Product Description

Arthur is a precocious eight-year-old boy whose mother is a B-list celebrity more concerned with her bank account than with her son's development. Then an enigmatic young nanny introduces him to a world he never knew existed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #110342 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Atkinson, who began her career with Behind the Scenes at the Museum, a Whitbread Book of the Year, and enjoyed good reviews for two more novels, now gathers together this suite of comparatively loosely connected stories. Atkinson's work has grown increasingly diffuse; her most recent book, Emotionally Weird, was printed in three fonts, representing separate strings of narrative. This collection takes that conceit without the typesetting extravagance one step further, opening and closing on two women who seem to tell one another the intervening tales. Atkinson's Scheherazades, singletons of indeterminate age named Charlene and Trudi, appear first in "a food hall as vast as a small city," and by the book's end which may or may not be the end of the world they're starving to death in a squalid, freezing flat in what feels like an apocalyptic present. In the women's restless imaginations, readers meet more than one girlfriend (in different stories, and each unbeknownst to the other) of a man named Hawk; a gaggle of perfect-toothed American Zane sisters; and a governess who may or may not be a goddess. Some of Atkinson's devices a giant cat who impregnates a woman with kittens, an evil twin who gets to have all the fun make for stories as simple as fables, but some, like the nanny goddess and the virtuoso, multiple-voiced "Dissonance," are sharp and memorable, full of astutely observed family dynamics. While not as intense or as unified as Atkinson's full-length work, this is a sharp and wholly original collection.
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From Booklist
Although they don't carry quite the emotional weight of George Saunders' brilliant stories (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, 1996), Atkinson's exceptionally entertaining tales display the same wild inventiveness. Sometimes the same characters and images (she is especially fond of wolf-skin gloves and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) recur in the 12 stories collected here, which, in the main, feature delightfully witty people marshaling their resources to confront a world that often disappoints. In "Unseen Translation," a nanny who resembles a "Marine Corps Mary Poppins" spirits eight-year-old Arthur away from his wealthy, neglectful parents. In the more somber "Sheer Big Waste of Love," Addison Fox, whose mother was a prostitute, carries with him the memory of being violently rejected by his wealthy father; however, an encounter with the man's legitimate children makes him realize things could have been much worse. Other titles feature people coping with the end of the world by going shopping and a woman killed in a car wreck who finds she is invisible, housebound, and addicted to Oprah. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Kate Atkinson was born in New York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, was named Whitbread Book of the Year in the U.K. in 1995 and was followed by Human Croquet and Emotionally Weird.

Customer Reviews

Strange and layered book
The more I think about Not the End of the World, the more the book seems to mean to me. Generally, the progress works the other way around. It says a lot about Atkinson as a writer how powerfully the book manages to keep a hold on my mind.

Atkinson creates a layered confection of characters both real and mythic. They live in a time just bordering the apocalypse. The world in which they live is often shallow and full of troubles, but is beautiful in contrast to the great pit of nothing waiting past the implied boundary. It is not an uplifting book, and when I finished it I was left with a feeling of bleakness. This is time out of time, and it is more frightening than hopeful.

While I do not expect a book to give up its secrets too easily, it did sometimes feel as though Atkinson were being deliberately obscure. Several of the stories had the feel of letters that you find in the street, or a conversation half heard around the corner. She was not generous with the doors into to the developing project of the book. As a reader, there were times when I would have appreciated just a wee bit more transparency.

This is the first Atkinson that I have read. It will not be the last.

Not Atkinson's best, but a grand ride nonetheless
I'm willing to bet that Kate Atkinson didn't color inside the lines when she was a little girl. She's a born subversive, and her charming, alarming, crazy quilt fiction catches the reader off-balance. "Normal" categories get messed with: Realism morphs without warning into fantasy; past, present and future are melded and skewed; people are never quite what they seem. These qualities shone in her first and most brilliant book, BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM (the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1995), as well as in two other novels (HUMAN CROQUET and EMOTIONALLY WEIRD), and they are equally evident in NOT THE END OF THE WORLD, a collection of 12 stories.

The narratives are neither clearly connected nor totally distinct (Atkinson doesn't do anything conventionally). Occasionally she recycles characters: The sullen adolescents whom she evokes with absolutely perfect pitch in "Dissonance" reappear, a few years older but still obnoxious, in "Wedding Favors." More frequently, though, a featured player in one story becomes a peripheral character in another; members of the Zane family, a large American clan, thread their way in and out of several tales, as do a self-absorbed celebrity mom and a nanny who is a worthy successor to Mary Poppins. Detecting these links is wonderfully diverting for the reader --- kind of like a Chinese puzzle --- and it also has the effect of unifying the collection. Atkinson's people all seem to inhabit more or less the same eccentric universe, which is Scotland (she lives in Edinburgh) and at the same time another place: more mysterious, less nameable.

