A Private View

by Anita Brookner

Brookner explores the complications that arise when one solitary man comes up against a woman who seems determined to invade his solitude. George Bland is an aging bachelor whose existence has been virtually a mirror image of his name — up until now. For into George's life walks Katy Gibb, young, abrasively self-assured, who incites in George the most alarming feelings.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, British Literature, 20th Century, Classics, Literature

219 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Anita 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.

Reviews

[Jim Fonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

We’re inside the head of George Bland – an apt name for a 65-year old retired guy who worked 40 years in the same office. He believes in all those stereotypical British things of his generation: duty, obligation, manners, propriety. Even his social interactions are obligatory to him: he even dreads Christmas because he has the duty of exchanging cards and gifts and going to a boring dinner or two.



George has acquaintances but almost no friends. He has one female friend he has been with for years. She finally figured out he would never ask her to marry him, so she married a much older man who has since died. They still see each other occasionally and talk once a week by phone on Sunday (another obligation). They used to have sex, in the sense that she occasionally asked “Shall we?” “They had felt like two members of an endangered species, huddling together for mutual protection.” George would pick up women occasionally on vacations abroad.

And he had one male friend who recently died right as they both retired. The two men had planned to spend their retirement abroad on exotic trips. But that all came to naught and now he is just drifting. He doesn’t know what to do with himself: library, museum, his club once a week for lunch, long walks, an obligatory weekly half-hour coffee with his maid; obligatory chats with the doorman. He enjoys listening to radio talk at night because he doesn’t have to respond. He tried a trip to Nice by himself but came back early because he found no purpose in being there.

Into this drab life comes Katy, a brash young American woman (definitely mid-30-ish, maybe 40?). She’s living temporarily in a friend’s vacant apartment next door. She’s in his apartment every day, asking for something: tea, sugar, have you made any toast? She’s a changeling: sometimes barefoot in a dirty T-shirt and jeans; sometimes dressed to kill for dinner; sometimes fresh from the shower in just a robe showing cleavage and thighs. George very quickly figures out what Katy wants: a “sponsor” for a business she hopes to start in England. Something New Age, maybe involving aromatherapy. George is very well off but notorious for watching his wallet.



So the stage is set: Mr. Prim and Proper who regrets living his very dull empty life vs. Ms. New Age in tight jeans. “He had still to overcome his enormous sorrow at not having managed to admit to his life all those elements he had somehow been at pains to exclude: license, passion, adventure, fury, recklessness.” Will he succumb?

You guessed correctly. So the rest of the story unfolds from there.

There’s good writing. Some passages I liked:

[On his weekly call to his woman friend]: “He did little more than listen. They knew each other so well that conversation was hardly necessary. Once each had ascertained that the other was still alive there seemed nothing more to say.” And “In many ways he still thought of her as his wife, the wife whom he had failed to marry. And she no doubt thought of him as one who might have been, should have been, her husband.”

[Of old married couples]: “And if they sometimes grew discontented, feeling in themselves an unused store of curiosity, they eventually grew resigned as time and age did their inexorable work. That was why old married couples seemed so contented, he thought: they had bowed to necessity, which in their case was not the mother of invention , but its opposite. They were like survivors of a war, grateful for a comrade in adversity, grateful too that hostilities were at an end, and that a peace treaty had been signed and witnessed.”



Like all of Brookner’s novels I have read (about eight); the main theme is always loneliness. As in some other novels, such as Visitors, there’s a brash, unmannered American who shocks the locals with his or her behavior and ingratitude. Another recurring theme is the obligatory Sunday night call that neither party really wants to make.

I find her novels an intriguing, slow, calming read. She’s not Henry James but she’s like him in her psychological focus and in her analysis of manners, mannerisms, gestures. Maybe Henry James ‘lite.’

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

Altered States

The Debut

Visitors

Dolly

Undue Influence

Top photo from medium.com/mind-cafe
London street from upsplash.com
The author from literature-fool/blogspot.com

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like I've come to an oddly delayed awareness of Anita Brookner's brilliance, only just now. I read her Booker winning Hotel du Lac some years ago. I liked it, I did appreciate it, but I didn't fall in love. I don't know why. I'm tempted to pick up Hotel du Lac again and see what I'd think of it now. I have a feeling I might be annoyed with the Robin who read it a few years ago and didn't see, on a sentence-by-sentence-level, the exquisite construction and the deeply insightful observations.

