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Altered States
Standing on a railway platform in a Swiss resort town, sensibly clad in his Burberry raincoat and walking shoes, a man thinks he may be looking at the woman for whom he ruined his life many years earlier. Alan Sherwood, a quiet English solicitor, remembers back to a time when he stepped briefly out of character to indulge in a liaison with Sarah Miller, an intriguing but heartless distant relative--only to find himself in a series of absurd situations that culminated in his marriage to Sarah's clinging, childlike friend Angela.
With her compassionate portrait of a man who has paid a terrible price for his folly, Anita Brookner gives us a novel that it at once harrowing and humane. In the traditions of Henry James and Thomas Mann, Altered States is a beautifully rendered tale of loneliness, guilt, and erotic obsession.
With her compassionate portrait of a man who has paid a terrible price for his folly, Anita Brookner gives us a novel that it at once harrowing and humane. In the traditions of Henry James and Thomas Mann, Altered States is a beautifully rendered tale of loneliness, guilt, and erotic obsession.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 2, 1996
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About the author
Anita Brookner
60 books655 followersAnita Brookner published her first novel, A Start In Life in 1981. Her most notable novel, her fourth, Hotel du Lac won the Man Booker Prize in 1984. Her novel, The Next Big Thing was longlisted (alongside John Banville's, Shroud) in 2002 for the Man Booker Prize. She published more than 25 works of fiction, notably: Strangers (2009) shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Fraud (1992) and, The Rules of Engagement (2003). She was also the first female to hold a Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at Cambridge University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 102 reviews
November 16, 2025
My sixth novel by Brookner. As always in her work, the main theme is loneliness and most of the characters live quiet, subdued (boring) lives.
Mostly Brookner writes about women but the main character in this one is a man. He's a mid-50’s lawyer, co-partner in a law firm with his lifelong best friend. He’s a widower and the story is told by having him reflect on his life and his only true love, an obsessive, impossible woman he never really got to know. Obviously it isn’t his wife we are talking about.
Like the main character, all these people have few relatives and stitched-together families. His mother is a widow. As the man grows up, even the few people he thinks of as aunts and uncles are his mother’s second-husband’s relations.
When he was in his thirties, the main character was attracted to Sarah, an uncle-in-law’s granddaughter. She’s ill-mannered, brash, self-centered. (Surprisingly, she’s not an American as these types tend to be in other of Brookner’s books, such as Visitors and A Private View)
Very early in the book the lawyer knows what he is in for. Yet he goes after Sarah and has a few one-night stands with her. “I knew that if I fell in love with her I should be embarking on a long and hopeless odyssey of missed appointments, of telephone calls that were never returned, of explanations for absence that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been, of sheer infuriating disappointment.”
That is exactly what happens to him. They never even have a single serious conversation where she asks him anything about his life or thoughts – nothing. Imagine starting a relationship with someone where your opening line at a party is “Are you always as rude as this?” It’s doomed from the start because, as she tells him, he CLINGS.
The lawyer marries a hanger-on of Sarah’s crowd. Within a few months he knows this marriage is a disaster.
Some lines I liked:
“Even so it was hard to see how Sarah had developed her more artful personality from the genetic elements at her disposal.”
“…I was so filled with benevolence toward the elderly, whom I pitied for no longer having access to the happiness I had so recently known.”
“At the same time she had entirely rejected her own mother, who seemed to have lost interest in her directly after the wedding, as if she were now entitled to honorary retirement.”
The focus on loneliness isn’t only on the main character. His mother is alone and he dutifully spends time with her but it’s an “obligation.” Another main character who is terrified of loneliness is a Polish woman from Paris who marries Sarah’s elderly uncle and struggles to find companionship among the few family members available to her.
A good story, although I'll point out that this is one of Brookner's lower-rated novels on GR (3.6). Beside the loneliness, with a suicide (not his) and the lifelong pall of unhappiness experienced by the main character, this one is perhaps the “heaviest” of Brookner’s books I have read.
I’ve enjoyed many other novels by Anita Brookner and below are links to my reviews of them. The two I enjoyed most were Hotel du Lac and Making Things Better. (I gave those two novels a rating of 5; all the others, 4.)
The Bay of Angels
A Friend from England
Look at Me
Hotel du Lac
Making Things Better
A Private View
The Debut
Visitors
Dolly
Undue Influence
Two photos of London where the author frequently walks: top, Baker Street from wikipedia, middle, the Marble Arch from britainexpress.com
The author from twnews.co.uk
[Revised, spoilers hidden 9/24/23]
Mostly Brookner writes about women but the main character in this one is a man. He's a mid-50’s lawyer, co-partner in a law firm with his lifelong best friend. He’s a widower and the story is told by having him reflect on his life and his only true love, an obsessive, impossible woman he never really got to know. Obviously it isn’t his wife we are talking about.
