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The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams
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The Girl in a Swing (edition 1981)

by Richard Adams

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8341525,943 (3.55)15
Alan Desland, who feels himself to be an ordinary and unremarkable man, falls passionately in love with the beautiful but mysterious German stenographer, Karin, who is sent to assist him during a business trip to Denmark. To his astounded joy, she returns his love - but their courtship and marriage will shake his life to its very foundations and test him to the limits of sanity.… (more)
Member:Bjace
Title:The Girl in a Swing
Authors:Richard Adams
Info:Signet (1981), Mass Market Paperback, 1 pages
Collections:Read but unowned
Rating:**
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The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams

  1. 00
    There Are Doors by Gene Wolfe (saltmanz)
    saltmanz: These are two drastically different books, and yet oddly they share so many little details.
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» See also 15 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 15 (next | show all)
Frustrating. Overly verbose. Beautiful. It doesn't really start until 100 or so pages in, and then it had me. Adams goes into so much detail about ceramics and pottery that I found myself glazing over whenever he'd start to describe anything that wasn't directly related to the main characters. The relationship between Alan and Kathe was beautifully done and for me the suspense was in her and her implied secret. At the end I was left wondering if what I read into it all was correct. There are things I will always remember about this story. Unfortunately frustration is one of them.good gothic. Skip the first 100 pages: He's kind of an uptight guy who inherits his family's ceramic antiques business. Then Kathe comes along and he comes alive. ( )
  naturegirlj9 | Mar 26, 2023 |
"Only your image trembles in my heart".

Richard Adams-Girl in a swing

I love that quote. This book has become a part of my heart. Oh my. I can confidently say once read, this is a book one will never forget reading.

I do not want to say to much. I do not think one should know to much when going in. This is a compelling and utterly bewitching book.

Richard Adams, who also wrote "Watership Down" created a masterpiece with "The Girl in a swing".

Alan is a shy awkward young man. He has a passion for Ceramics. He also has some Psychic ability. Alan has never been in love.

Alan is a character whom the reader will instantly love. He could be your best friend, so down to earth and free of pretense he is. And even though he has never loved deeply, he is in his own way happy.

Then he meets Cathe. Cathe is as different from Alan as one can possibly be. She is beautiful, mysterious and the personification of just about everything Alan has ever wanted. He falls hard and he falls deep.

He cannot believe she may feel the same way about him. He quickly asks her to marry him and when she says yes, Alan feels complete.

It would not be in the reader's interest to know anymore going in. This is NOT a love story in the conventional sense. If I had to categorize it, I would call it a Gothic Mystery that also contains many Super Natural elements, a character study and yes, somewhat of a love story.

Suffice to say, this book touched me deeply and and quickly landed on my favorites list. Actually I read it long ago, before Goodreads even existed. What a book! This is one I have reread many a time.

The writing here is incredible. The book is ethereal and shrouded in mystery while the prose beguiles the reader. I had never read anything remotely like it the first time I read this. I still haven't.

The whole book is unforgettable. It is told in a way that is utterly enthralling and before I say anymore more and spoil my own review I just have to ask the reader to give this one a chance. ( )
  Thebeautifulsea | Aug 5, 2022 |
What a haunting book. Richard Adams has a supreme gift of language that raises everything he does to the level of the best Greek tragedies.

I read a battered paperback copy of this several years ago in a single weekend, each dip into it longer than the one before, until it became impossible for me to set it down - I had to follow it through to the end.

'The Girl in a Swing' does not reach a place in my head and heart like 'Watership Down', but it proves to me the universality of Adams' gift, that he can play with any genre, any character, and create something beautiful and memorable. ( )
  ManWithAnAgenda | Feb 18, 2019 |
What an utter load of drek. The ominous foreboding at the begining lead only to a bizarre ending with way too much hinted at in strangely overblown language but nothing even remotely revealed. I read this for bookclub so I'll be curious to hear other's impressions but I just found it irritating.
  amyem58 | Dec 17, 2017 |
By the title you’d think this was written recently what with Girl this and the Girl that in just about every book title these days. Nope, it came out in 1980 and is one of those books that makes you wonder if you missed something along the way. So much is left up to the reader to decipher and interpret that I actually questioned my reading comprehension at the end. Never fear, it’s deliberate. Nothing is said plainly, plenty is hinted at. Obliquely. And before you decide that it’s authorial laziness I’m here to disagree. I’ve read Watership Down a couple of times and judging by that more famous work I know that Adams can convey nebulous ideas and render unusual scenes in great detail.

