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Лицедеи
Роман Джессики Андерсон «Лицедеи» — это отнюдь не примитивное «обличение нравов» капиталистического общества, просто героям его часто приходится оказываться в ситуациях, требующих «игры».
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
Jessica Anderson
111 books22 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
This is Jessica^Anderson, where ^=space.
About the Author:
Jessica Margaret Anderson (25 September 1916 – 9 July 2010) was an Australian novelist and short story writer.
(from Wikipedia)
This is Jessica^Anderson, where ^=space.
About the Author:
Jessica Margaret Anderson (25 September 1916 – 9 July 2010) was an Australian novelist and short story writer.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 13, 2024
An interesting, compassionate, character based novel about two families living in Sydney suburbia in the 1970s.
Jack Cornock,a self made successful businessman, is dying after suffering a major stroke. He has been married twice. Both his first wife, Molly, and his second wife, Grace, are alive with Grace caring for him. Jack Cornock has two adult children by Molly, Stewart and Sylvia. Stewart is a successful unmarried property salesman and Sylvia is an independent divorced woman in her late 30s who has just arrived in Sydney after spending twenty years in Europe. She earns a living by teaching Italian.
Grace’s first husband, Hugh Polglaze, died 31 years ago. Grace and Hugh had four children, Harry, Rosamond, Hermione and Guy. Harry and Sylvia are lovers. Rosamond’s husband, Ted Kitching, is in financial strife due to fraudulent activities.
The generally ordinary unlikeable characters are well developed. The plot is about who will benefit from Jack’s will. An engaging novel about fracturing family relationships and how money can influence individuals and relationships.
This book was winner of the 1980 Miles Franklin Award.
Jack Cornock,a self made successful businessman, is dying after suffering a major stroke. He has been married twice. Both his first wife, Molly, and his second wife, Grace, are alive with Grace caring for him. Jack Cornock has two adult children by Molly, Stewart and Sylvia. Stewart is a successful unmarried property salesman and Sylvia is an independent divorced woman in her late 30s who has just arrived in Sydney after spending twenty years in Europe. She earns a living by teaching Italian.
Grace’s first husband, Hugh Polglaze, died 31 years ago. Grace and Hugh had four children, Harry, Rosamond, Hermione and Guy. Harry and Sylvia are lovers. Rosamond’s husband, Ted Kitching, is in financial strife due to fraudulent activities.
The generally ordinary unlikeable characters are well developed. The plot is about who will benefit from Jack’s will. An engaging novel about fracturing family relationships and how money can influence individuals and relationships.
This book was winner of the 1980 Miles Franklin Award.
December 13, 2017
Not as good as Tirra Lirra by the River.
Set in mid 1970s Sydney. Sylvia returns from living in Europe to a family whose family members all have their "secrets". On the surface they are successful but one is going bankrupt and is a cad, the father is dying but is being extremely mean to his wife, a sister-in-law is a snob and wants to live above her means.
There are some real time pieces. A Chinese freighter and Chinese sailors walking the streets of Sydney were objects of curiosity. The prices of houses. Letter writing. The fortunate who own a phone in their homes.
But the ending is abrupt, at times who was who was confusing and the story lines became a little muddled.
Set in mid 1970s Sydney. Sylvia returns from living in Europe to a family whose family members all have their "secrets". On the surface they are successful but one is going bankrupt and is a cad, the father is dying but is being extremely mean to his wife, a sister-in-law is a snob and wants to live above her means.
There are some real time pieces. A Chinese freighter and Chinese sailors walking the streets of Sydney were objects of curiosity. The prices of houses. Letter writing. The fortunate who own a phone in their homes.
But the ending is abrupt, at times who was who was confusing and the story lines became a little muddled.
March 12, 2021
I made rather heavy weather of this novel, Jessica Anderson's sixth and the one with which she won the Miles Franklin Award for the second time in 1980. I was expecting it to be as good as
Tirra Lirra by the River
which had also won the Miles Franklin, in 1978. But for most of Part One The Impersonators is a confusing and somewhat lifeless story of competitors for an inheritance, and I wondered why, in the year that published Elizabeth Jolley's remarkable Palomino, the Miles Franklin judges chose it. (Had they used today's more expansive interpretation of Miles Franklin's terms of her bequest, the judges might well have chosen Shirley Hazzard's brilliant The Transit of Venus, which as Charlotte Wood writes in her essay at the Sydney Review of Books, is a novel exploring Australianness, despite being set almost entirely in Europe and America.)
