Swimmer - Softcover

Broady, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 000225946X ISBN 13: 9780002259460

Publisher: Flamingo, 2000

Synopsis

She swims into the medals and then into oblivion – a sensuous, searing, compact debut from an outstanding new British writer.

This is a striking, supple and direct debut from a new English writer that both promises an exceptionally exciting future and provides an unusual, accomplished and saleable debut. It’s a character piece, charting the life of a girl who becomes besotted with butterflies and swimming on the same holiday when an infant, then grows up to become a world-class swimmer before, at 19, obsolescence overtakes her with disorienting haste... If taken on its own terms – as an intense and focused portrait – it is simply staggering; a miniature, but a perfect one. It is stuffed with gorgeously apt and fresh imagery and has tremendous verve about it. It reads, in fact, like a race, as it should.

About this title

Review:

Swimmer is Bill Broady's lyrical literary debut: the story of a young female swimmer, a Commonwealth gold medallist, who escapes the peculiar loneliness of family and school life by finding her element in the water. It's a strange and melancholy tale: "Your first and last memories were of butterflies ... Before Dad's identification you'd named it already, in the fast-receding synaesthetic language of babyhood, MRRLYMBRXBRX". "You" is the unnamed swimmer; the novel is Broady's address to a girl who, at the very beginning of the book, has had her first and last memories: the butterflies who enthuse a child with a wish to fly that becomes the wish and talent to swim. In the first half of the book, the cast of characters is ready and waiting: Mum, Dad, Coach, budding champion and her competitive rivals. But nothing is quite as expected: "Stupidity! Stolidity! Senselessness!" is Dad's parody of Coach's "Strength! Stamina! Suppleness!", while Mum swigs gin in the bathroom. And Coach's commitment has its own price, one that is followed through in the disturbing sequel to the swimmer's success. At 19, her athletic career all but over, the swimmer is passed on to Coach Two, an agent who helps her to find, or lose, her way in the world of "promo": the money, sleaze and sex of the night clubs and glamour modelling that emerge as the pinnacle of Coach Two's ambitions.

It's a maddening world, literally, for the swimmer--and for the reader who follows her journey back to the "time before speech" and the early pleasures of butterflies. --Vicky Lebeau

From the Back Cover:

SWIMMING OUT OF CELEBRITY INTO TRANSCENDENCE

This is a striking, supple and direct debut from a new English writer that both promises an exceptionally exciting future and provides an unusual, accomplished and saleable debut. It's a character piece, charting the life of a girl who becomes besotted with butterflies and swimming on the same holiday when an infant, then grows up to become a world-class swimmer before, at 19, obsolescence overtakes her with disorienting haste... If taken on its own terms – as an intense and focused portrait – it is simply staggering; a miniature, but a perfect one. It is stuffed with gorgeously apt and fresh imagery and has tremendous verve about it. It reads, in fact, like a race, as it should.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 000225946X
• ISBN 13: 9780002259460
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144