Think of England by Frederic Raphael
With settings ranging from smart London offices to remote country houses, from Cambridge in the early 1950s to a colony of voluntary artistic exiles in the South of Spain, and from Highgate to Jamaica and the USA, this new collection from Frederic Raphael is as incisive, original and enjoyable as we would expect from the author of Oxbridge Blues and The Glittering Prizes. A young couple abandon the rat-race for a pastoral idyll in 'The People in Euclid', until a disturbing new presence imposes upon their happiness - reminding them of what they escaped from, and inextricably linking his life with theirs. In 'Union Jack Development', the sad tale of Antonia and Stewart - pieced together from letters and diary fragments left in a drawer - casts a sinister aura over the magical Jamaican holiday house. After weeks of frantic preparation, the entire village of Torreroja - resplendent with flowers, coloured lights and with proud Mayor Don Antonio to the fore - all wait with rapt anticipation to honour 'the face with saved Spain for God' on 'The Day Franco Came'. We meet extraordinary characters from the worlds of film, theatre and literature - like Sherman Shapiro, 'The Old Pro', who offers a budding screenwriter his first chance to break into Hollywood, but whose own life turns out rather weak in the third act; Jake Nathanson, ebullient on his heady passage to eminence, and rather less spritely on is ay down in 'Quixote Shmixote'; and Magnis Molyneux, who in 'Seniority' addresses himself to his vocation - literature - with monastic severity. We see how quickly 'the moment passes', and how flattery, favours and auld acquaintances can conveniently be forgotten. Think of England is a stylish, subtle and highly accomplished collection in which Frederic Raphael displays his astute observation of human motives and his versatility at their very best. Reviews A versatile English novelist (The Glittering Prizes), short story writer (Oxbridge Blues) and biographer of Byron, Raphael has mastered the one-liner, the literary dig and the mockingly erudite reference, all used with relish in his latest collection of short stories. Nearly all concern the vagaries of a writer's life, most saunter intimately among the famous and the eccentric, and many make the reader laugh out loud. Some have O. Henry-like twists, like ``A Kiss on the Cheek,'' in which a dazzling woman writer who condescendingly bid farewell to a much younger author seeks him out years later for professional advice. ``A Long Story Short'' and ``The People in Euclid'' concern lovers' triangles. The first introduces a man who leaves his wife, marries the other woman, but later meets his first wife at a party and has an affair with her; the second is the tale of a marriage into which an outsider intrudes so successfully that he ends up marrying the woman, only to suffer the equally intrusive presence of her first husband. ``The Day Franco Came,'' a passionate indictment of the pomposity, greed and hypocrisy of petty officials in a dying Spanish town, is made more damning by its matter-of-factness and vivid setting. It is the finest story in a collection marked by urbanity, wit and sure mastery of material. (April) The 17 stories in this third collection by the author of The Glittering Prizes are set in London and in Cambridge of the Fifties, in Jamaica and the United States, in English country houses and small villages in Spain. The characters are as cosmopolitan as their settings; sophisticates, they write, produce, or direct films and TV plays. Threading his way through several stories is an aspiring novelist who deserts literature for the big bucks promised by the real world and then deserts the real world so he can work on a novel. Raphael's prose is as brittle as his characters' conversation, and he endlessly plays with cliche: ``Selene went for what she wanted before what she wanted went.'' His stories are diverting, but they last in the mind no more than four minutes. Marcia Tager, Tenafly, N.J.
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Binding: Hardcover
Published by: J. Cape: , 1986
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ISBN: 9780224023832 | 0224023837
187 pages.
Book Condition: Very Good
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