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Virginia Budd Fathers (Coronet Books)
Coronet Books 0340563427 / 9780340563427 PAPERBACK Good
0340563427 From Publishers Weekly nBudd's ( Running to Paradise ) insightful portrait of three English families probes the impact of fathers on their children. In 1901 Lally Morgan's father is fatally stabbed when he goes to the rescue of his abused neighbor, Mrs. Wolf. The incident sends Mrs. Wolf to an asylum and son Julian to Europe to escape his father. Lally and Julian meet six years later and have a brief affair. But Julian leaves for Berlin to perform in a cabaret, while Lally returns to England. Her subsequent marriage, to wealthy and dashing Rupert Eagon, is rocked by Lally's burgeoning socialism and her unconventional attitudes toward sex. These dramas are revealed through Lally's diaries, which are bequeathed to Julian's grandson David, a lawyer whom she meets in the course of revising her will at age 99. David's fascination with Lally motivates him to study his family's history, resulting in a new appreciation of his grandfather, father and his own son. The shifts between past and present are handled well, and Lally's legion of admirers will no doubt include a large number of readers. nCopyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. n nReview nAs in this English author's Running to Paradise (1989), romantic portraits of bounteously loving beset, upper-class English rebels are reassembled from flotsam cast up by the past - diaries, reminiscences, and letters. Here, a brace of pre-WW I lovers - as well as the grandson of one, who in the present ferrets out their story - have been shadowed by the ghosts of their dead fathers: a white knight, a monster, and a drunken suicide. In 1901, as a child in London, Lally - adored by, and adoring, her warmly companiable and affectionate father - observes with a child's fascinated horror what terrible things the father of her brother's friend Julian Wolf is doing next door. There are beatings and screams; then one night when Mrs. Wolf is climbing a garden wall to escape, it's Lally's father who rushes to her rescue and is killed for his gallantry. Some years later, in Paris, Lally meets Julian and sees him perform brilliant comic monologues in a cabaret. Eventually, the souvenir of that performance - a cheap lucky cat cutout - finds its way back to Lally, at 99, when David, Julian's grandson (who never knew Julian, the family black sheep), presents her with it. Impressed by Lally, David sleuths the past - a search that carries through Lally's death. There will be glimpses of a rich, suffocating privileged life; Lally's husband; a marriage destroyed; fevered lovers' meetings; nobly sacrificial partings; the tragedies of WW I; and careers - of both self-destructive genius and determined good works. Meanwhile, David ponders the plight of Julian's hapless alcoholic son, his own father. At the close, Lally's diary - now worth a fortune since Julian's art has been rediscovered - is tossed into the fire, and David, father-haunted, reaches out to his son. Another pleasantly autumnal soughing over the loves of yesteryear, the mysteries and the miseries, airily confidential in the telling. A livelier story than Budd's first novel, with a spikier heroine. (Kirkus Reviews)
Price:
3.62 EUR
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