![]() ![]() Some are more likable than others, and some, like Edith Hope in “Hotel du Lac,” find a way home from their condition of exile. All the same, it’s hard to resist the naive temptation to read her heroines as self-projections. ![]() She is an obsessive, clinical, severely disenchanted writer. as if the laws of the universe no longer applied to me,” Kitty in “Providence” who feels “in a state of alienation,” “a stranger to the rest of the world.”īrookner has frequently been misread as a soft option, a wistful English lady writing short, tender, sorrowful novels a la Rosamond Lehmann, on broken hearts and lost loves. ![]() She is suffering from the condition of all the solitaries in Brookner’s fictional hospital: Mimi in “Family and Friends,” whose “profound despair” proceeds from a sense of exclusion from the living world, Frances in “Look at Me” who “could only identify a feeling of exclusion. Rachel hasn’t read Freud (Freud would have wanted to read her), but Brookner allows her to remark that “unhomely,” in the “psychiatric textbook” she has glanced at, seems an inadequate translation for “the effect of alienation” in unheimlich. ![]() “Unheimlich’ was the word that came to mind,” says Rachel, the narrator of Anita Brookner’s comfortless and discomforting seventh novel, contemplating her blank, white, unfriendly habitat. ![]()
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