For some odd reason that I can't quite pinpoint, I somehow was recently compelled to find a copy of Look at Me... which blew me away! And then picked up my copy of A Private View, written later in her career but yet still just as compelling and masterfully written.

Both books are similar, as they feature very isolated protagonists. People who value their privacy but yet who struggle all the same to fill the hours and who know deep loneliness. Both stories feature characters who threaten to upset the quiet and carefully built lives. In this book, it's a woman, Katy, who appears in George Bland's apartment building, claiming her friends said she could use their apartment while they were away, and since he has the spare key, can he let her in?

Katy is strange, and keeps knocking at George's door, and is at turns slightly charming but mainly rude and off-kilter. She's many decades younger than newly-retired George, and is altogether inappropriate in his life. But, George is at loose ends. His professional life is ended, his dear best friend has recently died. Katy brings some strange excitement, even if their association is obviously doomed.

I loved reading this. As with Look at Me, I didn't want to put it down. I love the understanding and care Brookner has for George, and other lonely characters in this story. I really loathed that weird and entitled Katy, who kept showing up unannounced, claiming to be starting a New Age business and needing "advice" that was almost certainly money. And did she actually have permission from the owners of the apartment, to stay there, eat their food, and wear their clothes?

Some people have made comparisons to aspects of The Remains of the Day, and I suppose I see the broad parallels, but this is its own gorgeous creation.

His life, in retrospect, seemed very long and quite uneventful. Yet it had been occupied with struggle, with the no doubt modest but nevertheless taxing struggle of finding a place for himself in the world.

4.5 stars

[Antoinette · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

“George Bland, in the sun, reflected that now was the moment to take stock.”

So begins our introduction to George Bland- a 65 year old single man who has just retired and whose best friend has just died. His plans for retirement included Michael Putnam, his friend. They were going to travel together. Now what?

Into his carefully structured life comes Katy Gibb, a woman at least half his age, who disrupts his daily flow. She is an opportunist and George sees this but then ignores it. Through her, he realizes how much he has missed out of life. He decides he should make one last attempt at finding freedom and excitement.

I kept thinking, “Poor George” as I was reading. To be 65 and only have death to look forward to.

Brookner so captures his loneliness, his realization of lost opportunities, his fear of aging alone and the utter grief he is experiencing. This book is told from George’s “ Private View”. We are immersed in his thoughts, his dreams and delusions. All I wanted as I read was for George to achieve some happiness.

“He sighed, as if life were suddenly a burden to him, and as if he hoped, for a brief but illuminating flash, that help, or at least relief from age, from loneliness, from sadness, might be visited on him, unexpectedly, gratuitously, and without his having earned or even understood the reason for it.”

I appreciate Brookner’s writing style. I’ve only read two books by her but both have had me reflecting on my own life.

I do wonder if a younger person read this novel if they would appreciate it or would it scare them off the thought of aging.

This was a buddy read with Diane Barnes- enjoyed sharing our thoughts on this one.

Published: 1994

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brookner has a main theme in all her books, loneliness in one form or another. It's her specialty and she excels at it. In this one, George Bland, recently retired, grieving the death of his best friend, unmarried and alone, meets a woman half his age who invades his carefully constructed life. She wants money and sponsorship for a new business she has in mind, and despite his best intentions, he becomes enamored of her youth and enthusiasm even though he knows perfectly well she is a liar and a user and bad news all around. We enter into his delusional mind for a while, hoping against hope he comes to his senses in time.

I had to feel sorry for George, as he enters a late life mid-life crisis, thinking a younger woman and a bit of adventure might keep him young, while missing his afternoon nap has him yawning. I also wanted to scream at him to come to his senses before it was too late, as Katy Gibb was an unpleasant and arrogant young woman with no sense of decency.

