The Usual Desire to Kill
A Novel
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3.8 • 17 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A “droll, psychologically astute…unexpected…very funny” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air) and moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter.
Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of decades-old food.
Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda’s mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.”
This wry, propulsive story about an eccentric yet endearing family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playwright Barnes combines humor with pathos in her heart-wrenching debut, the story of an aging British couple's unhappy marriage told mainly from the perspective of their actor daughter. Miranda's parents were born during WWII and have been together since their student days at Oxford. Dad, a retired philosophy professor, now tends to llamas, chickens, and cats at their rundown manor house in central France, where he and Mum, who got pregnant before she could finish her studies, moved after raising Miranda and her older sister, Charlotte, in England. The parents' endless stream of bickering, "a game of stubbornness versus pedantry," is witnessed most often by Miranda, now pushing 50, who visits regularly from Paris. She relates their bitter and witty exchanges in emails to Charlotte and in scripts, which comprise the text of the novel along with Miranda's narration and Mum's old letters. Miranda and Charlotte think they know their parents all too well, but the genius of the novel lies in the ways Barnes highlights how parents can never be fully known to their children, no matter how observant their children are. In Mum's letters to her sister, for example, she reveals an affair with an American traveler during her Oxford days, the outcome of which helps to explain her acerbic nature, while Dad shares a secret of his own with Miranda's daughter, Alice, in the form of a poignant philosophical conundrum. It's an unforgettable story about the limits of judging others.
Customer Reviews
Remarkable
Remarkable, scathing, disturbing, and enlightening. Quietly stunning ending. Thank you.