Like the main character, all these people have few relatives and stitched-together families. His mother is a widow. As the man grows up, even the few people he thinks of as aunts and uncles are his mother’s second-husband’s relations.
When he was in his thirties, the main character was attracted to Sarah, an uncle-in-law’s granddaughter. She’s ill-mannered, brash, self-centered. (Surprisingly, she’s not an American as these types tend to be in other of Brookner’s books, such as Visitors and A Private View)
Very early in the book the lawyer knows what he is in for. Yet he goes after Sarah and has a few one-night stands with her. “I knew that if I fell in love with her I should be embarking on a long and hopeless odyssey of missed appointments, of telephone calls that were never returned, of explanations for absence that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been, of sheer infuriating disappointment.”
That is exactly what happens to him. They never even have a single serious conversation where she asks him anything about his life or thoughts – nothing. Imagine starting a relationship with someone where your opening line at a party is “Are you always as rude as this?” It’s doomed from the start because, as she tells him, he CLINGS.
The lawyer marries a hanger-on of Sarah’s crowd. Within a few months he knows this marriage is a disaster.
Some lines I liked:
“Even so it was hard to see how Sarah had developed her more artful personality from the genetic elements at her disposal.”
“…I was so filled with benevolence toward the elderly, whom I pitied for no longer having access to the happiness I had so recently known.”
“At the same time she had entirely rejected her own mother, who seemed to have lost interest in her directly after the wedding, as if she were now entitled to honorary retirement.”
The focus on loneliness isn’t only on the main character. His mother is alone and he dutifully spends time with her but it’s an “obligation.” Another main character who is terrified of loneliness is a Polish woman from Paris who marries Sarah’s elderly uncle and struggles to find companionship among the few family members available to her.
A good story, although I'll point out that this is one of Brookner's lower-rated novels on GR (3.6). Beside the loneliness, with a suicide (not his) and the lifelong pall of unhappiness experienced by the main character, this one is perhaps the “heaviest” of Brookner’s books I have read.
I’ve enjoyed many other novels by Anita Brookner and below are links to my reviews of them. The two I enjoyed most were Hotel du Lac and Making Things Better. (I gave those two novels a rating of 5; all the others, 4.)
The Bay of Angels
A Friend from England
Look at Me
Hotel du Lac
Making Things Better
A Private View
The Debut
Visitors
Dolly
Undue Influence
Two photos of London where the author frequently walks: top, Baker Street from wikipedia, middle, the Marble Arch from britainexpress.com
The author from twnews.co.uk
[Revised, spoilers hidden 9/24/23]
July 14, 2021
Brookner is brilliant at portraying human irrationality--her characters, like we ourselves, watch as they do things they know they shouldn't do, do things they know they will regret, as if watching a delinquent sibling. They feel passion for people they know will do them no good. They marry people they do not love. They hurt people who do not deserve to be hurt. Brookner sees all of this and portrays it with a wry affection for the human condition.
November 3, 2024
This is the second Anita Brookner novel I have read and, in this case, a lucky find in the left-behind book selection at a resort hotel.
The first was Look At Me, recommended by the Mookse and Gripes podcast as her finest work (if not her most famous, that honour reserved for her Booker winning Hotel du Lac) and a very fine novel indeed. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
In that review I highlighted a particular aspect of Brookner’s writing that had also been called out by the Washington Post’s reviewer when the novel was originally published - their words:
And that description serves for this book as well, Brookner’s narrator tending to spell out, in beautiful prose, characters’s traits more than we necessarily see them in action. This was an approach that didn’t work for me in one of the great 19th century English, Middlemarch, but in Brookner’s hands it somehow does.
Altered States is narrated by Alan Sherwood, a well-to-do London solicitor, now in his 50s (I would guess) but mainly looking back on a key series of events c20 years earlier.
These revolve around his infatuation with a woman, Sarah, the daughter of his step-sister although via a rather tangled family relationship which is described well by an excellent blog review of the novel (http://brooknerday.blogspot.com/2019/...).
Adding to that complex picture, Alan’s mother remarries her upstairs neighbour Aubrey; Alan himself ends up marrying Sarah’s lifelong friend (albeit a very one-sided friendship) Angela; and another key role is played by Alan’s business partner Brian Smith, married to Felicity. Brian’s character as a casual if frequently successful womaniser and his successful and fruitful relationship with Felicity an opposite to Alan’s obsession with one hard-to-obtain woman and his ill-fated marriage with another.
