When I Was Otherwise - Hardcover

Benatar, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0370305310 ISBN 13: 9780370305318

Publisher: The Bodley Head Ltd, 1900

Synopsis

Well above the usual run: English as she should be writ: adventurous. --The Financial Times --This text refers to the Paperback edition. This skilfully wrought examination of character and relationships opens with macabre impact, as a newspaper report describes the discovery of two dead women - one of them a skeleton - in a North London house. The women are revealed to be the sister and sister-in-law of the man who shared the house. The story of these characters' lives is told through a blend of powerful characterisation and social satire, and summons the mingled tragedy and humour of old age to powerful effect. The author teases the reader towards the known and awful ending by cutting backward and forwards in time, and gradually constructing the complex pattern of feelings and events that define even the most mundane-seeming lives. He plays a similar and equally skilful game with our perceptions of and judgements on the characters, creating believable, fallible and ultimately highly engaging individuals. All the time, the social and cultural backgrounds to the protagonists' lives are described vividly and with great precision.

About this title

Review

“Particularly welcome . . . Funny, outrageous and unpatronizing . . . a cunning, convincing novel that, dealing primarily with the past, manages to be more up-to-date in its observations than the majority of contemporary satires.” —The Scotsman
 
“This book is remarkably convincing . . . One’s first reaction on finishing the novel is ‘Goodness, how sad!’ One’s second is ‘Goodness, how funny!’ —Francis King, The Spectator
 
“Benatar writes with wit and humour about subjects most writers do not tackle—ageing, age, the frequent nastiness of family life.” —Doris Lessing
 
“An intriguing, funny, sometimes exciting and, finally, sad story; the elegant idiosyncrasy of the author’s viewpoint, which made Wish Her Safe At Home so enjoyably inventive without discarding a carefully controlled narrative, here creates a moving story from what might at first appear to be the elements of a black farce.” —Christopher Hawtree, The Literary Review
 
“Arnold Bennett, reflecting with satisfaction on the ability of his novel, The Old Wives’ Tale, to give an authentic sense of the passage of time, once observed complacently that ‘it isn’t in many books that you can see people growing old.’ Much to its credit, When I Was Otherwise is such a book.” —Peter Kemp, The Times Literary Supplement  

About the Author

Stephen Benatar was born in 1937 in Baker Street, London—and in the block of flats where H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett once lived; one of these days there’ll have to be a third important plaque beside the other two! Benatar is married, with four children, but now openly gay and living with a male partner.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: The Bodley Head Ltd
• Publication date: 1900
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0370305310
• ISBN 13: 9780370305318
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256