The Summer Without Men
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3.2 • 6 Ratings
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- £5.49
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WHAT I LOVED
'An astoundingly joyful read . . . a book that shines with intellectual curiosity and emotional integrity' Guardian
'By turns funny, moving and erudite, playfully reminding us of a contemporary Jane Austen' Daily Mail
After Mia Fredricksen's husband of thirty years asks for a pause - so he can indulge his infatuation with a young French colleague - she cracks up (briefly), rages (deeply), then decamps to her prairie childhood home.
There, gradually, she is drawn into the lives of those around her: her mother's circle of feisty widows; the young woman next door; and the diabolical teenage girls in her poetry class. By the end of the summer without men, Mia knows what's worth fighting for - and on whose terms.
Provocative, mordant, and fiercely intelligent, this is a gloriously vivacious tragi-comedy about women and girls, love and marriage, and the age-old war between the sexes.
A rich and intelligent meditation on female identity, written in beguiling lyrical prose . . . heady and intoxicating' Sunday Times
PRAISE FOR SIRI HUSTVEDT:
'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom' Salman Rushdie
'One of our finest novelists' Oliver Sacks
'Reading a Hustvedt novel is like consuming the best of David Lynch' Financial Times
'Few contemporary writers are as satisfying and stimulating to read as Siri Hustvedt' Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A theatrically manic poet turns heartbreak into an intellectual endeavor in Hustvedt's intellectually spry latest (after The Sorrows of an American). Fresh out of the hospital at age 55 following a breakdown brought on by her husband's departure for a young colleague referred to as "The Pause," award-winning poet and Columbia professor Mia Fredricksen flees Brooklyn to spend the summer in her Minnesota hometown. There she is in the company of her mother and four other feisty old ladies, the young mother next door, and the seven hormone-addled pubescent girls enrolled in her poetry class at the local arts guild. Mia sorts out her agony as only a scorned woman with a Ph.D. in comparative literature can by pouring it through a sieve of poets, philosophers, and critical theorists. At times these references eclipse the presence of the narrator herself, but even this absence becomes the basis for philosophical rumination, as Mia corresponds online with the anonymous and at times abusive Mr. Nobody. Though initially trapped in a claustrophobic cerebral solitude, Mia opens up, and, in so doing, lets in some much needed air to a constricted narrative, so that instead of being another novel of a woman on the brink, this becomes an adroit take on love, men and women, and girls and women.