Sarah herself, as portrayed by Alan, is a memorably awful person, unreliable and entirely self-centred, breezing through life in an eternal present, unconcerned with the past, the future or with anyone else’s feelings. But nevertheless for Alan it is obsession at first sight, although he suspects she will be a difficult conquest and impossible to hold on to. But when he manages to gain admittance to her flat, she first of all insults him only for events to take a different turn:
I stayed with her that night, of course. Apparently it was as easy as that. As I seemed to have envisaged a mythic pilgrimage, a romantic conquest of imponderable obstacles, it might be said to have constituted an anti-climax. But only on the level of my more febrile imaginings, On the of verifiable reality it was the revelation for which nothing had quite prepared me, conducted in silence, with what seemed like unnatural energy on both sides. I took this unbelievable gratification to be mutual: indeed no further proof of our inevitable conjunction was needed, so it seemed to me. I never questioned my desire for Sarah, nor, oddly enough, hers for me. Any declaration I thought, would have clouded the issue. Since she accepted me, for whatever reason, I sought no explanations from her. Thus I was never to know the reasons for her compliance. But then again I had the proof, and my furnish me with details which she, perhaps, could would not have confirmed, had we ever indulged in those conversations which our activities served to demonstrate as being otiose, only resorted to by others less superbly matched. I was constrained through shyness though I might have enjoyed such loving gossip, whereas she was silent through a form of impermeability, as if to give herself away might constitute an almost terminal weakness. And yet I was sure of her. She had given me all the assurances I needed. She had no further need to give an account of herself, at least, not to me.
And yet she soon disappears from London leaving no way for Alan to contact her and making no effort to contact him. Before he even embarks on his love affair Alan is convinced from his initial observations with Sarah that this is how life would be:
I knew that if I fell in love with her I should be embarking on a long and hopeless odyssey of missed appointments, of telephone calls that were never returned, of explanations for absence that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been, of sheer infuriating disappointment.
Although actually this proves an optimistic take as Sarah doesn’t even feel the need for explanations.
Her indifference and then absence pushes him into his relationship with Angela, Sarah’s opposite in her strong neediness, but a marriage that his ongoing obsession with Sarah causes to end in a double tragedy.
Few of the characters in the novel come out well, particularly the women who seems to be either heartless and self-centred or clingy and needy (or both at different times) and if this was a novel by a male author I might find that a little problematic. But what we are reading is Brookner’s portrayal of Alan’s portrayal of these people, and it’s Alan himself who comes out of this as the most flawed personality.
A fascinating if somewhat exaggerated (but by the narrator not the author) character study.
Not as strong for me as Look At Me but still a good 4 star read.
The first was Look At Me, recommended by the Mookse and Gripes podcast as her finest work (if not her most famous, that honour reserved for her Booker winning Hotel du Lac) and a very fine novel indeed. My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
In that review I highlighted a particular aspect of Brookner’s writing that had also been called out by the Washington Post’s reviewer when the novel was originally published - their words:
Brookner persistently and (I suspect) deliberately violates one of fiction's allegedly inviolable rules: Show, don't tell. It is, generally, a rule I prefer to see enforced: Let character and theme emerge from plot and event rather than from exposition. Yet Brookner's style of narrative -- reflective, measured, expository -- is, in her hands, exactly right; her prose alone is, quite simply, exquisite.
And that description serves for this book as well, Brookner’s narrator tending to spell out, in beautiful prose, characters’s traits more than we necessarily see them in action. This was an approach that didn’t work for me in one of the great 19th century English, Middlemarch, but in Brookner’s hands it somehow does.
Altered States is narrated by Alan Sherwood, a well-to-do London solicitor, now in his 50s (I would guess) but mainly looking back on a key series of events c20 years earlier.
These revolve around his infatuation with a woman, Sarah, the daughter of his step-sister although via a rather tangled family relationship which is described well by an excellent blog review of the novel (http://brooknerday.blogspot.com/2019/...).
Brookner's hero Alan’s mother Alice was the second wife of the father of her friends Sybil and Marjorie. Sybil and her husband Bertram [Miller] have a daughter Sarah who is not just Alan's obsession but also the obsession of Jenny the childless Polish wife of Sarah's uncle (and Bertram's brother) Humphrey.
Adding to that complex picture, Alan’s mother remarries her upstairs neighbour Aubrey; Alan himself ends up marrying Sarah’s lifelong friend (albeit a very one-sided friendship) Angela; and another key role is played by Alan’s business partner Brian Smith, married to Felicity. Brian’s character as a casual if frequently successful womaniser and his successful and fruitful relationship with Felicity an opposite to Alan’s obsession with one hard-to-obtain woman and his ill-fated marriage with another.
