A Stairway to Paradise
Text Clasics
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Alex and Andrew are friends. And Barbara…Barbara is a goddess. Here is the eternal triangle, the story of three people in an unhappy tangle of emotions, none able to articulate the precise quality of their longing and dissatisfaction.Are any of them truly interested in reaching the ‘paradise’ they claim to be seeking, or are they actually trying to avoid it?In St. John’s hands, what is commonplace is transformed and transcendent. This is the work of an extraordinary writer.
MADELEINE ST JOHN was born in Sydney in 1941. Her father, Edward, was a barrister and Liberal politician. Her mother, Sylvette, committed suicide in 1954, when Madeleine was twelve. Her death, she later said, ‘obviously changed everything’.
St John studied Arts at Sydney University, where her contemporaries included Bruce Beresford, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes. In 1965 she married Chris Tillam, a fellow student, and they moved to the United States where they first attended Stanford and later Cambridge.
From Cambridge, St John relocated to London in 1968 with the hope that Chris would follow. The couple did not reunite and the marriage ended. St John settled in Notting Hill. She worked at a series of odd jobs, and then, in 1993, published her first novel, The Women in Black, the only book she set in Australia. When her third novel, The Essence of the Thing (1997), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she became the first Australian woman to receive this honour.
St John died in 2006.
‘Not much in the way of folly escapes Madeleine St John, and the oubliette she opens into the darker reaches of the spirit is unsettling.’
The Times
‘St John proves herself a comic, humane observer.’
Newsday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Booker Prize-nominee (The Essence of the Thing) St. John casts a droll eye over sentimental entanglements in this sophisticated novel, which features three hapless, intertwined lovers. "After all, it's not our fault," acknowledges Andrew Flynn, one of two middle-aged, lovelorn men who lust after the elusive Barbara, "that we're ignorant and inept--it's the way we're designed, basically.... as a species, we're still in the experimental stage." Flynn has just returned to London after a 10-year teaching stint in the U.S., leaving a broken marriage and young daughter behind. His friend Alex, a successful journalist, is stuck in a loveless marriage to Claire. Both men fall in love with Barbara, an elusive, charming young woman who can't decide where to plant her feet. Andrew thinks of Barbara as he sits in his "brand-new, rather empty sitting-room," and Alex obsesses over her while Claire is away at the Scunthorpe Literary Festival. Confronted by the reciprocation of Barbara's feelings, Alex is "too amazed by it to be able to think," much less do anything. He explains that he and his wife have a "modus operandi," and plan to stay together until their youngest child, age eight, is old enough to attend boarding school. (The two children, meanwhile, secretly count the days until their parents divorce.) Barbara refuses to have an affair with a married man. No one feels sorry for himself or herself: they simply drift along, hoping for the best, expecting little. This refreshing and witty if sometimes dauntingly British novel demonstrates that people give themselves all sorts of reasons to avoid "paradise."
