The Big Wolves - Hardcover

Sanders, Wilbur

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1561310050 ISBN 13: 9781561310050

Publisher: New Amsterdam Books, 1998

Synopsis

Anya is a South African exile who manages, con brio, a smart dress shop in London. Laczi is a sculptor who left his country for England after the Soviets put down the Hungarian uprising. Both are outsize personalities. The dress shop and the sculptor's atelier are in the same building. Working in stone makes noise and dust. Clash of Titans ensues.
Followed by grudging interest on both sides. Followed by wary mutual inspection. Followed by-well, we've all read the novels, we know what followed. The encounter of these two particular beings is comic, passionate, and troubled (Whim of Iron meets Very Nearly Immoveable Object). For example, the high and mighty Anya has a social conscience, and a political one; Laczi's experience of life in Hungary has taught him that politics is murder. She tells him, in effect, Call yourself a man? He tells her, in effect, I'm trying to be a grown man. Now, can this love affair prosper? Hardly.
They separate. They get together again, the worse for wear. They try to ignore their spiritual differences, which is rather like ignoring what Paul Goodman used to call one's way of being in the world. But these domestic trials, serious enough it would seem, are scarcely all God's dangers. There is a demonstration. Anya, large and handsome, Is a conspicuous target in it. And yes, politics turns out to be murder, in Britain as in other places. A large, handsome, generous life is beaten to death.

About this title

About the Author

Wilbur Sanders was born in New Zealand and was raised chiefly in Australia. He taught English literature at Cambridge University and among his other published works are short stories and a volume of literary criticism.

From Publishers Weekly

Sanders's first novel is a tragicomic love story set in England during the socially fluid 1970s. Anya, a white South African, is an emotional and vindictive woman whose view of life is refracted through complicated feelings about her homeland (as a teenager, she fell in love with a black revolutionary). Now the owner of a trendy London dress shop, Anya finds her livelihood threatened by her messy, noisy new neighbor, a cantankerous sculptor named Laczi who fled his native Hungary in 1956. Anya's bullyish tactics result in colorful verbal sparring, which they both enjoy; Sanders's keen ear for language enlivens this intense courtship. In a swift, jolting succession of events, Laczi's work suddenly becomes fashionable, he and Anya marry and buy a home deep in the country. But Anya's dissatisfaction with the role of muse causes a breakdown that sends her back to London, where she becomes involved in left-wing politics. Her disastrous encounter with a xenophobic Thatcherite England forms a sober epilogue to a consistently entertaining novel.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Amsterdam Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1561310050
• ISBN 13: 9781561310050
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252