Sarah herself, as portrayed by Alan, is a memorably awful person, unreliable and entirely self-centred, breezing through life in an eternal present, unconcerned with the past, the future or with anyone else’s feelings. But nevertheless for Alan it is obsession at first sight, although he suspects she will be a difficult conquest and impossible to hold on to. But when he manages to gain admittance to her flat, she first of all insults him only for events to take a different turn:
I stayed with her that night, of course. Apparently it was as easy as that. As I seemed to have envisaged a mythic pilgrimage, a romantic conquest of imponderable obstacles, it might be said to have constituted an anti-climax. But only on the level of my more febrile imaginings, On the of verifiable reality it was the revelation for which nothing had quite prepared me, conducted in silence, with what seemed like unnatural energy on both sides. I took this unbelievable gratification to be mutual: indeed no further proof of our inevitable conjunction was needed, so it seemed to me. I never questioned my desire for Sarah, nor, oddly enough, hers for me. Any declaration I thought, would have clouded the issue. Since she accepted me, for whatever reason, I sought no explanations from her. Thus I was never to know the reasons for her compliance. But then again I had the proof, and my furnish me with details which she, perhaps, could would not have confirmed, had we ever indulged in those conversations which our activities served to demonstrate as being otiose, only resorted to by others less superbly matched. I was constrained through shyness though I might have enjoyed such loving gossip, whereas she was silent through a form of impermeability, as if to give herself away might constitute an almost terminal weakness. And yet I was sure of her. She had given me all the assurances I needed. She had no further need to give an account of herself, at least, not to me.
And yet she soon disappears from London leaving no way for Alan to contact her and making no effort to contact him. Before he even embarks on his love affair Alan is convinced from his initial observations with Sarah that this is how life would be:
I knew that if I fell in love with her I should be embarking on a long and hopeless odyssey of missed appointments, of telephone calls that were never returned, of explanations for absence that were infinitely more mystifying than the truth would have been, of sheer infuriating disappointment.
Although actually this proves an optimistic take as Sarah doesn’t even feel the need for explanations.
Her indifference and then absence pushes him into his relationship with Angela, Sarah’s opposite in her strong neediness, but a marriage that his ongoing obsession with Sarah causes to end in a double tragedy.
Few of the characters in the novel come out well, particularly the women who seems to be either heartless and self-centred or clingy and needy (or both at different times) and if this was a novel by a male author I might find that a little problematic. But what we are reading is Brookner’s portrayal of Alan’s portrayal of these people, and it’s Alan himself who comes out of this as the most flawed personality.
A fascinating if somewhat exaggerated (but by the narrator not the author) character study.
Not as strong for me as Look At Me but still a good 4 star read.
July 11, 2021
Another from the latest batch of library books - I can never resist anything by Brookner. This one is very different to any of the others I have read - for a start its narrator is male, but as always the precision of the language is impressive, and there is plenty of dry humour, which makes it an enjoyable read.
The narrator Alan is a solicitor who develops an obsession with his cousin Sarah, a classic femme fatale, and after a brief affair marries Sarah's friend Angela. I can't describe the rest of the book without spoilers.
The narrator Alan is a solicitor who develops an obsession with his cousin Sarah, a classic femme fatale, and after a brief affair marries Sarah's friend Angela. I can't describe the rest of the book without spoilers.
March 28, 2022
Anita Brookner's prose is elegant, with vivid descriptive passages. She has the skill to analyze people and their motives for their actions with precision and clarity. However, at times she jumps around in time and unexpectedly we find ourselves in a new (or old) place.
"Altered States" is a book filled with lonely, flawed people, who are either seeking annoying validation and comfort from others, or are content to let life pass them by unchallenged and remote in some manner. Few of the characters are appealing, sympathetic or likable, including the main character, Alan Sherwood. He seems to have frittered away his life numbly in semi isolation with many of his concerns buried away in his semi- consciousness. Most of this novel was, for me, dark and discouraging, with little resolution for anybody (including me!). Well, as is often said, "Life is not a fairy tale".
I did consider giving this a 3 star rating, based on Brookner's writing alone, but I did not enjoy this book.
*******************
3/28/22
Note: I have noted this previous review and can state that my reaction to this book is a rarity for this author. For the most part I have enjoyed Brookner's writing.
"Altered States" is a book filled with lonely, flawed people, who are either seeking annoying validation and comfort from others, or are content to let life pass them by unchallenged and remote in some manner. Few of the characters are appealing, sympathetic or likable, including the main character, Alan Sherwood. He seems to have frittered away his life numbly in semi isolation with many of his concerns buried away in his semi- consciousness. Most of this novel was, for me, dark and discouraging, with little resolution for anybody (including me!). Well, as is often said, "Life is not a fairy tale".
I did consider giving this a 3 star rating, based on Brookner's writing alone, but I did not enjoy this book.
*******************
3/28/22
Note: I have noted this previous review and can state that my reaction to this book is a rarity for this author. For the most part I have enjoyed Brookner's writing.
April 18, 2014
No one does melancholy and a sense of social disconnection better than Anita Brookner. She's brilliant at depicting the lives of characters, both male and female, who fall foul of unwritten social rules, or who reach a certain age and realise that their lives (upper-middle class English, educated, professional, undramatic) have never told the stories their owners had always thought they were telling. Brookner's touch is always deft and her eye quietly pitiless, and she writes subtle and unsettling accounts of the moments when the emptiness of one's life becomes unexpectedly clear.
"Altered States" gives us a quiet account of an obsessive love affair and how a few months late in one's twenties echo on for two decades. She very wisely steers away from the physical part of amour fou to talk about the hollowness of what come after for a main character (a reasonably successful young London solicitor) across the years after his affair fails. Finely written, gently compelling.
