Undue Influence - Hardcover

Brookner, Anita

3.39

708 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670886378 ISBN 13: 9780670886371

Publisher: Viking, 1999

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Enigmatic Claire is 30 and lives alone in Marylebone. She works in the basement of a bookshop where she transcribes and compiles unpublished articles. She is content with her life, although she recognises she has become more reserved and independentsince her wilder student days. When Claire meets the Gibsons she becomes fascinated with Martin's submission to Cynthia. So when news arrives of Cynthia's death she finds herself increasingly attracted to Martin - hoping to learn the arts of connivance and complicity. They embark upon an affair, and despite her claims to independence, Claire is increasingly obsessed with penetrating Martin's guarded exterior. And so it comes as a terrible shock when she learns he is involved with someone else.

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Review:

A new Anita Brookner book is unlikely to surprise, unlikely to shock or disturb. Yet her work continues to be utterly compelling. This, her 19th novel, follows the usual pattern: a single, bookish woman, whose literary life is dominated by loneliness and the seeming impossibility of marriage, has her forlorn equilibrium disturbed by an unsuitable attraction.

Claire Pitt, at 29 one of Brookner's younger alter egos, is financially independent, clever, emancipated but empty. When Martin Gibson comes down to the basement in the second-hand bookshop where she works, Claire is beguiled. Her desire to be part of the story she tells herself about Martin's probable life leads her to provoke the quiet crisis so indicative of a Brookner d�noument.

Brookner, who is seen by some critics as the embodiment of Jamesian exactitude, as almost prissy, is really quite the opposite. An almost pathological writer, Brookner returns again and again to her notion of the inability of modern women to think of marriage as something that will rescue them--and yet who are pulled towards the ideal (an ideal they easily deconstruct) of a romantic saviour. The ubiquity of a particular, melancholic despondence saturates her work; disappointment dominates. Despite the humour, the erudition, the classical elegance of her prose, Brookner is a modern, bitter writer. Few writers have the ability to create such complete characters and then dissect their motives so clearly. Few writers have the skill to delineate the emotional complexity of the domesticated manners that mark our inability to communicate with one other. Undue Influence is another triumph of profound, psychological investigation from one of England's finest writers. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

How can anything be so funny and so sad both at once? Every sentence is an object lesson in compression and wit. (Tessa Hadley on A Start in Life, Guardian Summer Reads, 2015)

All of Brookner's novels are great, but this is one of the best . . . Brookner, though acclaimed, deserves more excitement, more rapture from us. Hotel du Lac and the Booker Prize were a long time ago, and it's not her fault if she has bloomed equally brightly every year without fail. I think we're taking her for granted if we don't jump up and celebrate this book right now (Julie Myerson Independent on Sunday)

Her technique as a novelist is so sure and so quietly commanding. (Hilary Mantel, Guardian)

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