I wondered what else was on the shortlist. There are no records prior to 1987 so we don't know. Consulting Wikipedia's list of notable Australian books published in 1980 to make an educated guess turned out to be fruitless, since it includes only four titles: The Impersonators, The Transit of Venus, Palomino and The Dying Trade by Peter Corris, which is a crime novel.
Published as The Only Daughter in the US, The Impersonators concerns Sylvie, who like her creator, has spent some years in London. She is the only daughter of Jack Cornock and by coincidence has come back from her love affair with Europe just at the time that Jack has had a stroke and is expected to die. Why she, and not her brother Stewart (a real estate agent) is the subject of speculation about getting all his money is a mystery I failed to solve.
Sylvie is not actually interested in money. She is content to live a simple life as a teacher of Italian in order to spent half the year travelling. But other members of the family do need an injection of cash. Jack married twice. His first wife Molly, is a tedious, ignorant woman who lets her second husband Ken bully her about her spending habits and is still so aggrieved by the divorce that she never mentions Jack's second wife by name. She wants Sylvie to get the lot at the expense of Greta, the second wife who brought four children to the marriage after the death of her husband 31 years ago. These four children are unlikeable, with the possible exception of Harry, Greta's oldest child, who wastes no time in launching a relationship with Sylvie. He's divorced, and so is she, but still, it seems mildly incestuous, even though there is no blood relationship between the two.
(There is a family tree depicting the relationship between Jack's two families, and just as well because I kept needing to refer to it.)
Rosamund, Greta's second child, is married to Ted Kitching, whose business is failing. She is loyal and supportive until she learns that he is not only a crook, but an unrepentant one who will emerge unscathed while the shareholders lose everything.
Greta's third child Hermione is married to Steven Fyfe, and is obsessed by Sydney real estate. She wastes a lot of Stewart's time looking at expensive houses they can't afford. For those of us who've never paid any attention to the petty snobberies of Sydney postcodes this preoccupation is a bit arcane.
Guy, in his early thirties, was a charming child who's become a boor.
These children all want Sylvie to sweet-talk her father into making compassionate provision for Greta, because of course, they will eventually inherit from her.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/03/13/t...
I wondered what else was on the shortlist. There are no records prior to 1987 so we don't know. Consulting Wikipedia's list of notable Australian books published in 1980 to make an educated guess turned out to be fruitless, since it includes only four titles: The Impersonators, The Transit of Venus, Palomino and The Dying Trade by Peter Corris, which is a crime novel.
Published as The Only Daughter in the US, The Impersonators concerns Sylvie, who like her creator, has spent some years in London. She is the only daughter of Jack Cornock and by coincidence has come back from her love affair with Europe just at the time that Jack has had a stroke and is expected to die. Why she, and not her brother Stewart (a real estate agent) is the subject of speculation about getting all his money is a mystery I failed to solve.
Sylvie is not actually interested in money. She is content to live a simple life as a teacher of Italian in order to spent half the year travelling. But other members of the family do need an injection of cash. Jack married twice. His first wife Molly, is a tedious, ignorant woman who lets her second husband Ken bully her about her spending habits and is still so aggrieved by the divorce that she never mentions Jack's second wife by name. She wants Sylvie to get the lot at the expense of Greta, the second wife who brought four children to the marriage after the death of her husband 31 years ago. These four children are unlikeable, with the possible exception of Harry, Greta's oldest child, who wastes no time in launching a relationship with Sylvie. He's divorced, and so is she, but still, it seems mildly incestuous, even though there is no blood relationship between the two.
(There is a family tree depicting the relationship between Jack's two families, and just as well because I kept needing to refer to it.)
Rosamund, Greta's second child, is married to Ted Kitching, whose business is failing. She is loyal and supportive until she learns that he is not only a crook, but an unrepentant one who will emerge unscathed while the shareholders lose everything.
Greta's third child Hermione is married to Steven Fyfe, and is obsessed by Sydney real estate. She wastes a lot of Stewart's time looking at expensive houses they can't afford. For those of us who've never paid any attention to the petty snobberies of Sydney postcodes this preoccupation is a bit arcane.
Guy, in his early thirties, was a charming child who's become a boor.
These children all want Sylvie to sweet-talk her father into making compassionate provision for Greta, because of course, they will eventually inherit from her.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/03/13/t...
August 2, 2016
Four years ago I read an Australian novel about families of Greek immigrants in Melbourne, The Slap. This one is about established Australian families a generation earlier, in Sydney. In spite of the differences of time and style, both books seemed intensely suburban. My wife and I kept comparing them, and we both thought that this one was rather better written than The slap..