"Altered States" gives us a quiet account of an obsessive love affair and how a few months late in one's twenties echo on for two decades. She very wisely steers away from the physical part of amour fou to talk about the hollowness of what come after for a main character (a reasonably successful young London solicitor) across the years after his affair fails. Finely written, gently compelling.
October 27, 2017
One of her best. I cannot remember reading this when it was published, so got myself a secondhand copy. In this short novel Brookner wrtes about solitude and misfortunes, yet there is a great quiet wit throughout. 'Quiet' is a word often used to describe an AB novel, but you have to read a few to really understand just what that means - quiet here does not mean dull or despairing. Perhaps her upper middle class characters allow the reader to dwell in a world that is apart from their own. Brookner writes of certain areas, neighbourhoods of west and central London with exactness. She is able to convey lost grandeur, fading glory. Her world is one of old money, foreign money, expensive picked-at meals, dimly lit hotels, transitory lives, shut off lives, dusty rooms filled with inherited furnishings, unanswered telephones and wet raincoats. There is something oddly satisfying about all this, as a reader looking in, only because the writer is able to convey a human heart at its most lonely and vulnerable, through a variety of both male and female characters.
August 15, 2022
Altered States is a mid-career Anita Brookner novel, standing between her 1981 debut A Start in Life and her 2009 Strangers. By my approximate count, Altered States is the eighteenth of her twenty-six novels, of which I’ve read most.
Altered States contains elements familiar to many Brookner readers: a believable, alone and often lonely person, prematurely aging, obsessed and abandoned by his attractive, self-obsessed occasional lover, and who eventually discovers the limits of his own knowledge of himself. But Altered States is also an unusual Brookner. Alan Sherwood, its protagonist, is male and Altered States is told through his first person voice. At least two other Brookner novels have male protagonists, but these are told in third person voices (Latecomers, 1988, and Lewis Percy, 1989). Other unusual elements in Altered States is the sex between Sherwood and the phlegmatic Sarah Miller to whom he is obsessively attracted, casual for her and all-meaning for him; the fetal death of Sherwood’s daughter; and the melodramatic fading and eventual suicide of Angela, Sherwood’s wife. Alan Sherwood, like Sarah Miller, like his wife Angela, are hardly likable or pleasant people: Sherwood’s emotionally brutish towards his wife during her post-partum depression; Miller’s “unknowable” to Sherwood, because there’s nothing there to know; and Angela seemed locked in a fantasy of courtship and marriage.
Brookner readers will recognize Sherwood’s flight to the mostly deserted hotel in Vif, Switzerland for contemplation and healing. In Vif’s Eden Hotel, Sherwood’s ”small and dreadfully quiet room. . . [seemed] too like a monastic cell to convey any prospect other than that of austere rest.” Sherwood’s sojourn in Vif is so uneventful as to bore him and equally the reader. But then Sherwood returns to England and reassesses Angela, Sarah, and himself.
Of Angela, Sherwood reflects that ”The tragedy was that we could not console each other. Our woes were never acknowledged and so remained unknown.” Of Sarah, Sherwood ”realized that all along my love had coexisted with dread, of her indifference of her negligence, the disorder in which she lived, her refusal of the friendship which should be natural between a man and a woman. None of this made her insignificant, unfortunately; for a woman without defining characteristic she was able to exert enormous power.”. And of himself, Sherwood concludes ”Sometimes I measure the time left to me and wonder how I should fill it. It may of course surprise me by being dramatically circumscribed—by illness, by disability, by accident, by default. I suppose I shall continue as I have begun, for I see no prospect of change. . . Here in Vif I am allowed to be as dull as I know myself to be.”
Some of Altered States left me yearning for its end. I usually turn to Brookner when I want elegant, understated prose and finely wrought emotional portraits. But with Altered States, I sometimes wondered if this Brookner was the wrong novel by the wrong author at the wrong time. Altered States feels uneven in its grip, plot, and emotional connection to the reader. But the final three chapters of Alan Sherwood’s personal stock-taking pack the huge emotional wallop of ugly self-discovery so characteristic of some Brookner protagonists: they finally recognize who they are, they know that they’re not going to change, and they despise themselves for it.
Much of Altered States is a rare disappointing Brookner novel, but a Brookner novel redeemed in its final chapters.
