Maggie GeeCríticas

the book was wonderful according to its adds in the book. however to was quite stupid.

I really enjoyed this novel. Having a good knowledge of the town in which the story was set made it interesting. M. G. has a way of writing that makes landmarks seem bigger than they actually are, and the many characters each seemed real, even the bit-part background characters, and it was good to see the return of Monica, from the previous novel, "Blood". I loved the talking ravens, the tunnel connecting the town to overseas, the theft of the display ship, and the cliff collapse. The plot was a simple one: strangers arrived, strangers left. Yet M.G. managed to keep my attention and adapt this plot into an adventure full of mystery and development. Various subjects too were explored; pandemics, reliance on technology, racism, evolution, climate change, all of which added to the appeal of the story. The magic/fairy tale aspects of talking animals, super-humans, genetic immunity to viruses, and mass impregnation made use of the one thing a great story should be - fictitious. I learned the names of plants and some history of Gibraltar. The running of the local grammar school, the influence of the Wetherspoon pub, the lifeboat volunteers, the local craftspeople helped create an overall enjoyable, optimistic story, and an accurate analysis of how outsiders are absorbed into a local community.

"Where are the Snows" features two very rich, self-obsessed lovers. The book begins with the two of them deciding to just "permanently leave" the two college-age kids behind and go do want they want (travel, live in hotels & f*ck mostly). The story is told in 1st person vignettes, dated between the late 80s and 2007, by each of the characters involved, but mostly our two lovers (did I say she is the stepmother?). That’s as much as I’m going to say about the plot.

My first response to this story was an immediate reaction to what the two were doing and how they talked about it. I couldn’t think of a more self-obsessed twosome. Do they deserve my sympathy? I spent the first chapter pissed-off and disgusted...but...I kept reading…. Even at the end of the story I couldn't say that I had any sympathy for the twosome at all (which shocks me a bit as I'm a very empathetic person, but I guess I have limits…) However, the book itself, does make one think… What do their actions do to the idea of family? Can teens be damaged by this kind of behavior? (or does one think them 'fully formed' at this point?) What is love and what is obsession, can they be the same thing? Do we blame the man or the woman more? Would a reader who was not a parent have the same reaction I did? Would a male reader have a different reaction to the story? Or should the gender of the reader make no difference?

I'd love to hear a book club discuss this book… (there’s fair bit of sexual content in it, so perhaps not good for every book group;-) The book also reminds me a bit of reading [We Need to Talk about Kevin]. So, this is a “reaction as a review….” I’ll give it 4.5 stars for blowing my mind.½

An enjoyable if light comedy of manners exploring the similarities and contrasts between white professional suburban mother and black, educated African mother when brought together in a domestic setting. October 2020.

A rather embarrassing story of humankind. Written well enough, but not my cup of tea.

So this is a breathtakingly bold conceit that could have gone disastrously wrong, which is partly what prompted me to pick it up. I did start it with a bit of an attitude of waiting for it to fall apart, but it never faltered, and it carried me with it right to the end. So the idea is this - Vigininia Woolf, the very actual, living breathing person, is, by some fantastical literary magic, willed back into existence by an author researching her work for a conference paper, in New York circa 2014. She has all her memories up to and including the moment she dies, and she quickly becomes aware that she has skipped forward in time. Her reactions to this, apart from a certain lack of curiosity about how it came to have happened, which she accepts fairly placidly, seem absolutely spot on from what I know of her life, and at times are portrayed with heart rending emotional insight. The first person viewpoint switches from Virginia to the author who conjured her into being, who acts as her tour guide to twenty first century life. There's a sub plot involving the author's rather neglected daughter's rite of passage quest to track her mother down, which felt like the least vital part of the story, and there's an attempt to explain it all to some extent at the end that felt unnecessary. It also, at times, perhaps takes too many liberties with Woolf's inner life, but then I think it has been meticulously researched, so perhaps I should bow to Gee's superior knowledge of her subject, and also, she acknowledges in a foreword that part of the reason for writing the book is to tackle Woolf, to, in an affectionate way, bring her down from her sacred pedestal as the champion supreme of women writers. It's an enormously bold undertaking, and despite the odd flaw, I have to award it full marks for sheer chutzpah I think. It's also a hell of a ride. Highly recommended for all Woolf fans.

