Age - Softcover

Calisher, Hortense

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0714530123 ISBN 13: 9780714530123

Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

Rupert is an honored American poet; Gemma a retired architect. They live happily and comfortably in a Greenwich Village apartment; the setting, for over thirty years, of their married life. Each with a previous marriage behind them - which left her with two daughters and him with the promise of greatness - they are now facing the challenge of old age together. Both, in their own way, defy the inevitability of death, and yet both are busy preparing for it. The alternating entries of their private journals, which make up the body of Calisher's text, tell a story of familiarity and the fear of loss, love and uncertainty of the future, meanings and habits. With rare verve and panache, Hortense Calisher has confronted a difficult and often neglected subject - and has triumphed magnificently.

About this title

About the Author

Hortense Calisher has written more than twenty books. Past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of PEN, she has been a National Book Award finalist three times and has won an O. Henry Award, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

The animating idea behind Calisher's slender new novelan elderly couple's coming to terms with the inevitability of their deathis a worthy theme. And the fictional materials meant to give it substance here seem promising, even exotic. Gemma is a retired architect in her late 70s, Rupert an inactive poet four years younger. One of her daughters by a previous marriage is sordidly murdered in a back alley; the other, conventionally married and pregnant, is living in Saudi Arabia. Rupert's ex-wife arrives from England only to die as they look on; their old friends, a literary power-broker and biographer and his wife, make a brief appearance and depart by double suicide. But the working-through of the material in the form of a team diary is curiously inert and fragmentary, much of it in language that is quaint to the point of eccentricity. A murderno small thing, after allis merely alluded to in passing, as is the adolescent girl's attempted seduction of her stepfather. The death in their presence of a significant person is merely flatly reported, news of the double suicide arrives in the form of a New York Times obituary. The narrative remains lifeless, an exercise rather than a cogent work of art.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0714530123
• ISBN 13: 9780714530123
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 124