the struggle of wills between parents and children and the paradoxes inherent in sexuality and marriage. It's 1971 and France is in the languid embrace of a very hot summer. Nadine, a nunlike widow, and her only child, the beautiful but terribly reserved Maud, are spending their holiday at Nadine's pretentious sister's summer home. Both are pleased at the arrival of two Englishmen, the dangerously seductive Tyler and Edward, a rather passive fellow preoccupied with his recent surprise inheritance of a used book shop. Maud, of course, falls for Tyler and accompanies him and Edward to Paris, where her careless lover quickly takes his leave. Edward discerns that the distraught and penniless Maud is pregnant, and in a strange act of chivalry and revenge, offers to marry her. Maud, still enthralled by Tyler, accepts. What sort of marriage will result from this loveless union of duty, envy, and fear? Leave it to Brookner to work out all the subtle, quite deliciously disturbing and telling details.

Donna Seaman

A restrained reading best presents Brookner’s subtle, but most elegant, prose. Narrator Lindsay Sandison, who’s lived in Europe and has a diverse theater background, is the perfect narrator. This introspective novel could easily lose its audience in the hands of a less able narrator. Sandison is so convincing with the many characters and cultures that the listener quite forgets that this is a story, not a biography. S.G.B. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

APR/MAY 97 - AudioFile

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