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Title: Heat Wave : Novel, A by Penelope Lively ISBN: 0-06-092855-7 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 15 October, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.38 (8 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Another winner from Penelope Lively
Comment: If you haven't yet discovered this Booker Award-winning British novelist, now's a good time to pick up one of her many books. Moon Tiger is her most well-known novel, but the others deserve equal attention.
In Heat Wave, Lively aims her magnifying glass on Pauline Carter and her married daughter. It starts out as a quiet story, set in a summer cottage in England's bucolic countryside. But with each turn of the page, the tension increases and increases...and increases...until the stunning conclusion just knocks your socks off. At it's base, it's a story of romance. Pauline is editing an allegory of romantic love while watching her daughter, Teresa, struggle with the romantic side of her married life, after realizing that her son-in-law is conducting an affair right under their noses.
About midpoint, you think you know where this book is heading. You would be wrong. Lively, in all her books, is fascinated with the conflict and difference between what is real and what appears on the surface. The serenity of the countryside is offset by the violence of the natural world; the appearance of romance is threatened by cynical adultery; love is marred by jealousy.
Don't miss this book; it's one of her best.
Rating: 5
Summary: This Heat Wave Is Chilling
Comment: I had not read a Penelope Lively novel in so long, I had forgotten how brilliant a writer she can be. Her talent is very evident in "Heat Wave." A deceptively simple story with very dark undertones, the book is a masterpiece of "novel-as-understatement."
Long-divorced Pauline, a freelance book editor, is spending the summer at her country cottage, World's End, with her daughter Theresa and her family--husband Morris, baby son Luke. Theresa and family occupy one half of the duplex, and Pauline the other. It's an agreeable relationship that allows each household the privacy it needs as well as the companionship, as the entire family gathers for dinner and other outings.
All is seemingly serene in both houses, but as the weather turns hotter in an unusually strong heat wave, the civilized overlay between the adults gradually melts away. For in an almost obscene coincidence, as far as Pauline is concerned, her daughter's husband Morris is engaged in an affair that is destined to break Theresa's heart--the same as Pauline's was broken many years ago by her husband (and Theresa's father) Harry.
The similarities between Morris and Harry are chilling. Both are authors. Both are self-centered, charming, and careless of their women. Both have affairs with young women who are "editorial groupies." As Pauline watches Morris become increasingly involved with Carol, the vacuous girlfriend of his own editor, Jack, she begins to relive (and re-feel) the horrible emotions she encountered as a young wife betrayed by her own cheating husband. The novel moves effortlessly between the present and the past as Pauline watches her own daughter's betrayal and is helpless to stop it. As her emotions churn, so does the weather. Only Luke, the innocent baby, is unaware of the terrible events unfolding all around him, and only Luke is unscathed in the end.
Similar in tone to the works of Joanna Trollope, "Heat Wave" is just about as good as it gets. It is beautifully written, spare and to-the-point, and it ensnares the reader completely in its seemingly simple story of love and loss.
Rating: 5
Summary: chilling
Comment: This book is very well written. The characters come fully to life and Ms. Lively examines the emotion of jealousy with a thoroughness that I haven't come across before. Most people who have ever been jealous or insecure in a relationship will be able to relate to Ms. Lively's characters who suffer from jealousy, but Ms. Lively takes the plot a step further and introduces an observer - the mother - who cannot stand to see her daughter cheated on, in part because the mother went through the same agony. This book isn't bashing men or relationships, though; Ms. Lively includes loyal men and healthy relationships in the novel. You wonder, though: is Ms. Lively intellectually compelled by the notion of jealousy, or has she felt it herself to this extent? The novel is balanced between careful observation and heated emotion.
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Title: The Road to Lichfield by Penelope Lively ISBN: 0802136257 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively ISBN: 0802135331 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: October, 1997 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Spiderweb by Penelope Lively ISBN: 0060929723 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: April, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Photograph by Penelope Lively ISBN: 0670032050 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 29 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Passing On by Penelope Lively ISBN: 0802136265 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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