Show 40 post(s) from this thread on one page
|
Amanda Prantera
I'm currently enjoying Amanda Prantera's 1996 novel Zoe Trope (a sequel of sorts to her earlier novel, Proto Zoe: yes, the woman should really be called Amanda Pun-terror), and as I expect she's a name not many are familiar with, to fill in the gaps let me append my Amazon review of her last-but-one novel Capri File (2001). This may go some way to explaining why the first few chapters of Zoe Trope have caused the greatest shaking yet of my so-far intact book buying ban. She really is awfully good...
Quote:
|
Re: Amanda Prantera
So, Zoe Trope was a breeze of a read, though with an ending rather suddener than I was expecting. It's a conversational account of the various loves in Zoe's adult life (just as I understand its predecessor Proto Zoe covered her childhood) - mostly men, but also places and friends and philosophies. The first of these was her father, and the opening chapters give us a sizzling portrait of family angst, with the mixed feelings that follow Zoe's grandmother's funeral, and a superbly done example of the wars of words that passed for conversation between father and gran:
Quote:
Incidentally, since posting the review of Capri File, I now see that most of Prantera's novels (with the exception of The Side of the Moon, The Kingdom of Fanes and, yes, the Lord Byron on Perversion one) are available in paperback from Bloomsbury. Hurray for that - the Anglo-Italian renaissance starts here. |
Re: Amanda Prantera
I've decided to work my way through Amanda Prantera's back catalogue (with no reference to how I came upon them, book-buying-embargo still technically in place and all that) and have now begun her first novel Strange Loop (1984).
Meanwhile I see on her agent's site, reference to a new novel due to be published in July 2005, which has presumably been put back, called Sabine:
Quote:
|
Re: Amanda Prantera
D'oh! I see, with a moment's more searching, that Sabine has already been published: but presumably with an effort to attract interest in it (and by extension in Prantera and her other work), and not realising that this method has been done to death in recent years, Bloomsbury have published it 'anonymously,' under the name A.P.
"A.P. dares not reveal her name, having revealed so much else in her hair-raising text, Sabine. She was born in England but educated mainly in France." :roll: |
Re: Amanda Prantera
Watch out for some lusty fairy action by anonymous author, S.W.
|
Re: Amanda Prantera
Well, having ignored Richard Yates and Patrick McGrath thus far I can only say, re Amanda Prantera...count me in!
|
Re: Amanda Prantera
Strange Loop (1984) was Amanda Prantera's first novel and I'm glad now that I never got around to reading it when I first picked up a copy all those years ago, as I might not have been persuaded to sample her further. It's not immature exactly - she was 42 when it was published - but it does fairly lack the accessibility and playfulness of her later stuff from the 90s and 00s (er, based on the one of each I've read, Zoe Trope and Capri File). The first person narrative is over-written, perhaps consciously as our protagonist is a philosopher - or considers himself one anyway - but it does cloud the story and give the impression of padding (after which it stretches only to 165 pages anyway). The plot has our man, Ludwig, returning to an abbey where he worked as a young man in the library after the second world war. He reminisces on his obsession with what he believes is a young woman trapped high in the turret opposite, and much passion and tragedy ensues. The framing device of Ludwig returning to the abbey is artificial and adds little to the story (other than a frisson from a gravestone), and the central dramatic plot point, laboriously led up to, is obvious from about halfway through, even when Prantera tries to deflect this by having her narrator explicitly acknowledge (and wrongly dismiss) the idea.
In its finer moments Strange Loop does have that heady combination of erudition and storytelling that someone like Andrew Crumey does so well, but only in moments, and for the most part it's an apprentice work for completists - like me! - only. ***00 |
Re: Amanda Prantera
Amanda Prantera's second novel, The Cabalist (1985), begins much more interestingly than Strange Loop, with the author interrupting in alternating chapters to give us a bit of background on the protagonist: stepping behind the curtain, so to speak. The protagonist is Kestler, a Venetian magician - as opposed to illusionist - who is terminally ill and wants to sort out his affairs and secure a worthy successor to his work before he dies. He also wants to combat a malevolent child demon called the Catcher (or Catfisher), who lures cats to their deaths, and who may or may not be real...
Unfortunately the author disappears quickly and we are left with an unforgivably dull read. Kestler's page-long paragraphs of internal monologue are dense and dreary and show clearly that while Prantera - a philosophy graduate - was eager to impress with her erudition and ability to sustain long stretches of unbroken prose, she had yet to come to the realisation that her true strength was in effortless readability and faux-naive cunning. This book has none of that, so goes down as another How-did-she-ever-get-a-deal-for-another-one? volume, although I'm glad in the end that she did. **000 |
Re: Amanda Prantera
Going from Amanda Prantera's second novel to her last-but-one novel Spoiler (2003), shows starkly how her style has changed - and to my eye improved - in the intervening twenty years. Spoiler is much in the line of Capri File, with its playful, charming narrator, this time a young man named Ben, a noviciate priest in a seminary in Rome. The subtitle of the novel is According to the Book of Ben, which both underlines the biblical references in which the book is steeped, and reminds us of the fallibility of the first person narrator. Pleasingly, though - and I never thought I'd say this - Ben is not simply an unreliable narrator, and doubts are cast on his testament openly from the start, and the ending is satisfyingly ambiguous, reminding us that as far as evil goes, the worst horror of all isn't knowing, but not knowing.
Ben has come to a Foucault's Pendulum style conspiracy theory: he believes someone in the seminary has killed a baby born on 25 December 2000 because they believe that the antichrist was born on that day, and had to kill him on the following lunar eclipse. Ben's next-door-roommate Adam (to whom Ben looked up in a more homoerotic than saintly way) has already been pushed off a high tower for his knowledge of this, and Ben is trying to piece together the clues he left before he died. So the setting is as clichéd as you like, but the handling is not, which is presumably why this 2003 novel of religious conspiracy, secret sects and murder failed sales-wise, and why The Da Vinci Code did not. Prantera can never leave her learning off the page for long, though unlike The Cabalist or Strange Loop, here it is used to entertaining and gripping effect, and her love of puns and fragmented formatting make the book as much a pleasure as The Cabalist was a relentless-paragraphed drag. As a first-class entertainment, but an entertainment nonetheless, I give it a ***00 and a smile. |
Re: Amanda Prantera
I read the prequel (I suppose) to Zoe Trope, Proto Zoe this weekend. It takes us through a series of incidents in Zoe's early life, involving wicked (in a good way) grandmothers, finishing schools, first loves and so on, all fairly amusing and ultimately rather more disposable and less memorably written than its sequel. I can't help thinking that at 140 pages each, the two Zoe volumes could profitably be combined into one without straining readers' wrists. I must admit that for all my early enthusiasm for Prantera, none of the four books of hers that I've read since Capri File has matched up to that early delight, and I face the pile of seven still to go on my bookshelf - Conversations with Lord Byron..., The Side of the Moon, The Young Italians, The Kingdom of Fanes, Letter to Lorenzo, Don Giovanna and Sabine, with rather less excitement now than I did before. But I shall work my way through them anyway if it takes me all year. I do it all for you, you know.
|
All times are GMT +1. The time now is 9:17. |
Show 40 post(s) from this thread on one page
|
Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2016, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.