Altered States contains elements familiar to many Brookner readers: a believable, alone and often lonely person, prematurely aging, obsessed and abandoned by his attractive, self-obsessed occasional lover, and who eventually discovers the limits of his own knowledge of himself. But Altered States is also an unusual Brookner. Alan Sherwood, its protagonist, is male and Altered States is told through his first person voice. At least two other Brookner novels have male protagonists, but these are told in third person voices (Latecomers, 1988, and Lewis Percy, 1989). Other unusual elements in Altered States is the sex between Sherwood and the phlegmatic Sarah Miller to whom he is obsessively attracted, casual for her and all-meaning for him; the fetal death of Sherwood’s daughter; and the melodramatic fading and eventual suicide of Angela, Sherwood’s wife. Alan Sherwood, like Sarah Miller, like his wife Angela, are hardly likable or pleasant people: Sherwood’s emotionally brutish towards his wife during her post-partum depression; Miller’s “unknowable” to Sherwood, because there’s nothing there to know; and Angela seemed locked in a fantasy of courtship and marriage.
Brookner readers will recognize Sherwood’s flight to the mostly deserted hotel in Vif, Switzerland for contemplation and healing. In Vif’s Eden Hotel, Sherwood’s ”small and dreadfully quiet room. . . [seemed] too like a monastic cell to convey any prospect other than that of austere rest.” Sherwood’s sojourn in Vif is so uneventful as to bore him and equally the reader. But then Sherwood returns to England and reassesses Angela, Sarah, and himself.
Of Angela, Sherwood reflects that ”The tragedy was that we could not console each other. Our woes were never acknowledged and so remained unknown.” Of Sarah, Sherwood ”realized that all along my love had coexisted with dread, of her indifference of her negligence, the disorder in which she lived, her refusal of the friendship which should be natural between a man and a woman. None of this made her insignificant, unfortunately; for a woman without defining characteristic she was able to exert enormous power.”. And of himself, Sherwood concludes ”Sometimes I measure the time left to me and wonder how I should fill it. It may of course surprise me by being dramatically circumscribed—by illness, by disability, by accident, by default. I suppose I shall continue as I have begun, for I see no prospect of change. . . Here in Vif I am allowed to be as dull as I know myself to be.”
Some of Altered States left me yearning for its end. I usually turn to Brookner when I want elegant, understated prose and finely wrought emotional portraits. But with Altered States, I sometimes wondered if this Brookner was the wrong novel by the wrong author at the wrong time. Altered States feels uneven in its grip, plot, and emotional connection to the reader. But the final three chapters of Alan Sherwood’s personal stock-taking pack the huge emotional wallop of ugly self-discovery so characteristic of some Brookner protagonists: they finally recognize who they are, they know that they’re not going to change, and they despise themselves for it.
Much of Altered States is a rare disappointing Brookner novel, but a Brookner novel redeemed in its final chapters.
December 15, 2011
This is one of Anita Brookner's novels written from a male perspective. Brookner's male voice is convincing and poignant. Anita Brookner creates beautiful English worlds, where nothing very dramatic happens, lives are quiet and dignified. Alan Sherwood is a solicitor who having once become obsessed by the beautiful, selfish, and deeply unpleasant Sarah, is unable to leave her behind. After a short liaison with her, his life is punctuated by a couple of fleeting glimpses and brief meetings which change his life. Alan takes refuge in a loveless marriage with Angela, another deeply unhappy character. His cosy relationship with his mother is changed by her second marriage, and Jenny - the wife of his uncle Humphrey - is drawn unhappily into Alan's marriage, and is also pathetically obsessed with an indifferent Sarah. Alan has to live with the guilt of his betrayal, and come to terms with his life.
I did find the time-line of this novel confusing - I was never certain how much time was supposed to have gone by - some people seemed to age quite a bit - while others didn't seem so much older at all. It is quite difficult to date the events, although it isn't really important. Also Sarah is described on the back cover as Alan's cousin, however, she was the daughter of his (much older) half sister. Still these are minor irritations in an otherwise brilliant novel.
I thoroughly enjoyed this beautifully written novel, no one writes about solitude and quiet rain soaked evening streets better than Brookner.
I did find the time-line of this novel confusing - I was never certain how much time was supposed to have gone by - some people seemed to age quite a bit - while others didn't seem so much older at all. It is quite difficult to date the events, although it isn't really important. Also Sarah is described on the back cover as Alan's cousin, however, she was the daughter of his (much older) half sister. Still these are minor irritations in an otherwise brilliant novel.
I thoroughly enjoyed this beautifully written novel, no one writes about solitude and quiet rain soaked evening streets better than Brookner.
December 5, 2009
Am surprised by all the negative reviews, I loved this book. I found the characters depressingly real and the tale albeit grim an intriguing one
December 23, 2013
LOVED this book about the inner life of a British solicitor. Probably not a young person's book. I suspect that you might want to be over 50 for this one.
September 12, 2009
It is rare for me to give up on a book but this one of those occurrences when the adage "Life is too short and there are so many good books to read". I really enjoyed Brookner's other books where her voice as the key female was interesting and multidimensional i.e. the key character “Hotel du Lac” etc., Her female view was unique and interesting to explore. In this novel she takes a male lead and it appears a mistake. Not only is he dull, in spite of travel and education, he falls for a woman (Sarah) that comes across as one of the most self-centered and distasteful characters you would wish to meet. There is nothing appealing or attractive about her. Brookner really doesn’t understand men if she feels Sarah, as portrayed, is irresistible and a man-magnet!
