Ever After - Hardcover

Swift, Graham

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679409548 ISBN 13: 9780679409540

Publisher: Knopf, 1992

Synopsis

Dazzling in its structure and shattering in its emotional force, Graham Swift's Ever After spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to the contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautify wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of Ever After is nothing less than the eternal question, "Why should things matter?"

"Ever After is explicitly concerned with historical investigation, love, death, family affairs.... It moves quickly, and it vibrates with feeling and thought."--Wall Street Journal

About this title

About the Author

Graham Swift is the author of six novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Last Orders. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in London, England.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Back Cover

its structure and shattering in its emotional force, Graham Swift's Ever After spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to the contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautify wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of Ever After is nothing less than the eternal question, "Why should things matter?"

"Ever After is explicitly concerned with historical investigation, love, death, family affairs.... It moves quickly, and it vibrates with feeling and thought."--Wall Street Journal

From the Inside Flap

its structure and shattering in its emotional force, Graham Swift's <b>Ever After</b> spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to the contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautify wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of <b>Ever After</b> is nothing less than the eternal question, "Why should things matter?"<br><br>"<b>Ever After</b> is explicitly concerned with historical investigation, love, death, family affairs.... It moves quickly, and it vibrates with feeling and thought."--<i>Wall Street Journal</i>

Reviews

This time out, Swift (Out of This World, Waterland, Learning to Swim, etc.) at first seems to be reworking a fictional convention that's becoming tired from overuse: the writer--or, as here, the Oxford academic--who finds himself in possession of an old manuscript whose revelations dovetail with the perturbations of the modern interpreter. Bill Unwin is the ambivalent don in question, and the journals (bequeathed by family) concern a Victorian ancestor named Matthew Pearce, a surveyor and rector's son-in-law whose life and faith is changed forever when, on the cliffs of Dorset in 1844, he comes face-to-face with an ichthyosaurus. Darwin replaces God in Pearce at that instant--but in Unwin the revelation only sharpens the dilemma of knowing what's better unknown (in his own case, the suicide death of his father), and the questions of immortality and memory and fame and mutability (all very much on his mind since his beloved actress wife Ruth's early cancer death). Unwin has attempted suicide himself but failed, and the vagrant nature of his narration seems an impossible search for focus. Swift is a very cunning writer, though. Every thematic strand- -books, bridges, railroads, dinosaurs, acting, sex--subtly achieves a color that makes it recognizable once the chords of fugue on the theme of mortality and immortality are struck. And feeling (a rare commodity in younger British writers nowadays) is what makes these colors so high: even at its most looping and shuffling, the book finds ways to move you, untricked-up emotion being its surest ground. Unwin's losses are ranged around, but so are the bravery of his questioning memory and the fidelity of his love. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

While struggling to reconstruct his life after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, middle-aged narrator Bill Unwin confronts his inescapable past. Numbed by the deaths of his wife and his mother, Bill had become a reluctant and skeptical academic researching notebooks written by a Victorian ancestor named Matthew Pearce. These notebooks provide a narrative vehicle for traveling backward and forward in time, giving Bill abundant opportunity to expound on such diverse topics as academia, dinosaurs, Darwin, railroads, death, and, ultimately, the enduring and life-sustaining power of love. Swift, the talented author of Waterland (Pocket Bks., 1984) and Out of This World (Poseidon Pr., 1988), has created a marvelous character whose wry humor and perspicacity uncover the elusive relationship between history and fiction. Poignant, astute, heartwarming, and welcome. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/91.
- Jacqueline Adams, Carroll Cty. P.L., Westminster, Md.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679409548
• ISBN 13: 9780679409540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275