Far from the ordinary crime story, literary author Maggie Gee’s Blood is a comic excursion into the rough-and-tumble mind of narrator Monica Ludd. She’s 38, over six feet tall, outspoken and awkward, far from tiny with, as she is fond of pointing out, an enormous bosom. When Monica squeezes you into the rollercoaster seat beside her on page one, you’re in for a wild ride.
Monica claims to be a respectable citizen of East Kent. Doubtful. Much of the story plays out near the seacoast there and on the peninsula of Thanet. The little community, the seashore, the shops—come to life nicely. Even such a remote area has its dose of violence, terrorism, and, well, blood.
Monica has a job. She’s the deputy head in a school, loathes her new boss, and takes no pains to hide it. She thinks he’d like to be rid of her, and who could blame him?, but he rarely stands up to her.
Monica has a family. She calls them “artistes of awfulness.” She landed in the middle of a congeries of three boys and three girls, all grown up now. Ma’s in a care home, forgetting everything or choosing not to remember, it’s hard to say which. It’s Dad who drives the family disaster train. He’s a dentist who has sex with his patients in the chair. He’s a serial philanderer whose current girlfriend is two decades younger than Monica. When his children were young, he beat them. He mocks them yet. His bullying drove his youngest son Fred into the Army, and the siblings blame him for Fred’s death.
The final insult—and the inciting incident of the novel—occurs when the siblings organize an elaborate party in Fred’s memory, and Dad doesn’t show up. Monica is so angry, she says she’s going to kill him. Alas, a lot of people hear this threat, and the next morning when Monica finds Dad’s brutally beaten, blood-soaked body, even her siblings think she’s a murderer. That attack launches her impulsive and lengthy campaign of lies and misdirection. There’s truth in the old saying, blood is thicker than water, and you see it here. Her siblings’ loyalty to her through this whole saga says volumes about the sides of Monica that she tries to hide with her bluster.
In Monica, Gee has created an unforgettable character. Not only large, but larger than life. Profane and resourceful. She speaks her mind, loudly (rarely a good thing). And she is a genius at self-justification. All of which I found highly entertaining, even on the not-infrequent occasions that I was embarrassed for her.
From a crime fiction point of view, Blood is refreshingly unconventional and a reminder that violence and retribution, jealousy and fear, have been important literary themes forever.
Literary novelist Maggie Gee, OBE, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was its first female chair.

I liked the intelligence and the understated wit with which this was written, but am at a loss to understand why it wasn't just set in the real world. I recognised characters from Maggie Gee's previous novel "The White Family", and as far as I can remember that was set in the "real" world, so was baffled by that. I was expecting some kid of apocalypse novel based on the synopsis, but that element of it didn't really deliver. Best to appreciate this as a series of loosely connected vignettes with some well drawn characters. My favourite bit was the satirical depiction of the teenagers - as a parent of teenagers perhaps that's not surprising.

"She and Vanessa are not so different. In some ways they are almost the same"
By sally tarbox on 2 January 2018
Format: Kindle Edition
Maybe 2.5* for a readable, if really rather silly, bit of chick-lit.
Vanessa is a lecturer in Creative Writing and rather a sloane ranger type, with her materialistic, fashionable London life. But her 22 year old son Justin is lying in bed with some sort of breakdown, and Vanessa invites her old cleaner, who helped bring him up, back to the home from Uganda, to help.
And so the stage is set for an implausible tale. Inevitable tensions between Vanessa - unpleasant, stingy, jealous - and Mary - forced to occupy a subordinate role, but very much her own person.
The glimpses of Mary's life in Uganda were quite interesting, but I just didn't buy the interplay of the two women.½