This was a buddy read with Antoinette, and her insights were similar to my own.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first I was confused; then I was compelled. At first I thought being in George Bland’s mind all the time would be too much, and at times it was claustrophobic. Katy Gibb’s machinations are easily seen through, but at least her encounters with Mr. Bland enliven the occasionally repetitive narrative. Brookner’s humor is revealed in retrospect at the comprehension of the meaning of Katy’s facial expressions.

On page 127, I read: Like Swann’s Odette, she was simply not his type. A ha, I thought to myself, I know what that means for the peace of mind of poor Mr. Bland.

On page 146, I read: It was like a detective story, or a novel by Henry James. which I felt was an even bigger clue to the work. And, yes, as I read on, I realized this is a reworking of James’ The Beast in the Jungle.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Private View is the fourteenth of twenty-four novels published by Anita Brookner. I’ve read all of Brookner’s novels preceding A Private View and several of her later novels. .

A Private View is distinguished by Brookner’s usual elegant and typically understated writing. As with most Brookner novels, she stands up a lonely and isolated person who’s ill at ease with the rough and tumble of everyday social interactions. In A Private View, the lonely and isolated person is George Bland, recently retired and bereft by the loss of Michael Putnam, his close long-time friend. As in her earlier Latecomers, Brookner provides an affecting and sensitive portrayal of male friendship, although in A Private View we view Bland’s friendship with Putnam purely through the retrospective lens of Bland’s memories.

Anita Brookner may have allowed herself a good time and even a smile or two in writing A Private View. Brookner’s naming her protagonist Bland seems so obvious as to dare critics to criticize her for being trite. And there’s the naff, conniving Katy Gibb (we know that her name isn’t happenstance either), rebarbative to all but the smitten Bland. (As always, reading Professor Brookner improves my vocabulary.) I imagine Brookner chuckling as she wrote this conversation between Geoge and Katy about Howard Singer, her New Age American guru. Here Katy heaps on Singer’s praises:
”’What doesn’t he do? Shiatsu, Vibrasound, Tantric Massage, Reflexology, Chakra, Crystal Therapy, Essential Oils — that’s my particular specialty — Flower Remedies, Colour Counselling — you name it.’
‘Sex therapy?’ suggested Bland.
‘Of course. An enormous number of people are on the wrong track, you know.’ Most of them, it was implied; possibly all of them, in Singer’s estimation.
Bland could see this man, this Singer, clearly a charlatan, bronzed and smiling, with very white teeth, and a Hawaiian shirt disclosing abundant grey fuzz. He added a pony tail and an elephant hair bracelet. . .” (p. 48)

Brookner likely also enjoyed her invention of the unlikely Bland, with his strangely detailed interest in the Royal Academy, Sickert, Redon, and Rubens, and his remembered emotive differences with his friend Putnam. Here’s Bland recalls a conversation with Putnam INSERT 203. And I imagine Brookner enjoyment at her enabling the elderly, shy, and awkward Bland to pursue the laughably unlikely Katy Gibb.

What redeems A Private View is Brookner’s portrayal of Bland’s profound loneliness and the nexus of that loneliness with his risible behavior resulting from desperation. Here Bland reflects on his hope for an alliance with Katy:
”He sighed, as if life were suddenly a burden to him, and as if he hoped, for a brief but illuminating flash, that help, or least relief from age, from loneliness, from sadness, might be visited on him, unexpectedly, gratuitously, and without his having earned or even understood the reason for it.” (p. 95)
Here Bland realizes the emotional danger that he’s confronts with Katy:
”The truth was that he was in danger of approaching some sort of precipice, and of going over the edge, that the transformation that he sought was somehow linked with this girl, who was until recently a total stranger, and that he was excited — excited as he had never been — by the contest of wills that was being played out between them. He had never been in a more ridiculous position in his life. But knowing, as he now perceived, that his life had been lived without his active participation, without daring, without heat, he was, or seemed to be, committed to this one final act of folly. . .” (p. 173)
Finally, here’s Bland after his hopes for Katy ended:
”There would be no flight to the sun: his future lay with the bitter seasons of reality. There would be no leaving this room, which now seemed kindly, even hospitable. He saw his madness for what it was, the final upheaval of an unlived life. . . “ (p. 196)

A Private View is a puzzling and sometimes disappointing Brookner novel. I can’t decide if it’s her worst or among her best.

