⇒ PDF Gratis Time After Time Virago Modern Classics Molly Keane Books

Time After Time Virago Modern Classics Molly Keane Books

Download As PDF : Time After Time Virago Modern Classics Molly Keane Books

Time After Time Virago Modern Classics Molly Keane Books

I do love Molly Keane...I would award five stars for her fine writing and wonderful lineup of characters, but I couldn't say I "loved" the book because of it's rather bleak storyline. Four siblings live in a large manor house, which has seen better days, as have the inhabitants who are all aging, and with their various disabilities and daily rituals don't have a great deal of love or respect for each other.The sisters each have a dog and the brother a cat.......none of the animals tug at ones heart strings and each is a sort of composite of their owners.
Enter Leda, the "half Jewish cousin" who rattled the family in various ways back when they were young. Her surprising reappearance,(she was thought to have perished in the German death camps) brings excitement and delight as they are all transported back to a time when they were young and carefree.
Each of the siblings vie for her favour and Leda plays it to the hilt but she has a hidden agenda which is gradually revealed as the story progresses.
It is amusing at times .....the tempo is great, but I would recommend Good Behaviour before Time After Time.


Tags : Amazon.com: Time After Time (Virago Modern Classics) (9781844083275): Molly Keane: Books,Molly Keane,Time After Time (Virago Modern Classics),Virago,1844083276,Romance - Historical - General,20TH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL AND SHORT STORY,England,FICTION General,FICTION Romance Historical General,Fiction,Fiction Literary,Fiction-Romance,GENERAL,General Adult,Great BritainBritish Isles,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945),Modern fiction,RomanceHistorical,Romance: Historical

Time After Time Virago Modern Classics Molly Keane Books Reviews

"Time After Time" is a grim book. While I found it to be good for a few laughs, I felt guilty about it later. Molly Keane is a little too skillful at satirizing the tropes of the British-country-house novel, and I suspect her of being a misanthrope. All of Keane's characters are flawed people, to greater or lesser degrees, and I hadn't thought I had sympathy for any of them, but at the end, when the author brutally gave each person what he or she supposedly deserved, I felt a little sick.

Joylessness isn't what I look for in a novel like this. I think one would do better to find one's humor somewhere else.
Just fabulous for the right reader. Word by word, sentence by sentence, etc., a delight for sophisticated readers.
The cruelties of life, both deliberate and accidental, play out with delicious irony in this very dark precursor to the modern noir novel. An elderly brother and his three aging sisters, all physically and emotionally maimed, are required, under the terms of their mother's will, to share the rapidly deteriorating family estate, Durraghglass, near Cork, Ireland. April, the only sister who ever married, is totally deaf but refuses to acknowledge it. May, with a grossly deformed hand, compensates by making "artistic" pictures out of scraps of tweed--and by incidental shop-lifting. June, severely dyslexic, actively manages the "farm." Jasper, blinded in one eye by June in a childhood accident, runs the moldy kitchen and makes gourmet meals out of scraps, sometimes even borrowing from the dogs' meals to improve meals for the family. Each of the Swift family members, firmly controlled by "Mummie" and her memory, leads an almost totally isolated, secret-filled life, unable to share feelings or care for anyone else.
Their already precarious lives are tested with the unexpected arrival of Leda, a formerly glamorous, half-Jewish cousin from Austria, whom they all thought "perished in some cold, unnamed camp, most likely. Who wants sordid details?" Leda, once April's best friend, bears grudges that hark back to her teen years, when her closeness to the family was deemed threatening to April's mother and she was summarily removed from Durraghglass, never to return. With subtlety and cleverness, author Keane slowly reveals elements of Leda's background and her connections to the family, using the dialogue, often at cross-purposes and always mordantly humorous, to reveal information, motivation, and character simultaneously. Irony builds upon irony as Leda's actions and remarks, often misunderstood, succeed in turning one sibling against another.
The myth of Leda and the Swan plays constantly in the background, with numerous symbolic references to the swans on the pond at Durraghglass and to Leda's swan-like preening. The Swifts, to continue the bird imagery, are no competition for Leda. As the tension of this domestic drama ratchets up and Leda wreaks her havoc, fate has a few ironies left in store. Unexpected resolutions, equivalent to those of a Greek tragedy, bring the novel to a wickedly satisfying close. Mary Whipple
This book belongs to a very specific genre - that of the shabby-genteel, slightly eccentric, Anglo-Irish family, still living in the manor house, which is now crumbling around them, as they struggle to keep up appearances, and spend a significant amount of time living in the past. Manor house novels are Keane's stock in trade - over the span of her career (writing as M.J. Farrell) she has joined other writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Cary, Jennifer Johnston and William Trevor in documenting the behavior and mores of the declining Irish Protestant Ascendancy.

Conflicted loyalties, class resentment, and nostalgia for a dying way of life are common themes in this particular branch of Anglo-Irish literature and each surfaces to some extent in "Time After Time". Given that it was written when Keane was 80, it's not too surprising that nostalgia for the past looms large throughout the book.

Keane's novels are generally light-hearted, more driven by character than by plot, and this one is no exception. I enjoyed this book for the virtues it shares with her previous work - she documents her characters' foibles and eccentricities with a clear eye, but also with genuine wit and obvious affection.

So this is a fun book, though don't look for profundity. And while Keane is a talented writer, William Trevor remains the undisputed master of the genre.
First fifty pages were difficult due to unkown Irish expressions, but as characters developed I was much more involved. A good read.
I liked it
I do love Molly Keane...I would award five stars for her fine writing and wonderful lineup of characters, but I couldn't say I "loved" the book because of it's rather bleak storyline. Four siblings live in a large manor house, which has seen better days, as have the inhabitants who are all aging, and with their various disabilities and daily rituals don't have a great deal of love or respect for each other.The sisters each have a dog and the brother a cat.......none of the animals tug at ones heart strings and each is a sort of composite of their owners.
Enter Leda, the "half Jewish cousin" who rattled the family in various ways back when they were young. Her surprising reappearance,(she was thought to have perished in the German death camps) brings excitement and delight as they are all transported back to a time when they were young and carefree.
Each of the siblings vie for her favour and Leda plays it to the hilt but she has a hidden agenda which is gradually revealed as the story progresses.
It is amusing at times .....the tempo is great, but I would recommend Good Behaviour before Time After Time.