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Pleasured
Book by Hensher, Philip
373 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1998
3 people are currently reading
84 people want to read
About the author
Philip Hensher
41 books111 followersHensher was born in South London, although he spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in Sheffield, attending Tapton School.[2] He did his undergraduate degree at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford before attending Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD for work on 18th century painting and satire. Early in his career he worked as a clerk in the House of Commons, from which he was fired over the content of an interview he gave to a gay magazine.[1] He has published a number of novels, is a regular contributor, columnist and book reviewer for newspapers and weeklies such as The Guardian, The Spectator , The Mail on Sunday and The Independent.
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.
You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...
The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999) brings together 14 of his stories, including ‘Dead Languages’, which A. S. Byatt selected for her Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), making Hensher the youngest author included in the anthology.http://literature.britishcouncil.org/...
Since 2005 he has taught creative writing at the University of Exeter. He has edited new editions of numerous classic works of English Literature, such as those by Charles Dickens and Nancy Mitford, and Hensher served as a judge for the Booker Prize. From 2013 he will hold the post of Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.[3]
Since 2000, Philip Hensher has been listed as one of the 100 most influential LGBT people in Britain,[4] and in 2003 as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Novelists.[1]
In 2008, Hensher's semi-autobiographical novel The Northern Clemency was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2012, Hensher won first prize -German Travel Writers Award, and is shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. He also won the Stonewall Prize for the Journalist of the Year in 2007 and The Somerset Maugham Award for his novel Kitchen Venom in 1996. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès' 1995 opera Powder Her Face. This has been his only musical collaboration to date.
His early writings have been characterized as having an "ironic, knowing distance from their characters" and "icily precise skewerings of pretension and hypocrisy"[1] His historical novel The Mulberry Empire "echos with the rhythm and language of folk tales" while "play[ing] games" with narrative forms.[1]
He is married to Zaved Mahmood, a human rights lawyer at the United Nations.
You can find out more about Philip on his author page at 4th Estate Books: http://www.4thestate.co.uk/author/phi...
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
November 1, 2011
There has been a lot of fuss about the Booker prize in the UK recently, which is meant to recognise the best literary books being written today. Some commentators were astonished that some of the best literary novelists were not even on the shortlist. I decided to buy the books of some of these unfortunate but brilliant authors who were overlooked by this year's judges. Philip Hensher is one of them, though this is an older book of his, from 1998.
I chose this novel, Pleasured, after reading many reviews on Amazon. In the end I chose it because it was set in Berlin just before the fall of the Wall. I have a number of books set in Berlin. It is a city that interests me a lot. So I decided that even if the novel is no good, I will at least get something of interest from it.
The novel is no good.
But I am getting something of interest from it because of the Berlin setting.
Rather than say any more about the book, which I'm only half-way through, I'd like to say something about the endorsements plastered all over it.
"Hensher's finest novel to date, at once literary and cinematic, intimate and epic."
Translation: His other books are even worse than this. The characters are living in a city where something momentous happens but they are too dull and self-obsessed for it to have much of an impact on them.
"A sublimely structured and sophisticated novel..."
Translation: Not much happens but the few things that do happen are strangely jumbled up.
"A novel whose ambitious scale is matched only by the steely elegance of its author's control..."
Translation: The author is hoping that by setting his novel at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it will somehow acquire the importance of that event. He doesn't seem to have anything important to say about it, though.
"Pleasured will be seen as a stepping stone in the development of an important new voice in British fiction."
Translation: Surely he could do better than this.
"Hensher's most ambitious novel to date, it is also his most satisfying."
Translation: He's trying hard but he's not much competition for me, I'm glad to say.
"Hensher has clearly set out to write the defining novel of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He may well have succeeded."
Translation: This is a really lame book that doesn't live up to expectations.
"Hensher is acute in his perception of how history is compounded of rumour, truth and lies."
Translation: I can't find anything good to say about the writing so I'll say something about the publishing industry instead.
"An engrossing read ... Perhaps the greatest achievement of this highly original and accomplished novel is the skill with which the themes of evasion and loss - and the prospect of recovery - are related to the looming presence of the Wall."
Translation: My own novel has just been published and I'm hoping for a good review in The Spectator where Philip Hensher is the chief reviewer.
I chose this novel, Pleasured, after reading many reviews on Amazon. In the end I chose it because it was set in Berlin just before the fall of the Wall. I have a number of books set in Berlin. It is a city that interests me a lot. So I decided that even if the novel is no good, I will at least get something of interest from it.
The novel is no good.
But I am getting something of interest from it because of the Berlin setting.
Rather than say any more about the book, which I'm only half-way through, I'd like to say something about the endorsements plastered all over it.
"Hensher's finest novel to date, at once literary and cinematic, intimate and epic."
Translation: His other books are even worse than this. The characters are living in a city where something momentous happens but they are too dull and self-obsessed for it to have much of an impact on them.
"A sublimely structured and sophisticated novel..."
Translation: Not much happens but the few things that do happen are strangely jumbled up.
"A novel whose ambitious scale is matched only by the steely elegance of its author's control..."