3.5 Brookner stars

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, I want to shake most Brookner protagonists vigorously and yell, "Wake the hell up! What is wrong with you? You can do better than this!
Think less, do more!" I'm not sure why I keep reading her books when I find her characters so infuriating. And yet, they are page-turners. I read this book in two sittings. I wouldn't say it was a favorite though; her characterization of a man seemed a bit off. But I imagine I'll keep reading her books. She writes intricate, satisfying prose that always sends me to the dictionary multiple times.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two kinds of novels--inside novels (head and heart) and outside novels (action)--a whole continuum of fiction runs from one extreme to the other. Brookner, like Henry James, lies towards the extreme end of the "inside" novels. People who criticize novels like these because "nothing happens" are like someone who reads a horror novel and critizes it for being scary. I don't read horror fiction because I don't like being scared. I read Brookner and James because I like living inside someone else's thoughts and feelings for a short time.

That said, I thought A Private View was an intriguing look at a man caught in a dilemma--should he break out of the quiet even boring life he has lead up until his retirement? Will he have missed out on something if he does not? Perhaps he has missed out BECAUSE he has not just accepted the pleasures of a steady, loving, even dull life?

[Till Raether · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

This is much better than the unfortunate Lewis Percy, but I maintain Brookner is not good at writing about men. Overexplanation to the point of obfuscation is her modus operandi always, but here it becomes tiresome, because there's just not much nuance to her main character George Bland (did she lose a bet, or how did she stumble into this stinker of a speaking name?). He's an old prude who turns horndog for a while, and boy do we wonder whether he gets sent to horny jail or not.

That said, I once again enjoyed the description of over- and underheated flats, sensible clothes, and grocery lists.

[Amy Gentry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anita Brookner novels are all very much the same book written from slightly different angles over and over again, a kind of monomania I admire. (Writers on panels are always smugly proclaiming they'd "never want to write the same book twice" to denote how superior and genre-free they are, but I ask you, are they really superior to Anita Brookner, who wrote the same exquisite book 26 times? Are they?)

That said, I usually stop at three and take a break with something else. By the time I'm approaching the end of my third back-to-back Brookner I feel numb and anhedonic, maybe even anti-hedonic, and have a hard time keeping straight all the wilting, narcissist mothers and numbly devoted spinster daughters and coarse parvenues and small bags of salad purchased from Marks & Spencer to be thrown away, uneaten, a few days later.

So when I started A Private View immediately after finishing Fraud, Latecomers, and the devastating The Bay of Angels, I struggled at first. The first act gave me George Bland (yep), a quiet man whose long-planned-for retirement has been ruined by the recent death of his best friend Putnam. Putnam, who was "the fun one", was going to be the companion of Bland's old age (their devoted homosocial coupledom resembles the one in Latecomers), and without him, Bland is completely unmoored. I started to go numb here and had to take a long break. Sometimes Brookner's male spinsters (I cannot in good faith call them bachelors) are harder to take than her women. They are just as aimless and inhibited, but more deluded and entitled than her savvy female narrators. I put the book down for a long time.

But when I picked it up again, I found the back half of the book went way harder than I expected. The catalyst character is the young(ish), hypnotically self-centered and nearly feral Katy Gibbs, who moves in uninvited across the hallway and proceeds to Droopy Dog poor Bland until he is madly in love with her despite full knowledge of her venal nature and his own stupidity. Where Brookner often writes this plot from the perspective of the spinster who is abandoned for this type of woman, A Private View takes the man's susceptibility to her as its subject, and the result is more evenhanded and disquieting. Bland, rigorously moral and "correct" like all Brookner stand-ins, never had a chance to throw his life away at the normal age for such things, and Katy is a mere pretext for this belated death wish to manifest and take root. Without judgment or pity, Brookner dismantles his facade of cool anthropological interest to show the aggressive, violent, and desperately needy attraction underneath. At times it felt nearly Patricia Highsmith-esque.

Or course, Brookner isn't Highsmith, so instead of an absurd, brutal climax, we get a cold cup of tea, a broken radio, a miffed cleaning lady, and a slow slide back into the tepid bath of loneliness. Which is more existentially frightening? A nasty end, or the routine ongoingness of despair that will guarantee the book has to keep on getting rewritten again, and again, and again....?

