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Loading... The Spare Room (2008)by Helen Garner
  
No current Talk conversations about this book. amazing grace - see Diana Athill's blurb (  ) Overgaard | Feb 20, 2023 |  One of the most emotionally true stories I've read about illness, caregiving, and friendship. #aww2013 ( ) Chris.Wolak | Oct 13, 2022 | A woman cares for her friend as she is dying and denying that she is dying from cancer. (  ) LivelyLady | Apr 29, 2022 | I picked this up at 2:30 and finished it by 7:00 the same day. I thought it was extraordinary. It is the story of two 60-something friends, Helen and Nicola. Nicola who has advanced cancer asks Helen if she can come and stay with her in Melbourne while she undergoes a three-week experimental, shysterish treatment. Both women were and are bohemians, although Nicola is the one more entranced by alternative-whatever. It is amazing the economy, in under 200 pages, with which Garner deals with a number of minor characters and a tightly composed plot that manages to touch on a variety of topics including friendship, death, medicine, family. What stood out to me most was the conflict between carer Helen and patient Nicola: the denial, the fear and anger, the urge to do the right thing versus the things that are not clearly in Nicola’s best interest, the ambiguities threaded throughout. The book is sad and funny. It did remind me of my mother’s death and the conflict, denial, love, fear, helplessness it entailed. I still don’t understand it but the novel treats of these very issues. Both main characters were appealing and their bond believable. Very well written with more obscure Australia-isms than I knew existed—tinnie, dobbing, manchester, doona, being a few. ( ) jdukuray | Jun 23, 2021 | Helen accepts Nicola into her home, while Nicola undergoes treatment for her cancer. Helen finds that the treatment is questionable, but Nicola is set on continuing. The relationship between the two women grows strained, and Helen struggles to care for her friend. This book explores the emotions and ethics surrounding a patient and their care, when the choices made by the patient impact their friends and family. ( ) Vividrogers | Dec 20, 2020 |
One sweltering summer day, Helen Garner joined mourners at the funeral of a former member of a performing troupe whose lives she had chronicled in her 1977 debut novel Monkey Grip, that tale of smack habits, communal houses and plenty of lustful sex. When the simple pine coffin was lowered to its resting place by men who took turns shovelling earth in keeping with Jewish ritual, "Helen pushed right to the front, to the lip of the grave, and got out her notebook and started to write," recalls theatre director Peter King. `Some people thought, `Oh my God.'"
Helen lovingly prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola. She is coming to visit for three weeks, to receive treatment she believes will cure her cancer. From the moment Nicola staggers off the plane, gaunt and hoarse but still somehow grand, Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian angel and her stony judge. The two women - one sceptical, one stubbornly serene - negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's bizarre therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale. No library descriptions found. |
LibraryThing Early Reviewers AlumHelen Garner's book The Spare Room was available from LibraryThing Early Reviewers.  Popular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914 — Literature English {except North American} English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.9)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
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