Our Kind: A Novel in Stories

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Harper Collins, 2007 - 208 Seiten
From the award-winning author of The Gardens of Kyoto comes this witty and incisive novel about the lives and attitudes of a group of women—once country-club housewives; today divorced, independent, and breaking the rules.

In Our Kind, Kate Walbert masterfully conveys the dreams and reality of a group of women who came into the quick rush of adulthood, marriage, and child-bearing during the 1950s. Narrating from the heart of ten companions, Walbert subtly depicts all the anger, disappointment, vulnerability, and pride of her characters: "Years ago we were led down the primrose lane, then abandoned somewhere near the carp pond."

Now alone, with their own daughters grown, they are finally free—and ready to take charge: from staging an intervention for the town deity to protesting the slaughter of the country club's fairway geese, to dialing former lovers in the dead of night.

Walbert's writing is quick-witted and wry, just like her characters, but also, in its cumulative effect, moving and sad. Our Kind is a brilliant, thought-provoking novel that opens a window into the world of a generation and class of women caught in a cultural limbo.
 

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Seite 53 - O, my love is like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June ; My love is like a melody That's sweetly played in tune. As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in love am I " He broke off for a moment, and I remembered how he glowered ecstatically into the fire. Then he concluded — "And I will love thee still, my dear, Till a1 the seas gang dry.
Seite 184 - I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange. While "The Snow Man" is written in an oblique third person ("One must have a mind of winter"), "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" is written in a regally assertive first-person voice.
Seite 2 - ... that ends in a close draw Above the cases howls loud mystery. What is the chain, then ask, and what the links? Are these acts sad or droll? From what derived? Within the floret's disk the insect drinks. Next summer there's more honey to be hived. What Artist laughs? What clever Daemon thinks? 104 : Question in a Field Pasture, stone wall, and steeple, What most perturbs the mind: The heart-rending homely people, Or the horrible beautiful kind?
Seite 108 - Like a nun withdrawing, or a child exploring a tower, she went, upstairs, paused at the window, came to the bathroom. There was the green linoleum and a tap dripping. There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room.
Seite 108 - An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth. " When a good sculptor models a torso, he not only represents the muscles, but the life which animates them — more than the life, the force that fashioned them and communicated to them, it may be, grace or strength, or amorous...
Seite 13 - We were married in 1953. Divorced in 1976. Our grown daughters pity us; our grown sons forget us. We have grandchildren we visit from time to time, but their manners agitate, so we return, nervous, thankful to view them at a distance.
Seite 14 - Years ago we were led down the primrose lane, then abandoned somewhere near the carp pond.
Seite 85 - We were company, perhaps; women of a certain age with shared interests. But friends? It seemed too intimate, somehow, wrong.) Clark assumed I'd gone to the john, Gay continued.
Seite 195 - The few times we speak of true things it is almost unbearable, and so we do not, mostly, preferring to laugh.

Autoren-Profil (2007)

Kate Walbert is the author of seven works of fiction: She Was Like That, longlisted for the Story Prize and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; His Favorites, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year; The Sunken Cathedral; A Short History of Women, a New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of the Year and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Our Kind, a National Book Award finalist; The Gardens of Kyoto; and the story collection Where She Went. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize stories. She lives with her family in New York City.

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