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't believe it's been less than a month... I feel as if I've been reading this book forever. A reviewer calls Brookner "our Henry James." Her prose does remind me of James's, but I can appreciate James for making nothing feel like something. Brookner failed to do so for me. I don't understand why this is a novel. What merits this book being written? I'm only giving it three stars because the writing is three-star level. The content, though, did nothing for me. Obviously, other people like this book, but I just couldn't get into it. Another reviewer said, "A beautiful book that one is impelled to read at one sitting." It probably would have been better to read it through because whenever I came back to it, I had to warm up to it again. Yet, I never wanted to keep reading, so there goes that. There are good moments in this book, but there's too much narrative, and nothing happens. I thought it was like Saturday by Ian McEwan at first, but so much happens in Saturday, and nothing happens in A Private View. A sixty-five-year-old man meets a thirty-something woman and thinks (A LOT) about her and what could happen between them. Yes, it's psychological, and I understand the musings on life after retirement particularly for someone who felt like his only real life-living came from work. It can be devastating especially after also losing a best friend. But all the story takes place before the plot. A better book would have taken place around Bland and Putnam's retirement and Putnam's illness and death. That would have been a beautiful and moving book. The psychological aspect just isn't astute enough to make a compelling read. Still, I gave it three stars because there are highlights, and I like Bland okay, and Katy at least is interesting. My favorite characters are probably Hipwood and Louise for their being well-drawn and realistic.
Anyway, I don't recommend this book.

[Annabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anita Brookner's protagonists are almost always set in their ways, given to long hours spent in contemplative thinking, ruminative walks around the neighborhood, solitary, but not lonely meals, excellent manners, and a penchant for solitude. And they are usually decent folks--her elderly bachelors can be especially chivalrous to a fault. A Private View's aptly-named main character George Bland is reminiscent of Paul Sturgis of Strangers. Both are respectable elderly gentlemen of satisfactory means, fiercely protective of their independence and privacy, and all too aware of their creeping mortality. Both lead impossibly structured, banal lives, so when something as negligibly incongruent as a fleeting, chance encounter with a character so unlike them, such as an aggressive woman with a blatant agenda--a flaw both men can somehow comprehend but cannot completely grasp nor act on, their daily, regimented existence is immediately derailed. The tension this creates is what compels me to read Brookner's books. Paul Sturgis's divorcee was merely annoying. George Bland's unwelcome neighbor is downright abrasive. But he finds himself drawn to her, mainly for the chance to perhaps someday dominate her, and put her in her place. (Not too alien an obsession, if you ask me.) His passive pursuit of the woman, his clumsy overtures, and the inner turmoils he goes through over this undeserving character are pathetic. George Bland's emotional pain meter reading is almost as torturous as that of poor Philip Carey in Maugham's Of Human Bondage. And yet, a moment of pragmatic decisiveness saves him from the hell I envisioned he was heading for. So here we have my first Anita Brookner with a satisfactory ending. Who would have thought?

[Randy Attwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had tried to read another Brookner book and couldn't get into it. This one trapped me. The technique is really interesting. It's told in first person point of view but from a detached third person approach. It allows the reader to be privy to George Bland's thought and then be stunned when given all access to his thinking his remarkable decisions, as in asking Katy to go to Rome with him. Think I'll have to grab "Hotel du Lac" for which she was awarded the Booker prize in 1986.

[Fredsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book to be opaque. All the corners got dented from hitting the floor when I fell asleep trying to read it. After a while, I got so the feeling of it dropping from my fingers would wake me up even before the clunk.

I know that many Brookner devotees consider this one of her best novels. It may be so. All of the introspection on earth is contained within the mind of George Bland, her just-retired main character. He is equal to his name, but even more static. The book opens just after George has retired and his best friend has died. He is Putnam's heir, and between his own and Putnam's savings he has quite a lot of money. But George is frugal and cautious, lonely, bored, and, except for his regular long walks, nearly inert. A troublesome woman moves in across the hall to stay until her friends return from a trip. She tantalizes him, he struggles with temptation, neither of them likes the other but each has an agenda, and so on.

