"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
At the centre of the novel--winner of the 1979 Booker Prize--are Nenna and her truant six- and 11-year-old daughters. The younger sibling "cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness." But the older girl is considerably less blithe. "Small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world's shortcomings," Fitzgerald writes, she "was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha."
Their father is farther afield. Unable to bear the prospect of living on the Grace, he's staying in Stoke Newington, part of London but a lost world to his wife and daughters. Meanwhile, Nenna spends her time going over incidents that seem to have led to her current situation, and the matter of some missing squash racquets becomes of increasing import. Though she is peaceful by nature, experience and poverty are wearing Nenna down. Her confidante Maurice, after a momentary spell of optimism, also returns to his life of little expectation and quiet acceptance: "Tenderly responsive to the self-deceptions of others, he was unfortunately too well able to understand his own."
Penelope Fitzgerald views her creations with deep but wry compassion. Having lived on a barge herself, she offers her expert spin on the dangers, graces and whimsies of river life. Nenna, too, has become a savant, instantly recognizing on one occasion that the mud encasing the family cat is not from the Reach. This "sagacious brute" is almost as complex as his human counterparts, constantly forced to adjust her notions of vermin and authority. Though Stripey is capable of catching and killing very young rats, the older ones chase her. "The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable."
As always, Fitzgerald is a master of the initially bizarre juxtaposition. Adjacent sentences often seem like delightful non sequiturs--until they flash together in an effortless evocation of character, era and human absurdity. Nenna recalls, for instance, how the buds had dropped off the plant her husband rushed to the hospital when Martha was born. She "had never criticized the bloomless azalea. It was the other young mothers in the beds each side of her who had laughed at it. That had been 1951. Two of the new babies in the ward had been christened Festival." Tiny comical epiphanies such as these have caused the author to be dubbed a "British miniaturist". Yet the phrase utterly misses the risks Fitzgerald's novellas take, the discoveries they make and the endless pleasures they provide.
Praise for Penelope Fitzgerald and ‘Offshore’:
‘An astonishing book. Hardly more than 50,000 words, it is written with a manic economy that makes it seem even shorter, and with a tamped-down force that continually explodes in a series of exactly controlled detonations. “Offshore” is a marvellous achievement: strong, supple, humane, ripe, generous and graceful.’ Bernard Levin, Sunday Times
‘She writes the kind of fiction in which perfection is almost to be hoped for, unostentatious as true virtuosity can make it, its texture a pure pleasure.’ Frank Kermode, London Review of Books
‘Perfectly balanced...the novelistic equivalent of a Turner watercolour.’ Washington Post
‘Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of car. Everything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.’ Sebastian Faulks
‘This Booker prize winner is a slightly dark, witty novel ... The brilliant Fitzgerald takes a subtle squint at thwarted love, loneliness and the human need to be necessary’ Val Hennessy, Daily Mail
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Book Description hardback. Condition: New. Language: ENG. Seller Inventory # 9781857152692
Book Description Condition: New. pp. 512. Seller Inventory # 2642188402
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. Sixty-one when she published her first novel, Penelope Fitzgerald based many subsequent books on the experiences of a long and varied life.Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, explores her time living on a barge at Battersea Reach. Human Voices takes place in the BBC where she worked during World War II. Both are vivid, intimate pictures of ordinary life, startling, sad and funny by turns, conjuring up complex worlds with the economy of poetry.The Beginning of Spring is an historical novel operating on a larger canvas. It presents a life unknown to the author through a story of English emigres in pre-Revolutionary Russia and has been described by one critic as the best Russian novel of the twentieth century. Written with energy, passion and wit, and each quite different from the others, all three of these masterpieces reveal a lightness of touch with the most serious matters unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Sixty-one when she published her first novel, Penelope Fitzgerald based many subsequent books on the experiences of a long and varied life.Offshore, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, explores her time living on a barge at Battersea Reach. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9781857152692
Book Description Condition: New. pp. 512. Seller Inventory # 49545645
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. BRAND NEW ** SUPER FAST SHIPPING FROM UK WAREHOUSE ** 30 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. Seller Inventory # 9781857152692-GDR
Book Description Hardback. Condition: New. New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. Sixty-one when she published her first novel, Penelope Fitzgerald based many subsequent books on the experiences of a long and varied life. It presents a life unknown to the author through a story of English emigres in pre-Revolutionary Russia and has been described by one critic as the best `Russian' novel of the twentieth century. Seller Inventory # B9781857152692
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Seller Inventory # 9781857152692
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Brand New. 512 pages. 8.27x5.31x1.18 inches. In Stock. Seller Inventory # __1857152697
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