Jack and Greta Cornock have no children of their own, but each of them has 30-something children from previous marriages, some single, some married, some divorced. Jack's daughter Sylvia Foley (divorced), who has been overseas in Europe for 20 years, returns for a brief visit to discover that her father has had a stroke, and her step-siblings are concerned about what he has left to their mother in his will. Like The Slap it goes into great detail about the minutiae of suburban life, and the concerns of middle-class suburban people, until one discovers that the older generation had a much harder time of it in their youth.
The book has a genealogical table in the front to help one to picture the complex relationship s between the main characters, and I found myself wishing that it also had a map of Sydney, so that one could picture the relationships between the places described, sometimes in great detail.. In spite of this, some details were rather fuzzy and blurred. In The Slap one was not told the ages of several of the children, so it was difficult to picture them. in The only daughter the ages of the children are given, but the makes and models of cars the characters drive around in are not. Perhaps that's a difference between South African and Australian culture, or perhaps it is a difference between small towns and suburbs. But I recall discussing who was visiting whom because we could see their cars parked outside someone's house.
But the book does give a rather detailed picture of suburban life and concerns in the 1970s.
Jack and Greta Cornock have no children of their own, but each of them has 30-something children from previous marriages, some single, some married, some divorced. Jack's daughter Sylvia Foley (divorced), who has been overseas in Europe for 20 years, returns for a brief visit to discover that her father has had a stroke, and her step-siblings are concerned about what he has left to their mother in his will. Like The Slap it goes into great detail about the minutiae of suburban life, and the concerns of middle-class suburban people, until one discovers that the older generation had a much harder time of it in their youth.
The book has a genealogical table in the front to help one to picture the complex relationship s between the main characters, and I found myself wishing that it also had a map of Sydney, so that one could picture the relationships between the places described, sometimes in great detail.. In spite of this, some details were rather fuzzy and blurred. In The Slap one was not told the ages of several of the children, so it was difficult to picture them. in The only daughter the ages of the children are given, but the makes and models of cars the characters drive around in are not. Perhaps that's a difference between South African and Australian culture, or perhaps it is a difference between small towns and suburbs. But I recall discussing who was visiting whom because we could see their cars parked outside someone's house.
But the book does give a rather detailed picture of suburban life and concerns in the 1970s.
September 9, 2009
Jessica Anderson is an Australian novelist with a deep understanding of the complexity of human emotions. She sees that a person can feel multiple things at once, even if the things are in conflict: love and loathing, care and selfishness, lust and distaste.
In The Only Daughter she portrays this mass of conflict as we see a fractured family. The father, a tough man, lies in bed after suffering a devastating stroke. His second wife cares for him, but there is an intensity of discord between them. His step family hovers, and his son from his first marriage is there too. And from abroad comes his only daughter, who was on her way home anyway, and did know until she got there of his condition.
The step family starts speculating right away, "Who will get the old man's money?" "Who will care for their mother (his current wife) if she is left out of the fortune?" And underlying it all are those conflicting emotions...they are wondering about the money because they care about their mother and/or, they are also greedy.
This is a very adult book...it deals with the messes we make of things, and the inevitability of no one understanding our true motivations, sometimes not even ourselves.
Anderson's writing is detailed, and her characters are not formulaic, but people I may know. She portrays none as heroes, but none are villains either...they are just people trying to get by, with their mass of conflict, looking to make each day worth it, and trying their damnedest to do the right thing.
In The Only Daughter she portrays this mass of conflict as we see a fractured family. The father, a tough man, lies in bed after suffering a devastating stroke. His second wife cares for him, but there is an intensity of discord between them. His step family hovers, and his son from his first marriage is there too. And from abroad comes his only daughter, who was on her way home anyway, and did know until she got there of his condition.
The step family starts speculating right away, "Who will get the old man's money?" "Who will care for their mother (his current wife) if she is left out of the fortune?" And underlying it all are those conflicting emotions...they are wondering about the money because they care about their mother and/or, they are also greedy.
This is a very adult book...it deals with the messes we make of things, and the inevitability of no one understanding our true motivations, sometimes not even ourselves.
Anderson's writing is detailed, and her characters are not formulaic, but people I may know. She portrays none as heroes, but none are villains either...they are just people trying to get by, with their mass of conflict, looking to make each day worth it, and trying their damnedest to do the right thing.
August 15, 2014
A good read. I enjoyed this book even though it seemed to end abruptly without settling anything. Very well written & the characters are all someone you can relate to. Classic example of how a death in the family & the aftermath of "who gets the money", affects everyone.
January 3, 2010
A decent story of family set in Australia.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews