内容説明
When Candida Wilton arrives alone in London, recently betrayed, divorced, and rejected, she wonders what more can happen, at her age, to change her life. And yet, as she climbs the dingy communal staircase with her suitcases, she feels both nervous and exhilarated. Candida confides the details of her progress to a diary that slowly takes on a strong persona of its own, as it often scathingly comments on the trappings of modern life, and uncovers the layers of her past and present life. And when Candida receives a sudden windfall, she takes a group of six friends, women who in one way or another find themselves straddling generations, on a trip she has long dreamed of to Tunis, Naples, and Pompeii, with surprising results. Lively, beautifully rendered, rich in literary allusions and psychological insight,
The Seven Sisters is a splendid, broadly appealing novel about starting over.
Amazon.com
It's hard to get across just how flat-out thrilling, how readable, how absorbing is Margaret Drabble's novel
The Seven Sisters. It sounds positively dull when you describe it: Candida Wilton, a faculty wife of late middle age, has been dumped by her allegedly do-gooder husband. Her three daughters aren't too impressed with her, either. The mousy Candida decamps to an inglorious flat in London, where she measures out her time in visits to the health club, trips to the grocery store, and her weekly evening class on Virgil. She tentatively makes a few new friends and rediscovers some old ones. This opening section of the book, told in diary form, is a marvel of tone. With very little action, Drabble makes Candida's forays into the world quietly electrifying. One of her new pleasures is recording in her diary her mounting dislike of her ex-husband. You sense a giddy freedom: "Andrew had come to seem to me to be the vainest, the most self-satisfied, the most self-serving hypocrite in England. That kindly twinkle in his eyes had driven me to the shores of madness."
Ah, but there's more life for Candida yet. A small, unexpected inheritance is left to her, and so she organizes her friends--all female, mostly aged, mostly unmarried--into a tour of Naples as Virgil describes it in The Aeneid. Their holiday is a fictional tour-de-force: by turns a hilarious send-up of group dynamics, a metafictional lark, a feminist rant, and a dark acknowledgement of Candida's mortality. In the end, Drabble's novel is a very serious one, and a very good one. --Claire Dederer
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Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble
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