WOMAN IN A LAMPSHADE

by Elizabeth Jolley

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Australia

229 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 1984

About the author

Monica Elizabeth Jolley was an award-winning writer who settled in Western Australia in the late 1950s. She was 53 years old when her first book was published, and she went on to publish fifteen novels (including an autobiographical trilogy), four short story collections, and three non-fiction books, publishing well into her 70s and achieving significant critical acclaim. She was also a pioneer of creative writing teaching in Australia, counting many well known writers such as Tim Winton among her students. Her novels explore alienated characters and the nature of loneliness and entrapment.

Honours:
1987: Western Australian Citizen of the Year
1988: Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for services to literature
1989: Canada/Australia Literary Award
1997: Australian Living Treasure

Reviews

[Jenny Yates · Rating 3 out of 5]

If this doesn’t have a cult following, it should. It's quite weird. Some of the stories are great, while others are shrouded in the surreal. The title story refers to a woman writer who can’t write unless she puts a lampshade on her head and sings a little song to go with it. This woman takes a hitchhiker home with her, apparently gets him into her bed, and then, instead of having sex with him, tortures him with a kind of screwball-comedy zaniness until he gives up and leaves.

There are a lot of characters like this, strewn throughout the book. Some stories seem exercises in how odd people can be. There’s one in which an outboard motor is moved from room to room of a very small house, and it’s in the way, no matter where it goes. Actually, this outboard motor appears in several of the stories, and many of the characters recur too. One running theme is the difficulty of trying to survive on a barren Australian farm.

Many of these stories have genuinely moving moments, and there’s some fine writing tucked in here and there too. Some quotes:

From “One Christmas Knitting” –
< In every place, however desolate, there will be some saving quality. Bricks, suddenly warm coloured, and corner stones made noble in an unexpected light from the passing and hesitant sun; perhaps a window catching tree tops in a distant park beyond steep roofs and smoking chimneys. Perhaps it is simply an undefined atmosphere of previous happiness caught and held in certain rooms. >

From “The Representative”
< The moon rose up swiftly from the long arms of a smoky sunset. >

[Stefani Akins · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Stuttgart, I once saw an exhibition of an impressionist's work. The point was not to thrill the observer with the finished, final version of each painting, but to show how each became, and thus, there were walls plastered with sketches and variants of the same scene over and over, in the morning, at noon, on a rainy day. It was actually quite fascinating. Reading the stories collected in this small book, I was often reminded of that exhibition. For one, I'd never known how frequently Elizabeth Jolley recycled her characters. It will not take long before the reader recognizes the jovial immigrant, the young coupled overwhelmed with the failure of their farm and the raising of their children, the slightly dim-witted aunty with a heart of gold, the elderly lesbian couple (especially if you've read "Miss Peabody's Inheritance") and most of all, the hardworking single mother raising a child still in school and a son -invariably- who's equally disinterested in eating and getting a job. Sometimes, it feels as if this entire collection is really an exercise book for point-of-view story telling.

Still, there are a few stories that really shine, like "The Paper Children", "The Shed" or "The Last Crop". There's the quiet heartbreak of a father trying to preserve a bit of carefree childhood for his kids, a sudden dramatic turn in an otherwise unexciting holiday in Europe, and a man who manages to persuade a Madonna to give up her place in heaven. My advice, if you decide to pick up this book, is to savor each story on its own and take your time with the reading.

[EC · Rating 3 out of 5]

So hard to rate this one, because there were some stories in Woman in a Lampshade that I absolutely adored and some that made me want to throw the book across the room. What drew me into the book was the first story, which had a happy ending - and it made me realise how it's become standard, expected, in literary short fiction for the characters to be punished in some way. So the happy ending of a relatively simple short story just floored me. Not that this was consistent - Jolley gets right back into the un-jolly, and the rest of the stories have more than their fair share of angsty characters getting hard-ons for Australian farm-scapes. So if that's your thing, go for it.

[Lib · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elizabeth, you are such an odd one, and I love you.

[Lila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Australian short stories, humorous and sometimes disturbing, set on struggling ranches in Australia. The women characters are often quirky with their own distinctive way of viewing the world. Some of the situations and families reappear and seen from other characters' viewpoints.

[Tess · Rating 4 out of 5]

*3.75

[Jeff Hobbs · Rating 1 out of 5]

The title story only

[Matthew Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of Elizabeth Jolley before last week, when I found this in a used bookstore in Thailand and bought it more or less based entirely on the title. It's really good, a loosely connected collection of stories (that I didn't realize were going to be connected and so I read them out of order). Some of the stories are really good—the funnier ones being better than the sad ones, generally—and it was a rare piece of fiction where I could actually relate to certain characters as if they were my relatives.