That said it’s an interesting book and in many ways very English. The landscape and towns, the habits and tea, the attitudes and obsession with the forbidden. It’s very, very sensual. I’d even go so far as to say erotic in spots. The way the women tut-tut over sex on the beach makes me stand up for Kathe in a way I didn’t through most of the story. If those women only knew the desire and fulfillment that she knew, but they couldn’t. Couldn’t even approach it on their most hedonistic day.

Any reader worth her salt will be suspicious of Kathe immediately. She inserts herself into Alan’s life swiftly and surely. He’s so damn helpless that it’s no wonder (can’t cook, can’t type, can barely use a phone) and sex is such an unknown so when she introduces him to it, he falls into it headlong, losing himself, reason and caution. She brings evasion to an art form, dodging questions and changing the subject. But over time her actions and reactions speak of a past full of upheaval and death. She is fascinated by religion, afraid of children and the dark. She’s too much a product of wish-fulfillment to be believable; she’s a sex machine, has to be cared for and coddled thus making Adam feel more alpha-male, wants to learn at the feet of her man, etc. The capper for unbelievably is when Adams has her say to Alan “And then you came round the corner like a sort of human goat and just raped me - it was sheer heaven, even by our standards…”). Um, I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

It’s a very dream-like novel even with gaffes like that. A reader who needs concrete information and everything spelled out for them won’t like this. You have to have imagination and intuition. Alan himself is baffled much of the time so he’s no help, you’ll have to figure it out and go with your instinct. Some say there’s too much information about ceramics and porcelain, but I didn’t find it so. ( )
3 vote Bookmarque | Sep 1, 2015 |
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Adams, Richardprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Smith, MaireCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do.

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide.
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside -

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown -
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Dedication
To Rosamond, with love
First words
All day it has been windy - strange weather for late July - the wind swirling through the hedges like an invisible floodtide among seaweed; tugging, compelling them in its own direction, dragging them one way until the patches of elder and privet sagged outward from the tougher stretches of blackthorn on either side.
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Wikipedia in English (2)

Alan Desland, who feels himself to be an ordinary and unremarkable man, falls passionately in love with the beautiful but mysterious German stenographer, Karin, who is sent to assist him during a business trip to Denmark. To his astounded joy, she returns his love - but their courtship and marriage will shake his life to its very foundations and test him to the limits of sanity.

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Book description
The story of a quiet Englishman swept out of his settled bachelorhood by an exquisite young German woman whose beauty stuns him and when he impulsively marries - knowing nothing of her family and nothing of her past - committing his life, heart and soul to her, only to discover, little by little, the nature of the darkness and doom she carries with her. From the first moment - the narrator alone in his house in the English countryside, remembering - we are in a world suffused with beauty and with fear; an aura of pervasive secrets...the sounds of water cascading, crashing (the story is haunted by the sea)...the scent of a strange perfume...a woman weeping as if desolation were her dwelling place. 

The man whom we see astonished into love is Alan Desland - cultivated, intelligent, nice. Convinced since boyhood that passion and the sensual life are not for him, he has committed himself to his bachelorhood, and to the management of the family business in fire ceramics and rare china which is the happy obsession of his days. Until suddenly, on a trip to Copenhagen, he meets her - Kathe. Her beauty is an arrow through his heart. She moves within a halo, a nimbus of erotic energy. This man, who has scarcely recognized his own starvation, dissolves into love, amazed that she wants him also, that she so quickly accepts him - and becomes, as his wife, even more alluring, both mysterious and open, possessing a profound dignity yet capable of entrancing vulgarities, mistress of a hundred ways of making love, knowing Alan's body better than he knows it himself. And we see how she charms his family and his friends...how she seems to breathe in his knowledge of rare china, discovering treasures as if by magic, buying for  song the fabled figurine called The Girl in a Swing. Yet never revealing anything of her own history.

But even as Kathe shows herself always more enchanting, we begin to sense threat, danger; in her refusal to be married in a church, in the mysterious child's voice on the telephone, in the shattering dreams - the primal, perhaps supernatural, shadows - that surround their ecstatic love making, in Kathe's sudden tantrums of despair - her cries to Alan that he alone can save her. From what?
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