Translation: The author is hoping that by setting his novel at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it will somehow acquire the importance of that event. He doesn't seem to have anything important to say about it, though.
"Pleasured will be seen as a stepping stone in the development of an important new voice in British fiction."
Translation: Surely he could do better than this.
"Hensher's most ambitious novel to date, it is also his most satisfying."
Translation: He's trying hard but he's not much competition for me, I'm glad to say.
"Hensher has clearly set out to write the defining novel of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. He may well have succeeded."
Translation: This is a really lame book that doesn't live up to expectations.
"Hensher is acute in his perception of how history is compounded of rumour, truth and lies."
Translation: I can't find anything good to say about the writing so I'll say something about the publishing industry instead.
"An engrossing read ... Perhaps the greatest achievement of this highly original and accomplished novel is the skill with which the themes of evasion and loss - and the prospect of recovery - are related to the looming presence of the Wall."
Translation: My own novel has just been published and I'm hoping for a good review in The Spectator where Philip Hensher is the chief reviewer.
March 1, 2016
There was something strange but also a bit magical about this book. I do not remember why but the atmosphere of the book really got me. I am a bit surprised that it is badly reviewed and that so few people read it.
October 26, 2020
New Year's Eve. The year is 1988, soon to be 1989. A car breaks down on the transit road between Berlin and the West German border. The driver is an Englishman named Peter Picker. The two passengers he's taking back to West Berlin from Christmas visits to their respective families are: Friedrich Kaiser, layabout, part-time bookstore employee and frequenter of dubious nightclubs; and Daphne, nee Charlotte, student and political agitator, whose boyfriend Mario, a defector from the DDR, is expecting her back in West Berlin by nine-o'clock (spoiler – this doesn't happen).
These four characters, thrown together by chance, are destined to change one another's lives during what will prove to be a life-changing year all round for Germany, East and West.
Philip Hensher is so good at getting beneath the skin of his characters and detailing all the small but significant minutiae of their lives, histories and consequent attitudes within a leisurely but arresting (and occasionally hilarious) narrative. As the months pass and relationships between Picker and Friedrich, Daphne and Mario, and Friedrich and Daphne blossom, pall and then pick up again, we find out so much about life on both sides of the Berlin Wall, both as lived in reality and as imagined by those on the 'other side'. By the time political events have come to a head on 9th November 1989 – ironically, the anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht - we've been party to farce, betrayal, deception and disillusionment on both a personal and political level.
The phrase 'the grass is always greener' comes to mind as the Wall falls and Berliners begin to realise that what was on the other side was always more of an idea than a reality. 'A solution has gone now. The idea of the East, it was always a solution, wasn't it?' says Friedrich as he and Picker stand in a deserted Sanssouci, former palace of Friedrich the Great in Potsdam. 'But it will be back, because we need a solution so much, we need the opposite of what we want, so that we can live our lives. So that we can say, well, our lives may not be what we want, but at least we don't have to live – over there.'
The book ends with a tragedy, and a kindness, and seems oddly applicable to these present uncertain times. Thoroughly recommended.
These four characters, thrown together by chance, are destined to change one another's lives during what will prove to be a life-changing year all round for Germany, East and West.
Philip Hensher is so good at getting beneath the skin of his characters and detailing all the small but significant minutiae of their lives, histories and consequent attitudes within a leisurely but arresting (and occasionally hilarious) narrative. As the months pass and relationships between Picker and Friedrich, Daphne and Mario, and Friedrich and Daphne blossom, pall and then pick up again, we find out so much about life on both sides of the Berlin Wall, both as lived in reality and as imagined by those on the 'other side'. By the time political events have come to a head on 9th November 1989 – ironically, the anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht - we've been party to farce, betrayal, deception and disillusionment on both a personal and political level.
The phrase 'the grass is always greener' comes to mind as the Wall falls and Berliners begin to realise that what was on the other side was always more of an idea than a reality. 'A solution has gone now. The idea of the East, it was always a solution, wasn't it?' says Friedrich as he and Picker stand in a deserted Sanssouci, former palace of Friedrich the Great in Potsdam. 'But it will be back, because we need a solution so much, we need the opposite of what we want, so that we can live our lives. So that we can say, well, our lives may not be what we want, but at least we don't have to live – over there.'
The book ends with a tragedy, and a kindness, and seems oddly applicable to these present uncertain times. Thoroughly recommended.
January 28, 2023
This was ok. I read it as research on the time period. The writing can be really engaging and lively. Strays into the author monologuing with increasing frequency as the story progresses with little concern for character.
There is a troubling scene of sexual assault that is somehow glossed over, not uncommon for a book written in 1998 I suppose. Left an icky feeling in me, the reader.
An interesting diversion with too many truly dull parts to be good.
There is a troubling scene of sexual assault that is somehow glossed over, not uncommon for a book written in 1998 I suppose. Left an icky feeling in me, the reader.
An interesting diversion with too many truly dull parts to be good.
March 28, 2018
I was really looking forward to this based on a good Guardian review. But unfortunately I found the characters hard to get to know, plotline slightly unbelievable, and storyline disjointed. Good for historical context but disappointed overall.