I came to hate George Bland. He is only in his mid-sixties and considers himself an old, an elderly man. He is healthy! This was written in 1994. Even in England I believe healthy people in their mid-sixties did not consider themselves elderly and almost ready to die. (Of course, George has just lost his best friend, who was not much older than he.) He is depressed and morose, unable to commit to anything but his own dreams of loneliness. What's worse is that he has all that money! He will never spend even a fraction of it! He has no imagination left for reality.

The visiting neighbor, the adventuress, is equally unlikable, but her mind is as closed to us as George's mind is open. She is like a shark, single-mindedly planning her attack and possibly having no other thoughts at all. I almost liked her better than George.

[Azabu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could read Anita Brookner all day long and never tire of her. Why her quiet characters who live quite conventional lives are so enchanting is a testimony to her stylistic prowess. Keep on writing, my dear Brookner! I am now re=reading her oeuvre with the same enthusiasm I felt the first time.

[Jane Donovan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always, Brookners writing is flawless!

[Miriam Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Private View is about George Bland, just retired from professional life and haunted by the sudden death of a friend and colleague. In this vulnerable state, Bland meets a young, attractive but predatory woman who moves into his apartment building under mysterious circumstances. Apart from intruding on his solitude, he soon realizes she is interested in him for financial gain. His intelligence, sound judgment and experience in personnel work all contrive to warn him and (hopefully) save him from making a terrible mistake...
As with all of her novels, Anita Brookner's brilliance is in the telling of the story. A Private View is my favourite of her twenty four novels. Her superb, witty style is complemented by shrewd and compassionate observations of people and situations.

[Gabriel Ducate · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book... I don't know if I liked it or disliked it. This book hit me in the sense that I related to the main male character. The female character was odd as hell and I didn't overly like reading about her.

This book was depressing to read from the males point of view as he is 65 and regretting his life chooses and trying to use his last few remaining years to turn things around. Unfortunately he trying achieving them through this (what I think) poorly written woman character. It just didn't feel natural.

I liked if for the emotions it was able to convey into me, I disliked almost everything else. It's strange though in many ways this book has changed my life because I don't want to end up like the 65 year old man.

[Gayle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this on the bookshelf at home - I think it is something my mother has passed on from her library days and since Anita Brookner is an award-winning author, I thought I would give it a go. It is certainly well-written but I am not really sure that I enjoyed it. The subject matter is a bit odd - the effect of a younger woman on a recently retired batchelor. I suppose it does explore the pysche of the batchelor and his reasons for being single and a loner but I didn't find any of the characters particularly sympathetic.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't like any of the characters in this book. The main character is a stuffy guy living in London in his sixties, whose opinated musings on the other opinionated characters suggest that this author does not understand how to effectively draw upon (normally) commonly recognized stereotypes. It is petulant and slow.

Still, it's short so I'm finishing it.

[MicheleinNJ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Annoying characters, boring plot, plodding book. The premise for a good story is there, but there is just waaaaay too much tedious thought and waaaaaay to little things of interest happening. Plus, as I said, I don't think there was one character in the book that I liked. Had to force myself to finish it.

[Deborah J · Rating 1 out of 5]

Truly irritating. The blurb describes Brookner as the English Henry James. I think not.

[Ashish Kumar · Rating 2 out of 5]

At first I was really enjoying this book. The writing was very precise and purposeful and made me think of how Ian McEwan writes (who I used to love some years ago) and even though the plot itself wasn't moving forward, I was swept away by Brookner's seer words and introspections. But then as I came half way through, I realised (I was too dumb to realise earlier) that we still haven't moved or made any progress story wise and as I continued on, it stuck me that this whole book is just repetition of the first chapter with very little (almost negligible) effort to add something new.

What really really pissed me off was the ending. For some reason I was expecting something disastrous or atleast monumentous to happen because while reading Brookner hints several times of some unforeseen events that will definitely make some turbulence in this otherwise uneventful story. The ending is just like the rest of the book- flat ass boring.

[George Ilsley · Rating 2 out of 5]

It feels like I haven’t been reading much. My currently reading stack should be called “books I rarely touch.”