Sorry i am half way through and I care nothing for anyone in this book and its better to quit while I have some good memories of reading Brookner’s other novels.
Sorry i am half way through and I care nothing for anyone in this book and its better to quit while I have some good memories of reading Brookner’s other novels.
November 6, 2018
[1996] Love Anita Brookner. Her writing, her insight, her characters, her beautiful writing. Man's perspective this time, and I think she does it well. I didn't fully understand Alan's obsession with Sarah. She was dismissive, unpredictable, and unattainable, and often that is enough to fuel an infatuation. But usually some redeeming characteristics are necessary for a sustained obsession such as Alan's, but she didn't seem to have any. It didn't matter. All the other characters are richly filled out in great depth that all feels real and human.
My favorite blurb from the back of my version of this book: "Brookner draws characters and settings beautifully, but her best attribute is a finely calibrated understanding of longing trapped in convention." Certainly one of her best attributes.
My favorite blurb from the back of my version of this book: "Brookner draws characters and settings beautifully, but her best attribute is a finely calibrated understanding of longing trapped in convention." Certainly one of her best attributes.
January 24, 2008
I am puzzled by Brookner's problem with timelines.
The protagonist had his 40th birthday the year following his wife's death, which occurred when he was 29.
At one point when he is in his mid-50s, he observes that a middle-aged woman couldn't be his long lost ex-love, because his lover would be almost his age. What??
It is never clear in what decades the novel takes place (maybe deliberate, but if so why?).
This seems petty, but it makes the entire novel feel sloppily written.
The protagonist had his 40th birthday the year following his wife's death, which occurred when he was 29.
At one point when he is in his mid-50s, he observes that a middle-aged woman couldn't be his long lost ex-love, because his lover would be almost his age. What??
It is never clear in what decades the novel takes place (maybe deliberate, but if so why?).
This seems petty, but it makes the entire novel feel sloppily written.
April 1, 2009
Objectively, there was nothing wrong with this book.
Subjectively, I made no connection with it. I read the whole thing in a state of neutrality. At least it wasn't long.
Subjectively, I made no connection with it. I read the whole thing in a state of neutrality. At least it wasn't long.
December 25, 2016
For me, this is probably more of a 2.5 stars. I'm not sure that I did actually "like" it. This is a book about unfinished business, but I feel that AB left a bit too much of the actual business of story-telling unfinished. Things happened, important, life and death things, which I couldn't quite believe in. (Well, one particular thing bothered me, but I shan't tell you what it was, because that would spoil it for anyone who wants to read the book!)
I am definitely a "character" reader. I love a good plot, I love a mystery and a thriller, I love complicated plots, I love really good stories; I love fiction of all kinds. But the characters have to be right. And that doesn't mean good necessarily. Some of the best, MOST "right" characters are horrible. But they engage you in a way that means you believe in what they do, even if it's something you would never do yourself (like murder, for example).
In Altered States, I simply did not believe that the character AB drew would do that one important thing he did. And since it coloured his entire life, and the whole of the rest of the novel, I simply couldn't believe any of it.
So yes, two and a half stars. It was definitely better than "ok", because the writing itself was good in many places; but did I "like" it? No, not really.
I am definitely a "character" reader. I love a good plot, I love a mystery and a thriller, I love complicated plots, I love really good stories; I love fiction of all kinds. But the characters have to be right. And that doesn't mean good necessarily. Some of the best, MOST "right" characters are horrible. But they engage you in a way that means you believe in what they do, even if it's something you would never do yourself (like murder, for example).
In Altered States, I simply did not believe that the character AB drew would do that one important thing he did. And since it coloured his entire life, and the whole of the rest of the novel, I simply couldn't believe any of it.
So yes, two and a half stars. It was definitely better than "ok", because the writing itself was good in many places; but did I "like" it? No, not really.
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April 27, 2022I think most people will agree this is one of Anita Brookner's more unique and interesting books. I like the male character - he seems to have depth and helped me understand the psychology of a guy who is obsessed and delusional about a girl who gives him all the signs she is not that into him. It was kind of fun to see how he justified it all to himself and yet sometimes teetered on the edge of self-awareness, if but only for a second. This story will live in my mind.
May 20, 2016
Engrossing, a novel about obsession, resignation and the significance of insignificant lives. How can Alan not see that the Sarah he longs for is corrupt and heartless? Similar to many Barbara Pym novels, the characters live very staid, boring lives but manage to do a good enough job at it, taking pride in the orderliness with which they lead these uneventful lives. A great read.
January 15, 2016
A wonderfully written book whose main character is a gentleman solicitor who becomes almost obsessed with a woman who seems incapable of 'normal' human feelings of love or caring. The story also focuses on the man and his mother and a number of other characters all at different stages of love, lose and the loneliness of aging. I thought this one of Brookner's best works.