June 28, 2022
Berlin 1988-89. Sense of uncertainty, possibilities of change (which, of course, occur on a grand scale), dissatisfaction among the cast of mainly young characters. In parts a challenging read, but worthwhile.
December 6, 2019
I loved this book when I first read. I still love it after rereading. Thought provoking and beautifully written.
January 6, 2022
A very difficult to get into book. Apart the separation of East and West Berlin. I enjoyed the last few chapters but aside from that found it a bit of a slog!
September 26, 2022
Love his later books. This - not so much.
January 27, 2021
Sporadically engaging, with wry and touching snapshots of a divided Berlin, its citizens on both sides of the wall unaware of the sudden approach of this edifice’s imminent fall, Pleasured contains the embryo of feeling which Hensher employs to much greater effect in The Fit: that of pathos, for the common man, for our human weaknesses and inability to divine what might befall us any moment. The East German cycling champion turned informer, the unattractive lonely West German filmgoer, the losers like Friedrich Kaiser who make us laugh and cry with their hopeless hopes and doomed small satisfactions when it looks like their dreams might actually come true. The dialogue between Friedrich and the gay, sophisticated, debonair Pierre is especially deft:
“..."It’ll just teach him not to be so German Democratic Republic. It’s just so passé.”
“Well, that’s where he lives, of course.”
“But can you imagine anything more frightful than choosing to be a frightful spotty homosexual and wear horrible plastic clothes and live in the German Democratic Republic?”
“Of course,” Friedrich said, “he hasn’t actually chosen all those things. Or any of them, actually.”
“He’s chosen his clothes,” Pierre said.
“Not necessarily,” Friedrich said. “Have you ever bought anything in East Berlin? There’s no choice at all.””
Perhaps Hensher would be pleased to have been proved wrong in his vision of reunification, that it could be a win/win, not a plunder of innocents by the West. His musings on the political-personal outcomes come across now as hectoring, whereas the brilliantly observed humorous glimpses of ordinary life remain the real charming heart of this novel:
“Once, Friedrich took a bus from one end of Kreuzberg to another. The bus was full of schoolchildren from Hamburg, on a trip to see Berlin. They all carried a small purple rucksack with the name of their school on it, as if education were a thing which needed to be advertised. The two teachers sat at the front, wearily two days into a trip, allowing themselves for the moment to ignore the growing rowdiness of their forty children...The children were busy chorusing the names of the bus stops after the driver’s announcements. Unfamiliar with the street names, they mistook them, and riotously corrected each other...“Next stop,” the tannoy announced, with a certain calm exhaustion, “as we would happily wish to advise our esteemed guests from the Federal Zone, is the world-famous landmark of Checkpoint Charlie.””
“..."It’ll just teach him not to be so German Democratic Republic. It’s just so passé.”
“Well, that’s where he lives, of course.”
“But can you imagine anything more frightful than choosing to be a frightful spotty homosexual and wear horrible plastic clothes and live in the German Democratic Republic?”
“Of course,” Friedrich said, “he hasn’t actually chosen all those things. Or any of them, actually.”
“He’s chosen his clothes,” Pierre said.
“Not necessarily,” Friedrich said. “Have you ever bought anything in East Berlin? There’s no choice at all.””
Perhaps Hensher would be pleased to have been proved wrong in his vision of reunification, that it could be a win/win, not a plunder of innocents by the West. His musings on the political-personal outcomes come across now as hectoring, whereas the brilliantly observed humorous glimpses of ordinary life remain the real charming heart of this novel:
“Once, Friedrich took a bus from one end of Kreuzberg to another. The bus was full of schoolchildren from Hamburg, on a trip to see Berlin. They all carried a small purple rucksack with the name of their school on it, as if education were a thing which needed to be advertised. The two teachers sat at the front, wearily two days into a trip, allowing themselves for the moment to ignore the growing rowdiness of their forty children...The children were busy chorusing the names of the bus stops after the driver’s announcements. Unfamiliar with the street names, they mistook them, and riotously corrected each other...“Next stop,” the tannoy announced, with a certain calm exhaustion, “as we would happily wish to advise our esteemed guests from the Federal Zone, is the world-famous landmark of Checkpoint Charlie.””
April 18, 2010
Got this book motivated by the great reviews at the back, but I must say that I was disappointed as it caused me some pain to finish it up. The story seems to be interminable with an array of boring and predictable characters. I love the cover though. :)
August 4, 2011
I did not really get along with this book, I was pretty disinterested in it from the start. It just wasn't the book for me, I am sure there are loads of subtle things I have missed that make this book a prize winner but for me I just didn't enjoy it.
August 2, 2011
This book had really good reviews, but one of them which I later read said "Tolstoyan". Perhaps I should have paid more attention. Not that I've read any Tolstoy, but this one was going over my head, so gave up around a quarter of the way through.
October 30, 2015
I agree with other reviewers that Berlin is a great setting and this book started out well and ran out of steam. I persevered to finish it but didn't really care about the characters and lost interest as it seemed to drag on at the end.
March 24, 2015
Didn't get this at all just didn't understand the story. Disappointed as Hensher's The Northern Clemency is a great book
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews