The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories
Angelica Garnett
The Unspoken Truth: A Quartet of Bloomsbury Stories
Real life and fiction meet as Angelica Garnett evokes what it is to grow up in the shadow of artists. Her family appear in different guises in the stories, but at the centre of each one is Garnett herself. She is naive and foolish as Bettina, desperately seeking acceptance into the grown-ups circle ("When All the Leaves Were Green, My Love"); shy and cautious, but finally disloyal, as Agnes ("Aurore"); a hesitant, uncomfortable Emily ("The Birthday Party"); and a contemplative, even witty older woman, full of appetite and guilt, as Helen ("Friendship"). Spanning an entire life, each story reveals a figure trying to understand her place not only within the polished circle of her family, but in an ever-changing world. A fictional counterpoint to her memoir, "Deceived with Kindness", here is a portrait of a woman seeking an understanding and acceptance of her past.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive. Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up surrounded by the most talked-about writers and artists of the day - Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the Stracheys, Maynard Keynes and many others. In 1942 she married David Garnett by whom she had four daughters; they later separated. In 1984 she published Deceived with Kindness, an extraordinarily frank memoir about her childhood, which won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. She is a painter and has lived in France since 1983.
3.3 out of 5 based on 5 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Biography, Literary Studies & Criticism |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
304 |
| RRP |
£15.00 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2010 |
| ISBN |
978-0701184353 |
| Publisher |
Chatto & Windus |
| |
Real life and fiction meet as Angelica Garnett evokes what it is to grow up in the shadow of artists. Her family appear in different guises in the stories, but at the centre of each one is Garnett herself. She is naive and foolish as Bettina, desperately seeking acceptance into the grown-ups circle ("When All the Leaves Were Green, My Love"); shy and cautious, but finally disloyal, as Agnes ("Aurore"); a hesitant, uncomfortable Emily ("The Birthday Party"); and a contemplative, even witty older woman, full of appetite and guilt, as Helen ("Friendship"). Spanning an entire life, each story reveals a figure trying to understand her place not only within the polished circle of her family, but in an ever-changing world. A fictional counterpoint to her memoir, "Deceived with Kindness", here is a portrait of a woman seeking an understanding and acceptance of her past.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive. Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up surrounded by the most talked-about writers and artists of the day - Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, the Stracheys, Maynard Keynes and many others. In 1942 she married David Garnett by whom she had four daughters; they later separated. In 1984 she published Deceived with Kindness, an extraordinarily frank memoir about her childhood, which won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. She is a painter and has lived in France since 1983.
John Crace's Digested Read -- The Guardian
Reviews
The Literary Review
Anne Chisholm
"Fasinating and disconcerting… As a way of paying her dues, ['Aurore'] clearly means much to the writer; but as fiction it fails to engage the reader, for whom the crime seems minor and the self-castigation excessive. By contrast, the next and shortest piece, ‘The Birthday Party’, is precise and dazzlingly effective."
01/02/2010
Read Full Review
The Times
Valerie Grove
"The Bloomsbury group hid their feelings behind an intellectual detachment; Garnett’s fragility is ever-present in her painstakingly dense and exact writing... But you sense here a very clear exegesis of Larkin’s poem, This Be the Verse."
16/01/2010
Read Full Review
The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
"There are moments when the reader, impatient with the almost wilful vulnerability of Garnett’s heroines, may feel there is something insubstantial about these stories, over which a faint air of apology sometimes hangs, as though Garnett doesn’t feel entitled to be writing them. But the thought has scarcely formed before it is punctured by some perception of piercing originality. The Unspoken Truth is not a masterpiece, but it is the work of a writer with very distinctive gifts."
11/01/2010
Read Full Review
The Sunday Times
Nick Rennison
"The joys of friendship, its small betrayals and the changes that events in the larger world can enforce on it are meticulously charted in "Aurore"… What this story and the other tales do not show is much enthusiasm for formal structure. Like real life, they ramble, digress and turn their backs on the patterns that storytelling usually imposes. In the end, they fall into the unsatisfying limbo that lies between memoir and fiction."
24/01/2010
Read Full Review
The Guardian
Alex Clark
"...in spite of the signposts pointing us in the direction of authentic lived experience, these pieces often appear both unconvincingly fictional and at the same time not quite fictional enough; as if their creator, in marshalling her material, had forgotten that a story needs to look outwards as well as to the caverns within."
23/01/2010
Read Full Review