I’ve been reading but never finishing. Certainly I never finished this short Anita Brookner novel. The back cover gives away much of the plot — took 150 pages to get to the point the back cover advertises!

Not much happens but all the characters know everything about each other. Little does that help make important decisions.

I’ve previously enjoyed the dry wit and wisdom of Brookner’s novels (although I’ve not rated my favourites here) so this one was a disappointment. Perhaps her protagonist, Mr. George Bland, was just too close to home for comfort.

[Muriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mijn eerste Brookner en smaakt naar meer. Langzaam, poignant en introspectief proza, met om de zoveel tijd een mokerslag. Een ontdekking.

[Kathleen Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The prose is polished and erudite, but is an exercise in repetition. If you want to spend hours inside one man's head while he relentlessly ruminates on his past life and on his increasing obsession with a willful young woman, this one's for you. I couldn't wait for it to be over.

[Donna Golden · Rating 2 out of 5]

I plodded through this book, like the protagonist, feeling sad that I had invested so much time without any sense of fulfillment beyond the completion of a task. A slim ray of anticipation (but never for a favorable outcome) emerges at around Page 200, only to dissolve in regret.

[Nick Schroeder · Rating 3 out of 5]

"He wondered if it were healthy, or desirable, to be thinking of the past just now when he should be thinking of the future." (p 209)

George Bland has lead a quiet, safe, correct life. On retirement his is abandoned by his long-time friend, Michael Putnam, through Putnam's sudden death. Bland has also lost the regularity and positive feedback of his work life of which he has fond memories. With Putnam's departure he looses the prospect of traveling the world with Putnam as they had planned to do with their simultaneous retirements. Then Katy Gibb drops into his life, almost literally, and upsets whatever small progress that Bland had been making in devising a life post-retirement, post-Putnam. Bland is immediately intrigued by her. A young woman on her own, of indeterminate age — 25 to 35, Bland finally settles on 35 —, of indeterminate finances, who claims to be friends of the couple who live in the flat across the hall who are away at the moment. And thus begins Bland's thinking, pondering, obsessing about the his past, his future and what he should be doing about the later and how the former has/will/should inform his decisions about his future. Bland is torn between undertaking what he sees as an unconventional but interesting/exciting course of action which will end his humdrum life, and with continuing as he has been. The problem, as he sees it, is that the new course of action/behavior is out of tune with who he has been and he sees that he will cost him all respectability with the people currently in his life. And that is Bland's main problem — as he sees it — his issue is the "Private View," his view and his view only of what is and could be. He speculates, he thinks, he worries about .... He makes mountains out of mole hills and considers courses of action that astonish the reader and then, a half hour later, astonish and embarrass himself. A Private View is a view on what can happen when one over thinks and/or under thinks one's actions. It's also a view on the balance of living mostly in the past and/or the future verses living mainly in the present.

I might have given this 4 stars rather than 3 but this one may have hit a bit too close to home.

[JacquiWine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been making my way through Anita Brookner’s exquisitely written novels slowly but steadily over the past eight years. As a long-term reading project, I’m finding it fascinating to see how Brookner weaves her familiar themes of loneliness and isolation into different scenarios each time. First published in 1994, A Private View is somewhat different from her trademark stories of unmarried women living quiet, unfulfilled lives while waiting for their unobtainable lovers to make fleeting appearances before disappearing into the night. In this instance, Brookner turns her gaze towards the aptly named George Bland, a quiet, respectable, recently retired man in his mid-sixties living a dull, highly ordered existence in a comfortable London flat. In many respects, he is the male equivalent of Brookner’s archetypal spinsters – a man adrift, living a narrow life on the periphery, while all the excitement and passion seems to be taking place elsewhere.

In this excellent novel, Brookner explores what can happen when such a life is disrupted, raising the tantalising possibility that it might veer off course. Brookner was a fan of Georges Simenon’s romans durs (his hard, psychological novels), and there is a touch of the Belgian master in A Private View. In several of Simenon’s books, the plot focuses on a seemingly ordinary, respectable man who suddenly (and often for no apparent reason) rebels against convention, abandoning all judgement to embark on a path of self-destruction. What causes such a man to actively seek out the shameful, the ruinous, or the dangerous in search of fictitious freedom until his actions end in near-inevitable catastrophe? It’s a puzzle Simenon seems repeatedly drawn to with intriguing results.