This book focuses on a single family to examine attitudes to race and homosexuality in society. There are dramatic events, but these take a back seat to the examination of individual attitudes and motivations. It felt odd to have such polarised attitudes within a single family, but on an individual basis the characters felt real. In particular the patriarch – Alfred the park-keeper - rang true. Park keepers come from a bygone era and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one, yet I could picture him in his coat, berating people for walking on the grass. Powerful writing, a cerebral rather than an edge-of-the-seat experience.½

I found this novel out of the blue, had seen no publicity about it, but grazing in the London Review of Books bookshop, there it was. Yay! As a big Virginia Woolf fan I just had to have it, and Maggie Gee was surely not going to let me down, and she didn’t. A reason to support our increasingly rare independent bookshops.

It is a multi-layered exploration of a lot of things (some of which I am sure I missed and will find in later readings). The novel’s backbone is that a 21st century writer goes to NY on her way to a conference in Istanbul, to see the originals of Virginia Woolf’s work, but when she gets there, what she encounters is the woman herself, reborn in the 21st century, and all that entails. Angela takes it upon herself to marshal this reincarnation of her literary heroine, and it isn’t exactly what she expects.

The novel is about literary icons, and how they both succeed and fail us, it is about how outsiders are sometimes more adept than insiders at survival, often Virginia’s curiosity makes her far more able to tolerate the 21st century than Angela can. Worn down by the barrage of modern life Angela has less patience and misses so much.

Angela also has a daughter she constantly tells us she loves, but rarely spends time with, and a husband with very much his own life (their relationship is under strain). In some ways the daughter, Gerda’s story interested me less, but it had aspects that mirrored the main narrative, and certainly came together with the central story at the end.

In contrast, Virginia was childless due to her health issues, with a husband who worshiped her, but a complicated relationship that hinged mostly on intellect. Complicated but equal, possibly rare for her era.

Virginia persuades Angela to take her to the conference about herself in Istanbul, and as well as exploring the emotional and sexual world of Virginia, there are the comparisons of the city, as Virginia had visited Constantinople, as it then was, twice in her twenties.

The conclusion is very much about how literature of the past can teach, enliven and be relevant to the present. In this case how Virginia’s work and life can inspire and challenge new readers in the 21st century.½

The Ice People is a bleak vision of a near-future in which civilisation breaks down in the face of rapid climate change, its focus strictly on gender politics and disaffected youth. Although the cover hints tantalisingly at a broad canvas of environmental politics and African supremacy, The Ice People is the story of one man (Saul), depicting the dissolution of his family as a microcosm of the disintegration of British society.

Every attempt I have made to write a brief review of this novel has turned into an essay - it is dense, compelling, packed with throwaway references and visions of its time and technologies, thought-provoking and likely to induce arguments. It is worth a read for all these reasons and a top pick for a book club - but not exactly enjoyable (as someone else has commented, the most sympathetic character is a feathered menial robot with strictly limited programming (no AI here!) who may or may not have eaten her owner's cat).

Utterly compelling story with unusual scope. Stretches itself through time & landscape like a nimble feline.

The time: more-or-less now. The place: a city which is more-or-less London - there is a President, not a Prime Minister, but he is prosecuting a war against a Muslim country in alliance with the President of more-or-less America (rather pointlessly disguised as 'Hesperica'). It's been raining for weeks and weeks, and almost without the residents realising it, floodwaters are creeping over more and more of the city.

There is a huge cast of characters, from wealthy Lottie luxuriating in her comfortable life, to elderly May looking after her grandchildren and missing her dead husband, from ex-convict and apocalyptic cult member Dirk to self-centered novelist Angela and her neglected daughter Gerda. They are all affected, in different ways, by the flood, by rumours of strange planetary line-ups, and by the city's preparation for a grand Gala, more-or-less a great celebration of capitalism. But we soon realise that they are also deeply interconnected in a multitude of ways, and to me the rising waters seemed to symbolize social atomisation, which has crept up on us without our really noticing, as well as everything that goes with atomisation, such as lack of connection and community, prejudice, and inequality.

