Miss Garnet's Angel

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She has worked, variously, as a cleaner, a dancer, an artist’s model, a teacher of children with special needs, a university teacher of literature, and a psychoanalyst. A rich, moving, and satisfying tale of a woman engaged at last with the great mysteries of love and life. Vickers had been a regular visitor to Venice ever since she first travelled there as an "arrogant teenager who thought it would be awful and full of tourists.

Chart the course of Julia’s awakening: discuss the specific moments and scenes in which Vickers illuminates her heroine’s mounting intoxication with religious pageantry and mystery. Julia Garnet is, among other things, a woman struggling to emerge from the long shadow cast by her father’s censure and abuse. Led by innocent curiosity, she trespasses on an art restoration project - or perhaps I should say a transformation project because conventional, unimaginative Julia Garnet is about to be changed forever. Unfortunately I don't think the two stories knitted together very well, especially as the modern day plot with Toby and Sarah ended long before the end of the book.I think no novel can be written without some kind of autobiographical input (the trick is not to let one’s own personality intrude inappropriately) and in this case the persoanl note my own discovery of Venice, which was a turning point in my life —not unlike Julia Garnet’s. Perhaps most of all I loved uncovering the role of the dog i the Tobit story —dog’s were not at all popular with the Jews and Tobias’s dog is the only one who gets a good press in the Hebrew scriptures.

Studying and teaching literature has given me high standards but I’m glad to have these —and literature has also given me a sense of scope, and maybe, too, the courage to tackle what I want to tackle (and not what we are told readers ‘want’ —which can anyway never be predicted, I’m glad to say!Most affecting to Julia, though, is her discovery in a local church of panels depicting the ancient tale of Tobias and the Angel. A ravishing novel possessed of an insistent emotional honesty and an infectious curiosity about life’s oldest mysteries, Miss Garnet’s Angel is that rarest of contemporary novels: kindhearted and complex, subtle and genuinely suspenseful. Upon finishing this novel I have been left with the uncomfortable feeling that this novel, published surprisingly recently in 2011, endorses pedophilia and incest. From couch to ballroom: Ex-therapist Salley Vickers has always based her characters on parts of her inner self, she tells Lisa O'Kelly.

Working in these two professions together with bringing up my children have been a privilege —without theses disciplines I would be much lesser person. Like Miss Garnet, Instances is a novel —about redemption and the possibilities of forgiveness although with a more contemporary setting. Birdie is a composite of every real and mythical rock girlfriend - a little bit of Marianne meets Angie and Courtney - yet now widowed and wrinkled, she still knows how to take on the industry suits and hang on to her cut. Miss Garnet, ein ältliches, frisch pensioniertes Fräulein und ehemalige Lehrerin begibt sich für ein halbes Jahr nach Venedig, um die dortigen Kirchen und Kunstschätze zu studieren. From the gloom inside immediately a figure shuffled toward me stretching out hi hand for what I understood as a plea for money.At the very least, you will question your assumptions about the possibility of "entertaining Angels unaware", the limits of material existence, and the finality of death. Her flatmate, Harriet, dies 2 days after they both retired, and the elderly cat, that has lived with them a good number of years, disappears.

I knew from talking to people at quite an intimate level that there is a longing for what I can only describe as traditional values, by which I mean in this case, art, the ancient story of Tobias and the angel, the paintings of Venice, even the character of my heroine.

She has the shape, the air and the biography of a Brookner heroine as she sets tentatively off to Venice to live a little. Salley Vickers, the author of Miss Garnet's Angel, captures the layered personality of Venice in parallel stories that unfold contrapuntally gradually advancing toward the grand reconciliation between dream and reality, innocence and experience, love and loss. I have to share a quote from the Tobit story: “Azarius, I said, You told me once I may find out who or what you worshiped . How did you go about creating the rich back-story that informs the Julia we meet in the present action of the novel? Missing are the blood and gore, the stories of deceit and revenge, the anger and judgment of an implacable god.