Product Description

Orange Prize winner and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008, Linda Grant has created an enchanting portrait of a woman who, having endured unbearable loss, finds solace in the family secrets her estranged uncle reveals. In vivid and supple prose, Grant subtly constructs a powerful story of family, love, and the hold the past has on the present.

Vivien Kovacs, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from the world by her timid Hungarian refugee parents, who conceal the details of their history and shy away from any encounter with the outside world. She learns how to navigate British society from an eccentric cast of neighbors -- including a fading ballerina, a cartoonist, and a sad woman who wanders the city and teaches Vivien to be beautiful. She loses herself in books and reinvents herself according to her favorite characters, but it is through clothes that she ultimately defines herself.

Against her father's wishes, she forges a relationship with her uncle, a notorious criminal and slum landlord, who, in his old age, wants to share his life story. As he exposes the truth about her family's past Vivien learns how to be comfortable in her own skin and how to be alive in the world.

Grant is a spectacularly humanizing writer whose morally complex characters explore the line between selfishness and self-preservation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52140 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781439142363
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
Praise for STILL HERE: ** 'It's a testament to Grant's skill that she can create a novel at once so serious and so readable' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY ** 'A passionate, meaty book ... Rewarding' MAIL ON SUNDAY ** 'Tough, lusty and resolutely unreconstructed, Alix is an unconventional, strikingly memorable creation' HARPERS & QUEEN

Review
"There is nothing lightweight about its themes and yet it is so artfully constructed that you barely feel you're reading it at all, so fluid and addictive is the plot."-- The Observer

"Gripping and written with keen understatement, it manages to be a domestic coming-of-age story even as it takes in the tumultuous sweep of the twentieth century." -- The Evening Standard

"Like money, clothes have real, symbolic and psychological value. Linda Grant understands these dimensions implicitly. Stitched beautifully into the fabric of her latest novel is an acute understanding of the role clothes play in reflecting identity and self-worth.... Grant's own particular beam reveals the way we acquire our sense of self from what gets reflected back to us, either in the mirror or in our relationships with others. She is at home writing about the thrilling ripple of a skirt as she is charting social tensions." -- The Sunday Telegraph

"We are what we wear because clothes reveal our personalities but, as Grant makes clear as she guides us through a dizzying ethical maze, they also conceal them....In this meticulously textured and complex novel, beneath Grant's surface dressing, what she is talking about is more than skin deep." -- The Sunday Times

"A beautifully detailed character study, a poignant family history, and a richly evocative portrait..." -- The Independent

"This vivid, enjoyable and consistently unexpected novel is like Anita Brookner with sex. Sándor's mix of the endearing and the repellent takes on a life beyond that of an absorbing and unexpectedly ambitious story." -- The Telegraph

"This is a terrific novel, bursting with life and vivid characters."-- The Mail on Sunday

About the Author
Linda Grant is a novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in 2006. She writes for the Guardian, Telegraph, and Vogue. She lives in North London.

Customer Reviews

Even 'monsters' have a human side
It takes some time before the main plot of the book really gets into its stride. The story is told by Vivien, the daughter of Ervin and Bertha Kovacs, Jews who had fled to London from the antisemitism in pre-war Hungary. They are timid people, desperate not to get into any further trouble, and they have been so traumatized by their past that they never talk about it. For example, Vivien has been told nothing about her grandparents, though she does know that Ervin has an elder brother, Sándor, who is the black sheep of the family and who arrived in England only after 1956. When Vivien was ten, she had once caught a glimpse of Sándor, who turned up at their front door, only to be driven away by his brother, who would not explain to Vivien why he hated his brother so and who forbade any mention of him in the house; but soon afterwards there were reports on television about his arrest, and then books and newspaper articles programmes appear about Sándor, who, for his crimes as a particularly notorious and vicious rack landlord, had been sent to prison for fourteen years.