Usually I prefer my "magical" and my "realism" well separated, like carrots and peas on a dinner plate. But Atkinson is so adept and her narrative voice so persuasive that after a while I began to enjoy the sudden shifts from ordinary life to fairy tale, from anxiety to horror, from a bad day to the end of the world. Perhaps her inspiration here is the cult show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (to which the characters in several stories are hopelessly addicted), an odd hybrid of teen TV fare and spookier, more complex life-and-death drama. Take "Temporal Anomaly," wherein a lawyer named Marianne has an unusual out-of-body experience, or the amazing consequences when a woman without a boyfriend adopts a stray in "The Cat Lover." Often, the realistic side of her stories involves broken families and deserted children. In "Tunnel of Fish," "Sheer Big Waste of Love" and "Unseen Translation," we encounter three small, wise, almost painfully controlled boys who are among Atkinson's most touching inventions.

What I didn't like was the epigraphs that precede each story. They're wildly eclectic, ranging from Buffy to Emily Dickinson to classical sources (including untranslated Greek!), but does the book really need another layer of possible meaning? They struck me as irritating rather than enlightening, like program notes that over-explain instead of letting the work speak for itself. And because some are highly esoteric, they give the mistaken impression that you must have a daunting level of scholarship in order to gain entry to the book.

The stories in NOT THE END OF THE WORLD are, in fact, completely accessible --- with the exception of the first and the last, "Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping" and "Pleasureland," intentional bookends for the collection. On one level, these two tales are simply a big fat ironic play on the title phrase, since what's happening is that the world (as we know it) is ending: weather anomalies and epidemics and warfare and no more radio or TV or food, zoo animals running riot and museums left unpoliced so "people wandered in and took the artifacts and used them to improve their interior décor."

The Charlene and Trudi stories (in both cases, they are the sole characters) are a weird cross between high-literary minimalism and a high-end shopping list, itemizing everything from tea to perfume to fabric. Atkinson seems to be pointing out how little "stuff" matters when it comes to the apocalypse, while at the same time glorying in the sheer sound and texture of words and objects. She also jams in a great many references to themes and people mentioned in the rest of the book, as if Charlene and Trudi's dying days (and dying world) contain and transcend everything else. None of this really works --- and it is particularly discouraging to encounter it right off the bat (I almost threw the book across the room). My advice: Skip Charlene and Trudi until you've read everything else.

NOT THE END OF THE WORLD is a grand ride, but I don't think it is Atkinson's best. Too many of the stories, despite their obvious virtuosity, wind up getting by on the author's sarcastic, fantastic riffs and juicy language. She could (dangerously, for her own development) be typecast as wacky rather than deep. I hope she writes another novel next --- preferably about a small boy with profound dignity and a well-concealed longing for love.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

An Anthology Painting the Picture of the End of the World
Not the End of the World is an anthology of loosely related pieces. These stories all drift around the common theme of the End of the World. Whether it is on a global scale, or simply changing one's path through life, these World Ending events are never addressed directly. Like so many people, the characters in "Not the End of the World," rarely meet their fate directly. Then again, events that often appear to be the End of the World are not really the end of the world at all.

In keeping with the theme of not facing an event directly, what is most intriguing about these pieces is not the central plot, but rather the peripheral occurrences. For example, in the first piece "Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping," the plot is summed up by the first sentence, "'I want,' Charlene said to Trudi, 'to buy my mother a birthday present.'" In the end, Charlene finds a present; however, that is not what is fascinating about the story. What is fascinating are the details in the periphery hinting that the end of the world is nigh. It is a world where men see how drunk they can get before the curfew, bombs explode in the distance and the city runs out of diesel and gin. But these details do not directly relate to the selection of a birthday present.

In the subsequent pieces, the intriguing peripheral aspects come in the form of defining a larger picture. How are these vignettes related? On the surface, these pieces are related through the relationships between the characters of each story. There is though a deeper relationship, just waiting for reader to tease it out.

Despite the lack of a emphasis on plot, this collection is continuously fascinating. What "Not the End of the World," has to say about life is not something that can be easily expressed. Like any good magician, Kate Atkinson does not reveal how she performs her tricks.