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Loading... Offshore (1979)by Penelope Fitzgerald
None.  RandyMetcalfe | Feb 12, 2013 |  Offshore was my second Penelope Fitzgerald novel. I previously read The Bookshop, and am now reading The Blue Flower. I enjoy Fitzgerald's writing style. Her characters are interesting and I admire her ability to define them in a concise way. In Offshore, I found Nenna and her daughters likeable. The whole setting of Offshore (mostly barges on the Thames) was different, but I liked it, and the addition of descriptions of the mainland. I think the themes and characters were varied, and overall, I found the novel to be a great read. (  ) YasminM | Feb 6, 2013 | I found this to be a strange book. At first I just thought it was pretty boring then some of the characters started to grow on me and it was mildly interesting. The end was altogether abrupt and I can't help but feel that I just didn't get this book the way it's supposed to be gotten. 2.5 Stars (  ) daystarzbooks | Jan 22, 2013 | The book follows the lives of a group of people who live in barges on the Thames during the 60s. They are 'in between' the land and the water and although they are very different characters, they all seem to be happy to be there, in an indeterminate place, difficult to classify. The characters seem to respond to the difficulties of their way of life by helping one another. It is a short book, but rich, humorous and very well written. A real pleasure to read! (  ) alalba | Dec 9, 2012 | Offshore never really got going for me. It felt as if Fitzgerald conceived the idea of a novel featuring a mixture of offbeat characters all of whom are at a turning point in their lives. Then to give it more appeal, she makes them live in houseboats in a less than desirable stretch of the River Thames. We trace their lives as they unravel or , in the case of one of the river dwellers, sink. But it’s difficult to engage with these characters or feel very interested in what happens to them because they are only sketchily depicted. Their eccentricities are not markedly eccentric, or even odd. The most interesting character for me was Maurice a male prostitute whose friendly nature is repeatedly taken advantage of who use his boat as a place to stash their stolen goods. But he is absent from the book for much of the time. Nenna, the central character, is a bohemian Canadian whose husband has left her and who is left quite literally struggling to keep things afloat. The scenes in which wanders shoeless through the streets of London late one night, are the most memorable. But it’s not enough to rescue the novel. According to a quote from the Observer on the back of my copy, Offshore is ‘a novel of crisp originality, lucid and expressive with some splendid bursts of satire’. Would that it were so. For me, the narrative sank deeper and deeper into the mud of the Thames, occasionally bobbing up for air to fool readers into thinking that something would now actually happen, only to subside even further into the depths. The experience left me feeling I’d been cheated. (  )2  Mercury57 | Oct 21, 2012 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0395478049, Paperback)Offshore possesses perfect, very odd pitch. In just over 130 pages of the wittiest and most melancholy prose, Penelope Fitzgerald limns the lives of "creatures neither of firm land nor water"--a group of barge-dwellers in London's Battersea Reach, circa 1961. One man, a marine artist whose commissions have dropped off since the war, is attempting to sell his decrepit craft before it sinks. Another, a dutiful businessman with a bored, mutinous wife, knows he should be landlocked but remains drawn to the muddy Thames. A third, Maurice, a male prostitute, doesn't even protest when a criminal acquaintance begins to use his barge as a depot for stolen goods: "The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him."At the center of the novel--winner of the 1979 Booker Prize--are Nenna and her truant six- and 11-year-old daughters. The younger sibling "cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness." But the older girl is considerably less blithe. "Small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world's shortcomings," Fitzgerald writes, she "was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha." Their father is farther afield. Unable to bear the prospect of living on the Grace, he's staying in Stoke Newington, part of London but a lost world to his wife and daughters. Meanwhile, Nenna spends her time going over incidents that seem to have led to her current situation, and the matter of some missing squash racquets becomes of increasing import. Though she is peaceful by nature, experience and poverty are wearing Nenna down. Her confidante Maurice, after a momentary spell of optimism, also returns to his life of little expectation and quiet acceptance: "Tenderly responsive to the self-deceptions of others, he was unfortunately too well able to understand his own." Penelope Fitzgerald views her creations with deep but wry compassion. Having lived on a barge herself, she offers her expert spin on the dangers, graces, and whimsies of river life. Nenna, too, has become a savant, instantly recognizing on one occasion that the mud encasing the family cat is not from the Reach. This "sagacious brute" is almost as complex as his human counterparts, constantly forced to adjust her notions of vermin and authority. Though Stripey is capable of catching and killing very young rats, the older ones chase her. "The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable." As always, Fitzgerald is a master of the initially bizarre juxtaposition. Adjacent sentences often seem like delightful non sequiturs--until they flash together in an effortless evocation of character, era, and human absurdity. Nenna recalls, for instance, how the buds had dropped off the plant her husband rushed to the hospital when Martha was born. She "had never criticized the bloomless azalea. It was the other young mothers in the beds each side of her who had laughed at it. That had been 1951. Two of the new babies in the ward had been christened Festival." Tiny comical epiphanies such as these have caused the author to be dubbed a "British miniaturist." Yet the phrase utterly misses the risks Fitzgerald's novellas take, the discoveries they make, and the endless pleasures they provide. --Kerry Fried (retrieved from Amazon Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:05:22 -0400) 'Offshore' is set in the 1960s and describes the relationships amongst a group of houseboat dwellers living on the Thames at Battersea Reach. The novel is part of a reissue programme for all of Fitzgerald's titles in Flamingo. |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
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In this short novel, Penelope Fitzgerald is masterfully concise, poignant, and honest. It is a world she knows intimately, having lived it before the incessant development of 1960s London swept the Reach clean. Yet here it comes fully to life again, vital, elemental, though perhaps just out of reach.
It is a novel you can read in a brief span, but you will undoubtedly return to again and again. And each visit will be a rich harvest in the flotsam and jetsam of your reading life. Highly recommended, every time. (