I don't normally much like 'state of Britain'-type novels, and indeed after fifty pages I was ready to put this book aside. But for some reason I decided to give it another go, and I started to enjoy it very much. I think, in particular, it's because we see enough of the inner lives of our characters that they are not simply stereotypes or representatives of a particular social category, and they come together in unexpected ways. This makes it more subtle than other novels with a similar range, and yet it can still make its points effectively.

I've never read any of Maggie Gee's novels, but I enjoyed reading her autobiography. Gee grew up in a working-class family and went on to Oxford and a literary career. While Gee has always been committed to a literary life, a life of the mind, Gee's point in her autobiography is that one cannot deny one's animal influences. The memoir is a record of how these animal influences: birth, sex, love, death, have shaped her life. This is also an autobiography about class. Gee came of age at a time when the British class system was being overhauled, and working-class children could first aspire to an upper-class education.

I enjoy autobiographies because I like to see how people make sense of their lives. This one offers an interesting look at the publishing industry, and at the demands of writing. It likewise provides a look at growing up with a difficult and demanding father. For all these things, there were times when I found my interest in the book flagging. Gee is rather liberal in offering advice, which I didn't necessarily need or want. There are also points at which reading about others' animal instincts ceases to be interesting. Most readers will gravitate towards this autobiography because of their interest in Gee's literary career, and those tend to be the best parts of the book. The appeal of this book comes from the fact that Gee is not merely an animal like everyone else, but a writer.½

My Cleaner studies the relationship between two women with much more in common than either of them suspects. Vanessa is a sixtyish English woman, solidly middle class, a writer with two novels and several successful Pilates books to her credit who now teaches creative writing, the divorced mother of a son. Mary is a younger Ugandan woman, college educated, linen supervisor in a hotel in Kampala, also the divorced mother of a son, who once worked for several years as Vanessa's cleaner. When Vanessa's son Justin has a nervous breakdown, she appeals to Mary to return to England to help him. Mary realizes that she can save most of the money she makes in England and use it for a better life with her boyfriend and for the girls in her village.
The two women do not like each other. Vanessa is jealous of Mary's relationship with Justin, but Mary mothered Justin when he was a baby and Vanessa was too busy. In fact, Vanessa is jealous of Mary's relationships with everybody and spends a good bit of her time shoring up her own shaky ego. Mary, on the other hand, lost her son to her husband when they divorced, and although she was devoted to him, she was not able to spend a lot of time with him when he was a baby because she was taking care of Justin. Now Jamil (or Jamey or Jamie - Does Mary not know how he spells his name?) has disappeared, and Mary is as fearful for him as Vanessa is for Justin. Mary sees Vanessa as out of touch with reality, a small woman swamped by her possessions, spoiled, and too self-indulgent to be of any use in the world.
What ensues is a charming, funny, touching journey to self-understanding and accommodation through misunderstandings and deception. Maggie Gee's writing is pitch-perfect, understated, and insightful. As Mary and Vanessa haggle over money, she writes, "They are a breath apart, with the world between them." I thought before I wrote this that I liked the book very much. Now I believe I love it.½

This is the story of the White family. Alfred, the father, is a bigoted tyrant in his home and a long-time, proud London park keeper who abides by all the rules. May, his wife of many years, is devoted to Alfred and never interfered with his brutal treatment of their three children, who are now all grown and carrying the emotional scars he inflicted. When Alfred is facing death, he seems to regret the damage he inflicted on his children, and we are left to wonder how different their lives would have been had he rectified his rigidity sooner. This is a difficult novel to read because it reveals the ugliest side of human nature and people who despise anyone who differs from them. Shirley, the only White daughter, is perhaps the most likeable character in this narrow-minded, shallow family.½

This ambitious, groundbreaking novel takes on the taboo subject of racial hatred as it looks for the roots of violence within the family and within British society. The Whites are an ordinary British family. Alfred White, a London park keeper, still rules his home with fierce conviction and inarticulate tenderness. May, his clever, passive wife loves Alfred but conspires against him. Their three children are no longer close; the elder son has left for America and the youngest son is a virulent racist. The daughter is involved in an interracial relationship with a black social worker. When the father’s sudden illlness forces the children to come together, their deep fears and prejudices come to the surface, raising issues about kinship, trust, and hatred. Maggie Gee expertly illustrates the tensions and prevailing social problems of modern day England in this fascinating novel.

