The Past

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Literary fiction, by which I mean fiction with skillful writing and deeper thoughts about life than so-called mainstream, commercial, or popular fiction, is my reading preference. I totally get it that it is not for everyone. The Past is highly literary. Set in a small British town, it moves at a slow pace with plenty of description of weather and place as well as a look at the inner lives of the characters. There is however plenty of tension in the story that builds to an unexpected climax. Stevie Davies (16 January 2004), "Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley", The Independent , retrieved 7 March 2016

A British middle-class family of three adult sisters and their brother arrive at their grandparents’ old house, a small English rectory, for a three week summer holiday, which ends with a meeting to decide on whether or not to keep the house. Hadley’s skill makes it effortless for the reader to follow the many characters. We are in 21 st century real-time narrative in a house that is hauntingly full of the past. Gorgeous repeating images of mirrors, rain, the imprint on the bottom of antique teacups (lineage being another theme), and slight shifts in light heighten our experience of the siblings’ nostalgia and other yearnings. Claustrophobia is lessened by the extension beyond the inside of the house and its inhabitants to landscape and history, including the 1968 workers and student riots in Paris and the disappeared of Argentina, home country of Pilar, new wife of Roland, the brother in the family. There is also an old woodland cottage, like something out of a fairy tale, ‘The children were aware at once that the cottage smelled awful – not innocently of leaf-rot and minerals like outside, but of something held furtively close, ripening in secret,’ where many of the significant events of the novel take place. Like the rectory its continuing presence in the family’s life is poignantly precarious. A novel so evocative of summer and adolescence that to read it is to reexperience the deep languor and longing of those days.” — Tayari Jones, O Magazine I liked it. It got me to look again at my own family and the ways in which our shared life unites us while our different personalities create fri Starred Review. Hadley is the patron saint of ordinary lives; her trademark empathy and sharp insight are out in force here." - Kirkus

Forse si solleva un pochettino la parte centrale intitolata “Il passato”, ma è sensazione che dura poco: anche qui Hadley sembra produrre più fumo che arrosto. a b c d e f The Writers of Wales Database: Hadley, Tessa, Literature Wales, archived from the original on 6 March 2016 , retrieved 4 March 2016 Winner of the Windham Campbell Prize • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A Time Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Top 10 Book of the Year • A Huffington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Editors’ Choice

One of the ways I like to nerd out as a reader is to read several novels that basically tell the same story in different ways. Then I compare and contrast in my mind about the various books.The effect of suddenly switching into the consciousness of these individuals when they were young children (just a baby in the case of Alice); with their mother, alive here, young and strong, is moving. Where we might have been impatient with dreamy Alice (well-named) for instance, now we see through her mother’s eyes her first clambering steps to independence when she escapes her cot and arrives on the threshold of her mother’s room: ‘in her sagging night-nappy…staring solemnly, as if she wasn’t sure what she might find, in a world no one had prepared for her.’ Heartrending when we know already what Alice finds later in life. And bitter, mixed-up Harriet, now before us, a small girl who, her Grandmother realises, is not the adored child, expected only to be ‘sensible’. And Roland, being a 1960s boy, is the one singled out for future intellectual endeavours, later discovered desperately trying to read Herodotus ‘in the original’, opened ‘across his scabby knees’. Otherwise the very well-written story, perhaps a little character-driven and only hot on stream of consciousness movement, did manage to tell the story of a ordinary British family struggling with life's challenges and the memories of the life they used to enjoy and love. It was like being nostalgic again about a landscape in which they could not embed themselves again as participants in it. They were out of it for too many years. The three sisters were like a seraglio of Fate. So the same, yet so different, with a bond that eventually would prove to be stronger than destiny. Their last reunion in the old home, being a typical British pastoral as pastiche, brought more than just a last effort to be a united family, drenched in old traditions and values.

As the novel spans generations, it also intertwines concepts of heredity. Although a subplot--of Pilar’s possible origins related to the Argentine “Dirty War,” is partly peripheral, and only briefly explored, it also serves as a metaphor for the meaning of family, bloodlines, and the curse of the outlier, or to have competing loyalties. Also, it resonates with the pain of shameful secrets. the under-earth smell of imprisoned air, something plaintive in the thin light of the hall with its grey and white tiled floor…There was always a moment of adjustment as the shabby, needy actuality of the place settled over their too-hopeful idea of it.”Sophisticated and sleek, Roland's new wife (his third) arouses his sisters' jealousies and insecurities. Kasim, the twenty-year-old son of Alice's ex-boyfriend, becomes enchanted with Molly, Roland's sixteen-year-old daughter. Fran's young children make an unsettling discovery in a dilapidated cottage in the woods that shatters their innocence. Passion erupts where it's least expected, leveling the quiet self-possession of Harriet, the eldest sister. This story falls into three sections. The first and last are set in the present, as four adult siblings spend what may be their last holiday at their grandparents' old house in South West England in a small village near the coast. The middle section is set many years earlier at a time when their mother took the first three of them to the same house while considering whether to leave the father. In 1993, when she was in her late thirties, Hadley studied for an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University College, which she was awarded in 1994, and gained a PhD at the University of the West of England in 1998; [1] [5] [6] [9] her PhD thesis is entitled "Pleasure and propriety in Henry James." [5] She started to teach creative writing at Bath Spa University in 1997; [4] as of 2016, she is professor of creative writing at the university. [5] [10] Her first published novel, Accidents in the Home, written while bringing up her family, appeared in 2002 when she was 46. [3] [8] [9] Her continued study of the author Henry James has resulted in a book, as well as several research and conference papers. [5] [10] She researches and teaches on James and Jane Austen, as well as early 20th century novelists and short-story writers, especially women, including Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys. [5] [6]