Latecomers

by Anita Brookner

Other authorsAndrew Sachs (Contributor)

Cassette Audiobook , 1994

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Audiobooks

Publication

Chivers Audio Books (1994), Audio Cassette

Description

'No man is free of his own history' Hartmann and Fibich came to England on the kindertransport. As orphans of the war they were strangers in a strange land. Together, they survived. And in adulthood they have been unable to separate, sharing a successful business. Yet Hartmann's carefully polished manners conceal the past he refuses to think about. While Fibich, a mass of fears and neuroses, can do nothing but remember. Together these two men seek to build a future from the shaky foundations of their own pasts . . . 'Like Virginia Woolf, Brookner's aim is not to draw characters in the round, but to reveal psychological reality in the deep' The Times %%%Latecomersis the eighth novel by Anita Brookner, the Booker Prize winning author of Hotel du Lac. This edition includes an introduction by Helen Dunmore. Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. Anita Brookner's Latecomerswas published in 1988 and is one of her most poignant novels. It tells the story of two men, the charming Hartmann and the troubled Fibich, best friends ever since they came to England as German refugees, and how they respond to their shared history in different ways. Latecomersis a moving, compassionate portrayal of how we confront the past and live with the present, from a writer of profound psychological depth. 'She has never written a better novel . . . unbearably moving' Ruth Rendell 'Her technique as a novelist is so sure and so quietly commanding' Hilary Mantel, Guardian Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, and worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 and her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. Hotel du Lacwon the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member AJBraithwaite

This isn't a book to read if you're looking for action or dialogue. It's a gentle, insinuating sort of novel. You come to care about the main characters very much, even though not a lot happens to them. It's almost a four-star read, but I did keep checking the page count to see how much further I

had to go and that's my definition of a book that doesn't quite make the four-star grade.

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LibraryThing member William345

Hartmann and Fibich come to England as children before the Second World War on the historic kindertransport. They are in every sense of the phrase: displaced persons, and remain so all their lives. They meet and bond with each other in a wretched boarding school. In London they spend their

childhood and adolescent years with Hartmann's Aunt Marie, before moving on to lives as successful businessmen, though their business is a frivolous one, low-brow greeting cards at one point, that neither takes seriously. The overarching theme for Hartmann is one of sensuous burial in the present as a means of avoiding unpleasant memories. Yvette, his wife, is deliberately out of step with the liberated women of her generation. She has a severe deficit in the empathy department; and her shallowness is admirably reflected in her materialism, which makes her a perfect fit for Hartmann. Everything with Yvette is appearance, surface, display. Everything with Hartmann is pleasure, indulgence, release. Fibich by contrast is someone who has not left his past behind. He is haunted by the Shoah, particularly the loss of his parents. He suffers keenly all his life from what psychologists call "survivor guilt." He wishes to understand it, but it's too much cognitive dissonance that will never lend itself to neat answers. (One is reminded of the guard in Auschwitz who says to Primo Levi: "There is no why here.") The woman Fibich marries, Christine, is Aunt Marie's niece and a more self-effacing and humble character you are unlikely to come across this side of Dickens; though she is without the unbearable tics Dickens gives his characters, or the cloying cheerfulness. Fibich meets Christine when she arrives every Friday to help Aunt Marie prepare her only dish: braised tongue à l'orientale. She stays with Fibich during the aunt's precipitous decline and death, and by then they are bound to each other by mutual pain and loss. Life for Brookner's characters, some of them, is a constant risk and worry. Whatever they do they are marked by a certain paralysis by analysis, stuck to the point of inaction. Though they try they can never remedy their affliction. Such are Fibich and Christine, such is also Hartmann, though Yvette is all instinct, and intuitive grasping. As for the writing, the novel all but leaps to life in your hands. Brookner is such an efficient writer; by p. 84 she has gone through the upbringing, childhood and adult psychological life of all four main characters. The section in which Christine and Fibich have a son of their own, Toto, whose sheer life force all but bowls them over, is dazzling. Toto's familiar is Yvette, with whom he shares an adoration for surfaces. He wants to be an actor, and one has to admit that seems perfect for this debauched Narcissus. This is one of my favorite Brookner novels and I highly recommend it.

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LibraryThing member bodachliath

I wanted to read this after reading a recent Guardian article on Brookner's novels other than the Booker winner Hotel du Lac, which was the only one I had read. This is a poised and reflective study of memory, loss and how different people handle it. At its centre are Hartmann and Fibich, lifelong

friends and business partners who met as schoolboy refugees from Germany in the Kindertransports. Brookner contrasts the "voluptuary" Hartmann with the haunted brooding Fibich, and gets inside the minds of all of her characters, drawing warm and humorous portraits of a close family against the backdrop of darker events.

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LibraryThing member mumoftheanimals

Nicely written but just too slow to finish. Shame as the subject interested me.

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