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Loading... Arlington Parkby Rachel Cusk
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Finished this a couple months ago now but still wanted to leave a review. Like others, this book left me a little disappointed and I am worried this marks a turn into a style of spending a short amount of time cast awful characters and never really scratching the surface, which is how I felt about Outline, Then again if it is done well, like in The Lucky Ones, it really blows my mind. The ballet shoes and so many other vivid descriptions: the literary club, the park, the mall are so wonderful but in the end it didn't add up to much for me, unfortunately. Think I'm going to try one of her memoirs when I next read her. ( ) Beautifully written in parts but I felt the short story-like structure jumping from character to character didn't really work as well as a more longer-form narrative would have done. Although many of the characters do re-appear later in the book, I found that as some level of interest and character insight was being reached the chapter would come to a close and focus on someone different. Need to take a break from reading books about white, middle class people too. Felt like their suburban lives was too much of an easy target here for Cusk, and didn't ever really reach the heights of her superlative Outline trilogy. Desperate Housewives meets Under Milk Wood By sally tarbox on 13 Jun. 2012 Format: Paperback The start to this novel is brilliantly evocative describing the rain over a night time city: 'In their sleep they heard it, people lying in their beds: the thunderous noise of the water...it made them feel somehow observed, as if a dark audience had assembled outside and were looking in through the windows, clapping their hands.' And then Cusk takes us through a day in the life of this suburb through the eyes of various middle-class young mums; the snapshots of each show an unremitting dissatisfaction with their husbands and children and their place in a man's world. I LOVED Cusk's prose but started to get fed up with these moany privileged women! no reviews | add a review
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Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumRachel Cusk's book Arlington Park was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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