December 28, 2009
Never had heard of this author--picked it up when I heard one of her novels won the Booker Prize. I plan to read more of her works! Great writing- wonderful insight to characters- well worth the time.
March 21, 2017
It's hard to enjoy a book when you don't care for any of the characters. None of them, nary a one.
Tiny spoiler: the "distant relative" with whom the protagonist has an affair is his half-sister's daughter -- his niece. They are of a similar age, but that doesn't make it any less skeevy.
Tiny spoiler: the "distant relative" with whom the protagonist has an affair is his half-sister's daughter -- his niece. They are of a similar age, but that doesn't make it any less skeevy.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 21, 2016
Fine portrait of a man's affections and self-deceptions, which turns into a examination of solitude and loneliness. Interesting how it changes its focus, so that an overlooked woman becomes more central to the story as it ends.
March 15, 2016
A brief review in my tribute to Anita Brookner (1928-2016) at http://anzlitlovers.com/2016/03/15/va...
May 8, 2012
I love Anita Brookner. An old favorite.
May 14, 2015
Brookner manages to write books with little plot or action that nonetheless are fascinating .
January 13, 2023
A solid 7.5 on the Brookner crushingness scale, with a male narrator who really does think and behave like someone out of a Henry James novel. This endeared me to him despite his selfishness. It seems to me there's always an additional layer of irony to Brookner's male narrators; we catch them justifying themselves in behaviors that one of her female narrators would see right through and privately skewer. I doubt we are meant to take the narrator's assessment of his annoyingly sheltered wife Angela, for example, entirely at face value. But it's one of the strengths of Brookner's writing that we are able to tolerate a deeper understanding of every character's flaws, including the narrator's, than is usually comfortable, and hold them in tension with their humanity.
March 28, 2022
"Maybe all lifelong searches end like this, I tell myself, as I begin the steep climb back to my hotel, and the only verdict on all my activities, on my life, in fact, [is] contained in the withheld kindliness of the slowly and inexorably descending night." This last sentence in the first chapter pretty much sums it up. And, the first chapter is actually the ending- the rest of the text elaborates how this gentleman ended up in that place, with those thoughts and feelings and ideas about his life and his self. The Quest is not so straightforward. At first, it seemed this protagonist was the only character with some self-awareness and some understanding of other's self-awareness. But as the story proceeds, I began to wonder if he too wasn't also completely ignorant of his own motivations.
See my comments under "Second Thoughts" with spoilers.
See my comments under "Second Thoughts" with spoilers.
December 28, 2018
This well written novel is about Alan Sherwood, a well off middled aged solitary London solicitor who becomes smitten by Sarah, his care free, unreliable rich cousin. Alan's affair with Sarah is very short. You gain the impression Alan thinks lots more of Sarah than Sarah does of him. This novel is about solitude, ageing and relationships.
I enjoy the author's carefully written, gentle style of writing.
I enjoy the author's carefully written, gentle style of writing.
May 14, 2012
Alan Sherwood, a reserved English solicitor, seemed real and believable in his fruitless chase and longing for Sarah Miller - a woman who kept him intrigued for years - whom he did not really get to know in spite of several attempts. While circumstances and prevailing state of affairs gradually lead to his engagement to a fragile and delicate Angela quite the opposite of Sarah’s character - without much knowing, he almost slipped to infidelity when Sarah re-enters his life.
Altered States is an intricately woven tale of complex human emotions, hope and despair, longing and belonging carefully crafted in the back drop of London and Paris with different timelines. None of the characters were superfluous.
When I picked this book from British Library last Saturday, 16 years after it was first published, the only thought that encouraged me to read this book was Anita had written over a dozen books and I had not read any. While I am not really sure, if this book can be considered a reader’s delight, it is most certainly a treasure for all those who are trying to define, understand human psyche.
While I am still not able to pin point exactly what I liked about this book nor label it as a must read, but Anita’s polished and poignant prose with vivid description, in depth insight into different dimension of a human mind, perceptions and open perspectives about individual thought process will stay in one’s mind even after the book is over. The ending seemed natural and yet so unpredictable which leaves the reader asking for more.
Altered States is an intricately woven tale of complex human emotions, hope and despair, longing and belonging carefully crafted in the back drop of London and Paris with different timelines. None of the characters were superfluous.
When I picked this book from British Library last Saturday, 16 years after it was first published, the only thought that encouraged me to read this book was Anita had written over a dozen books and I had not read any. While I am not really sure, if this book can be considered a reader’s delight, it is most certainly a treasure for all those who are trying to define, understand human psyche.
While I am still not able to pin point exactly what I liked about this book nor label it as a must read, but Anita’s polished and poignant prose with vivid description, in depth insight into different dimension of a human mind, perceptions and open perspectives about individual thought process will stay in one’s mind even after the book is over. The ending seemed natural and yet so unpredictable which leaves the reader asking for more.
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