The Book Depository Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty
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Price: £10.64
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: Midwinter Break : Paperback : Vintage Publishing : 9781784704919 : : 04 Jan 2018 : A retired couple, Gerry and Stella Gilmore, fly from their home in Scotland to Amsterdam for a long weekend. A holiday to refresh the senses, and generally to take stock of what remains of their lives. Their relationship seems safe, easy, familiar - but over the course of the four days we discover the deep uncertainties which exist between them. The Book Depository Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9781784704919
MPN: 9781784704919
GTIN: 9781784704919
Author: Jane
Rating: 5
Review: Bernard MacLaverty’s novels are the antivenin to a poisonous working day; his characters so real I feel like I could knock round and go for a pint with them, or, in Midwinter Break, maybe just with Gerry, since his wife Stella doesn’t seem to be the beer-drinking type. Stella and Gerry have grown old together, and they are each in their own way dealing with an uncertain future and lost opportunities. Gerry finds solace by reminiscing: experiencing half-drunk sleepy meditations and flashbacks, as he lives with one foot in the Troubled past of Ireland and one in his comfortable but uneasy marriage with Stella. Stella, by contrast, has got religion; an Irish Catholic religion, with the rites and the prayers and her God and the past – and her obsession with religion and a strange breed of goodness is growing more bizarre by the day. On the couple’s visit to the Anne Frank house, she leaves a token in an informal collection of tributes: a gold earring that was a present from Gerry, but then she changes her mind and returns to the museum and takes back the jewellery – and is seen doing so by the curator, who, she imagines, believes she is stealing. Her reasons for taking back the earring are a Gordian Knot of introversion: she is not Jewish; her pain cannot be compared to those who lived and died through the Holocaust; the earrings were a present; she feels foolish for her sentimental act. In a fit of shame, she finally throws them into a canal. Gerry, deep in his cups one evening, opines that double vision is the realm of cartoon drunks, making me suspect that MacLaverty has never found himself trying to watch the telly on a Saturday night with a hand over one eye to block out the extraneous twin actors. The joy of McLaverty’s writing isn’t just in his close observational style – we aren’t exactly outside-looking-in, nor is the book claustrophobically introverted; the readerly satisfaction in the book lies in living through the characters in an almost voyeuristic fashion. Stella is all nerves, neuroses, and unlikely dreams. Having reached old age largely feeling her potential has been wasted, she is portrayed through observations and projections, and her story, like her life, is confined to a straight line; her vague dream of cosy independence brooks no detours or compromises, and she is unable to contemplate any imaginative leaps that may set her on the path to a more fulfilling life of her own. The lives of Gerry and Stella are, despite the highs and lows, flat. McLaverty describes them in a Guardian interview as ‘young people who got old’, and the novel portrays them as restless people without anything truly new to look forward to. This feeling of emptiness and ennui drives Gerry’s drinking, and fuels Stella’s rigidly fussy fantasies. Winter Break is a story of regrets and longings within a long, long marriage: the desire to break free, and the conflicting desire to maintain love, and with it, a steadily contented routine.
Author: lilysmum
Rating: 3
Review: Well, they don’t really bicker, they just kind of co-exist really, in the way that older married couples do. Stella is clearly the star in Gerry’s firmament. She’s booked the holiday and got the house ready for them to go to Amsterdam for a winter break. The problem in the marriage is that Stella resents Gerry’s drinking. As they do the tourist things in Amsterdam - double decker trains, the red light district, Anne Frank’s house, they remember and revisit an event from the past which is only revealed towards the end of the book. I don’t really know what to make of this book. I can see it’s an examination of a marriage and a woman questioning what it’s all been for - all the ironing, all the shopping, all the teaching, for a husband who resorts to the bottle as his way of coping. There are echoes of the Macbeth’s, and also of The Great Gatsby, with boats “beating against the current”, that I really appreciated and enjoyed. But there were a couple of things about Stella that just didn’t ring true to me, and that spoiled it for me. For example, at the very beginning of the book, she licks her fingers and smooths her eyebrows. I’ve never done that in my life, and I’ve never seen any woman do it either. And then later in Anne Frank’s house, Stella makes a sacrifice by leaving one of the gold earrings Gerry has just bought her on a mantelpiece. I found that a curious detail that didn’t ring true, apart from maybe she was trying to give Gerry a message that she didn’t value him. I see that it symbolises her preoccupation with her faith and a promise she made to God Years before, but it didn’t quite work all the same. I liked the way the author points up the self absorption of the characters by showing how little they know each other in spite of knowing so many trivial things about each other. It is a realistic portrait of a marriage. Anyway I did read amazing reviews on Twitter and I am just a bit underwhelmed by this book. I kept reading to find out what would happen, however, and I did find the ending very satisfying and plausible.
