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Life In the West (Squire Quartet)
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Life In the West (Squire Quartet)
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by Brian W. Aldiss
Sales Rank : 3300790
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Paperback: 304 pages
Publisher: Little Brown Uk November 19, 1998
ISBN-10: 0349110670
ISBN-13: 978-0349110677
Product Dimensions:
7.6 x 5 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
Product Review
'A complex, thoughtful and beguiling story by one of our best novelists' - William Boyd 'His dialogue is impeccable and his narrative is glazed with customary wit' - DAILY TELEGRAPH
Another wise, limpid mainstream outing for sf/fantasy master Aldiss (Forgotten Life, 1989). This one first appeared in Britain in 1980, and centers on Thomas Squire, a middle-class maker of TV programs: incidents at an international conference that Squire is attending illustrate problems in his personal life, and these in turn illuminate modern Western attitudes and mores. Although Squire's TV series, Frankenstein Among the Arts, exploring today's culture of mass production and its dubious sense of value vs. worth, was a popular success, his personal life is in a shambles: his wife, a fabricator of exotic, arty insects, has left him, and without her Squire lacks the will to maintain his ancestral halls. The proximate cause of the breakup is Squire's affair with the sexy star of his TV series; he gives her up with an air of martyrdom, then invokes the double standard with elaborate justifications. At the International Congress, Squire's impatience with Marxist rhetoric leads him to insult several delegates and offend one of his oldest friends. He warms to a Russian colleague, a minor dissident complete with KGB watchdog, and professes to trust him - but, when tested, Squire finds this trust to be only a pleasant illusion. And the book's title? Well, Squire considers clean, industrious, friendly, regimented Singapore to be the freest city in the world, and indeed it exactly matches his background and outlook. A little too clever, sometimes in its precise weaving of informative strands - even Squire's name is significant, and the reader is conscious of having been manipulated - but in the main a discerning, often amusing portrait of Western middle-class culture, and less social satire than ironic truth. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
Thomas C Squire, founder of the Society for Popular Aesthetics, one-time secret agent and successful hedonist faces a midlife crisis. That undermines the stability of his ancestral home in Norfolk. Following the creation of his TV documentary series, FRANKENSTEIN AMONG THE ARTS, Squire attends a conference of academics in Sicily. There, against a background of international rivalry, he becomes involved with the lovely if calculating Selina and the Russian Vasily. In counterpoint to the drama of the conference runs the story of Squire's private life: the horrifying circumstances of his father's death; his many affairs with women; and his fifteen-month separation from his wife. This brilliant novel, sometimes violent and always compassionate, moves from England to Sicily, from Singapore to the former Yugoslavia. LIFE IN THE WEST embodies the best characteristics of Brian Aldiss's writing: wit, human understanding, a fine turn of phrase and consummate storytelling.
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