This was a bookclub read for me. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it! What we discussed: http://escapebookclub.blogspot.com/2011/10/wednesday-5th-october-my-driver-by.ht...½

Although I have not yet read any novels by Maggie Gee, her name is familiar to me as a prize-winning author. Her autobiography, My Animal Life is an interesting account of her life. The first half of the book focuses on her family and childhood; the rest of the book focuses on her career as a writer. She does not shy away from the difficulties she has faced - from writer’s block, to being rejected by publishers despite being an accomplished author, to finding the time to write when she has a young child. She also writes at length about the creative process, and it’s interesting to see how her upbringing has influenced her work. As a result of reading this memoir, I will be seeking out her novels to add to my reading pile.

My Animal Life was well-written, much about Gee's unhappy childhood with a physically-abusive father, an unhappy mother and two brothers but didn't become interesting to me until she grows up, goes to Oxford and writes about the Sixties and her later life, especially her career as an author (with a dozen books behind her).

An unexpected and a delightful read for me; This was my first experience reading this author and I want to read more .... This is clever ... It explores many areas including, cultural differences, racism, family-life, tolerance .... It is touching ... yet, lively and you just want to keep on reading it. I could not put it down!!½

Class was an important factor in British education, work, and society just a few decades ago, and probably still is to a lesser extent. Maggie Gee describes how it impacted her choices and path in life. It is a captivating life story beginning in an era when attitudes and values were undergoing sweeping changes. Her memoir is not particularly exciting or stirring, but it is a brave, compelling mission in soul-searching. Her success as a writer is evident in the expressive style, making the story both interesting and entertaining. I commend Gee for being able to open her heart and write so frankly.

Maggie Gee's memoir would have been so much better if she had just stuck to writing about her life. Born to complex, imperfect parents who didn't always make the right decision, and living her twenties in the '60s, Gee has led an interesting life. She writes about her rather trying childhood and subsequent sexual rebellion in her early adulthood with the right amount of sarcasm and self-awareness, and I enjoyed the backstory into her parents' families as well. Where this book falls apart, however, is in Gee's desire to give the reader advice on various aspects of life. I don't look to an author to teach me how to raise children, or how to navigate the confusing world that is dating - I just want to read about his or her life. I can learn my life lessons on my own, thanks, and last I checked, writing novels does not give one an automatic degree in psychology or sociology. Also, Gee's overarching metaphor is that her life has been like an animal's, and that humans are really not that different from other living creatures. I get this, and it is an admirable stance to take, but I didn't need to be reminded of it on every single page. After a while, I found myself yelling "I get it!" at the pages of the book. Yes, animals deserve our respect. Yes, lots of life is about luck. Thanks tips.

So, skim the sections where Gee dispenses her advice, especially the last chapter on souls, which is rather ridiculous, and just focus on her coming of age story. Actually, if you want a better exploration of life in the '60s, sexual freedom, and art, read Patti Smith's Just Kids½

This memoir was a little unusual for me to read.The author uses the image of animal life to explain her own behaviours, and emotions. Gee related some very painful accounts of her mother and father's marriage. Gee decided to not expose all about her brothers, husband and daughter, so the view that the reader gets is about her inner life as a writer. Gee gives advice and talks about the writing process and her own personal growth. We learn about her mother and father's families, her father's abuse of her mother and herself and her thoughts on class. As a North American, reading Gee's writing on rising from a "lower class" through an excellent education to the middle class, I was not able to empathize with her triumph. This sensitivity to class is really foreign to me. Otherwise, Gee's account of her writing history,and her understanding of the good and bad in her relationship to her family was very interesting. This book is about a writer's progress.