With Brookner’s A Private View, the catalyst for the protagonist’s potential derailment is abundantly clear – the arrival of an alluring, infuriating young woman, who takes up residence in the opposite flat. Nevertheless, there are parallels with Simenon’s novels in various respects…

Recently retired from his senior position in personnel, George Bland lives a quiet, methodical existence governed by correctness, respectability and upstanding moral codes. Having never married, George has missed out on many of life’s pleasures, from the excitement and spontaneity of day-to-day life to deeper experiences such as passion and love. His close male friend and former work colleague, Putnam, with whom he was hoping to share various retirement trips abroad, has just died, leaving George bereft but wealthy. There is another close friend, too – a former girlfriend, Louise, whom George might have married, had he not been so reluctant to make a long-term commitment back then. While no longer intimate with one another, they have maintained a close friendship for many years, despite Louise’s marriage to a much older man (now deceased) and the birth of a son. Every Sunday evening, George and Louise speak to one another on the phone – a comforting ritual born out of habit, their longstanding history and a mutual sense of affection.

He almost loved her [Louise], and would have married her had she been slightly but essentially different. He thought that she probably felt the same about him. Each was too loyal to admit that something else was desired, something less sedate. […] Yet they were undoubted allies. Prepared for disappointment, they nevertheless made the most of their friendship, which became, and had remained, a civilised and affectionate affair… (p. 80)

Putnam’s rapid decline and death have thrown the emptiness of George’s fastidious life into sharp relief. In short, this life has been one long sequence of flights from various threats to secure the calm existence George values so highly. Firstly, there was his uncomfortable childhood, followed by an unhappy adolescence, both marked by his parents’ near-constant quarrelling; then, in adulthood, his reluctance to marry Louise, even though they were (and still are) remarkably well suited to one another. Moreover, Putnam’s sudden death has made George more conscious of the fragile nature of his own mortality. He is sad not merely at the loss of his only male friend, but for the emptiness of his past life, having shied away from risk, adventure and any form of lasting commitment.

Above all, in his new unsupported state, he felt a curious sense of shame, that he had saved his own life to so little purpose. He was comfortably off, and he was superfluous. He had no family, no wife, no lover; he had lived so carefully that he occasionally caught sight of himself as an object of ridicule. (p. 3)

Without Putnam or his work to sustain him, George is lost and unmoored, his life merely an unending sequence of long, lonely days stretching out ahead of him, punctuated by walks, time spent in the London Library and trips to Selfridges’ Food Hall. Alarmed by this prospect, he experiences a strange desire for something to happen to alleviate the boredom, something that will override his need for security and usual caution when orchestrating his life.

All at once, in the golden sunshine, with the breeze still warm in this late season, he felt alone, as he had not done since he was an adolescent. It seemed to him that he knew no one, that the office, the comfortable background to his life for so many years, had evaporated, or passed into other hands, leaving him adrift, to spend too much time sitting in cafés, or staring at the sea. (p. 4)

Into this void comes Katy Gibb, an alluring young American woman of indeterminate age. (At first, George puts her at twenty-five to thirty, later revising this to a coquettish thirty-five.) Greedy, self-centred, and openly manipulative, Katy purports to have arranged to stay in the flat opposite George’s while the usual occupants, the Dunlops, are away in New York. However, to gain entry to the Dunlops’ flat, Katy must persuade George to hand over the spare key. This, he duly does, following a discussion with Katy, setting in motion an intriguing series of encounters with this mercurial new arrival.

To read the rest of my review, please visit:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025...

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conceptual contents below may be spoilers:


This book explores themes of old age and the whole book is about a singular decision and an attempt to carry out the decision. On the one hand, the book is about the acceptance of one's life, al beit one not lived fully. On the other hand, it can also be interpreted as the acceptance of death. The character went through stages of acceptance, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It raises te question whether a life unlived is worth examining (yes) and worth accepting (yes). While the story is slow and at times disjointed, this book encouraged me to reflect and examine my own life.