LATECOMERS - Hardcover

Brookner, Anita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039457172X ISBN 13: 9780394571720

Publisher: Pantheon, 1989

Synopsis

Even on his first day at English boarding school, Hartmann knew that he was doomed. More than an outsider, he was German. Had he not been paired with Fibich he would have died or killed himself. Only their shared experience as orphans of the Second World War saved him. Now, more than forty years later, they could think no more of living apart than they could of divorcing their wives, although their temperaments were diametrically opposed and they rarely though alike on any matter. It pleased Fibich to stir his tea furiously with a pencil like a harassed salesman, to feel guilty about having made so much money so easily. For Hartmann there was something reassuring about the absurdity of their trade - greetings cards and later photocopiers. Of course the work was anathema to them both, but the money was delightful. Hartmann felt they had come through. Until his daughter had a miscarriage. Then they realized, for the first time since childhood, that a disorder had occurred which they were unable to put right. With unfailing perspicuity, Anita Brookner unfolds the lives of the two men as they become husbands, then fathers, and in Hartmann's case a grandfather, each hunted by their past in their comfortable, bourgeois worlds. Latecomers is at once mordant and sympathetic, her most moving novel to date.

About this title

Review

"Brookner's most touching novel...She has transcended the struggle between men and women to arrive at...truth; as if having solved the mysteries of love, she has moved on to the meaning of life."

-- Philadelphia Inquirer

In Latecomers the author of the bestselling Hotel Du Lac extends her range to produce a glowing masterpiece about the ambiguous pleasures of friendship and domesticity. Hartmann and Fibich are "latecomers" to England, brought over as children from Nazi Germany. No two men could be more dissimilar: Hartmann is an expansive, deliberately unreflective voluptuary; Fibich, the ascetic, lives in a perpetual swoon of homesickness and terror. But as imagined by Anita Brookner, their fifty-year friendship becomes a transcendently funny and touching model for the ways in which human beings come to terms with the tragedy of living.

"Brookner's illuminating depiction of her characters' inner lives makes Latecomers a brilliant, accomplished work."

-- San Francisco Chronicle

From the Back Cover

Sent to London as refugees during the second world war, Thomas Hartmann and Thomas Fibich become lifelong friends and eventually business partners. Over the years, Hartmann has settled for a life of pleasure, seldom disturbed by his difficult past; Fibich endures a life of gloom, his mind never straying from the last sight he had of his mother, fainting on a railway platform. But both are troubled by the same profound and unfocused longing, and as they approach old age, the need to exorcise and understand the ghosts of their past.

“She has never written a better novel. There are only inadequate words (except her own) in which to convey how searchingly gentle it is, how almost unbearably moving.”
RUTH RENDELL, 'Observer'

“The best novel Anita Brookner has written since the Booker Prize-winning 'Hotel du Lac'. It marks an advance into new territory, while preserving all her old sharp intelligence and shrewdness.”
SUSAN HILL, 'Good Housekeeping'

“A book of such charm, such depth, such poignant detail and compassionate understanding that, reading it, you may find tears mingling with laughter.”
'Daily Mail'

“Anita Brookner has proved herself to be so fine a novelist that she deserves to be judged in a class of her own.”
'Daily Telegraph'

“All the satisfactions to be found in her best work are here.”
'Sunday Times'

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 039457172X
• ISBN 13: 9780394571720
• Binding: Hardcover