Guppies For Tea
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
A bright, funny novel about a woman's life on the brink of destruction and how she pulls it back together, by the author of Shooting Butterflies
Amelia Lindsey is an exceptional young woman.
She shares her days between a grandmother whom she loves, a mother whom she tolerates with patient fortitude, and Gerald. They had fallen in love with Amelia two years earlier, when he was in his artistic phase, and had begged her to move in with him. Now (no longer in his artistic phase) he is showing signs of irritation. And suddenly Selma, the talented and much-beloved grandmother, has become old.
As life - and Gerald - begins to collapse all round Amelia, she is determined that the one person who will not fade is Selma. Fighting a one-woman battle against Cherryfield retirement home, Gerald's defection and her mother's obsession with germs, Amelia finds herself capable of plots, diversions, and friendships she has never imagined before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British writer Cobbold's debut novel, which introduces three generations of women, each ineffectual in her own way, proves much sadder than it is droll. It's been decided that Selma Merryman, recently widowed and showing unmistakable signs of senility, must leave her lovely Devon estate and become a resident of a retirement home. Selma's daughter, Dagmar, a compulsive hand-washer horrified by anything remotely unsanitary, including her now incontinent mother, considers the home a fine solution. But Selma's 31-year-old granddaughter, Amelia, determines to liberate Selma from the community of pathetic residents and authoritarian nurses. (The title comes from these caretakers' unappetizing tendency to serve fish as a snack, and an incident in which a nurse disposes of sick guppies by boiling them.) Cobbold effectively conveys the poignance and pain of seeing a once-vibrant individual confined in a loveless environment. Her dark humor, however, which focuses on Amelia's lack of self-confidence (her philandering husband has just demanded a divorce), patronizing doctors and Dagmar's fear of germs, gives the impression that lone women can't cope calmly with adversity. Selma's forgetfulness and weakness lead to crises on her trips away from the home, and although Amelia averts each disaster, it's with ample hysteria. Though a bestseller in Britain, where it was nominated for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, this tale of one woman's empathy, her mother's apathy and her grandmother's decline may not be Americans' cup of tea.