In 1977 Vivien, aged 24 and out of a job, accidentally sits next to him on a park bench: she recognizes him, but does not tell him who she is, though we are told fairly early on that he did realize who she was. Both of them will for a long time keep up the pretence that she is someone called Miranda. The old man is looking for someone to tape-record and then write up the story of his life, and Vivien takes on the job. In the course of it she learns about the past of which her parents had never spoken - it covers the years from 1916 to the Hungarian uprising of 1956. And she also learns what events had turned her father into such an anxious and timid creature, while Sándor, who had had an infinitely worse time in Hungary during the war, had learnt from them that only the tough, ruthless and selfish survive. But Vivien gradually begins to realize that even a `monster' has a human side. The first climax comes about two thirds through the book in which, well described as it is, her collusion is to me frankly unbelievable. The second climax, near the end and involving the novel's secondary plot of Vivien's relationship with one of her uncle's tenants, also strikes me as somewhat forced.

The story is set against the time when racist thugs of the National Front were very active and intimidating in certain London neighbourhoods, and that of course was a frightening reminder to the generation of refugees.

One theme of the book is that Vivien, partly because she had been kept in such ignorance of her roots, does not really know who she is. As a young woman and wanting to escape from the stifling atmosphere of her home, she goes through various styles of living, each of which involves its own way of dressing up. The clothes of all the characters are described in detail throughout the book, and are symbolic of their owners' lives. `The clothes you wear are a metamorphosis. They change you from the outside in' is Vivien's rather odd generalization near the end - true perhaps of the clothes Vivien is given, less so surely of those she has chosen.

Some things in this book ring very true; others less so; but it is a good read; and when you have finished the book, you will want to read the first chapter, set in 2006, again.

Interesting but not compelling
This novel, which made it to the Man Booker short list, is uneven and not nearly as good as other novels on the list, like Barry's "The Secret Scripture and Adiga's "The White Tiger" (which won the prize). Grant is skillful at characterization, and almost all of the characters in "The Clothes on Their Back" are interesting, particularly Sandor, the slumlord uncle who escapes the Holocaust and then communist Hungary but can't escape his own nature. But the plot that draws the disparate characters together is thin, particularly the narrator Vivian's involvement with an alienated young punk who has a room in her uncle's apartment house. The narrator keeps pointing out that the two of them are only together for the sex, as if repeatedly trying to explain why these two would spend time together at all. Some scenes seem like a stretch, like the birthday party Sandor throws for Vivian; it's a device to accomodate the family confrontation, but it's not very convincing. Read "The Clothes on Their Backs" and see what you think; it's an interesting novel, if not a great one.

Flat, predictable and underwhelming
Judging by the uneven quality of contending titles for the Booker prize in recent years, it has been increasingly difficult to fathom just what the panel judges were looking for in their shortlisting process. For while last year's prize winner "The White Tiger" was simply outstanding in terms of its contemporary relevance, Linda Grant's "Clothes On Their Backs" on the other hand while generally well written, frankly underwhelmed me in the literary stakes.

Vivien Kovacs, a lost unfulfilled soul grown up in London as a child of Jewish immigrants, is sorely in need of an identity which her timid parents all too eager to forget their past, is unwilling to help her find. At the opposite end is family black sheep Sandor, an estranged uncle with a criminal past whom Vivien's parents are determined to keep out of her life. He too, having survived the persecution in Hungary in the 50s before arriving in England as an impoverished immigrant, needs to connect with the only family he has who refuses to acknowledge him. Is it any surprise that Vivien and Sandor become magnets drawn irresistably to one another ?

Despite having the story straddle the 50s, the 70s and the present in a rather confusing manner, without any memorable events to mark each period, there is an unintended flatness to the plot that makes reading the book rather dull. For one thing, the fireworks we are entitled to expect of the climactic birthday scene flops like a damp squib. For another, the author's decision to have the two protagonists know (yes, not guess) each other's identity from the start not only takes the fun out of it for the reader but also lends a rather predictable air to the whole affair.

The story is saved by the character of Sandor, who in choosing pragmatism in his bid to survive in London is as courageous as he is deceitful and immoral. What a terrific round character as compared to Vivien or his cowardly brother and sister-in-law.

A pleasant enough read though definitely not Booker material.