Evening (Vintage Contemporaries)
by Susan Minot
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Book Summary Information
Author: Susan MinotEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-01
ISBN: 0307387127
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Evening (Vintage Contemporaries)
Book Review: Whatever We May Think of at the End of Life
Summary: 4 Stars
This was truly a striking story. I didn't like it much at first, but as I continued reading I saw there was something beautiful being realized. I had a good feeling after I finished reading it - I enjoyed the story and admire Susan Minot's confidence to write a novel in this way - her loose, rambling style captured the subconscious mind.
It's true that this is a sprawling story which was sometimes hard to follow but I think that often, that's the way memories get tangled up at the end of life after an illness. It gives the reader an inside view of dying, which is very thought-provoking. I'm intrigued to see the movie and to see how their treatment affects the plot and storyline.
Summary of Evening (Vintage Contemporaries)
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEARJuly 1954. An island off the coast of Maine. Ann Grant-a 25-year-old New York career girl-is a bridesmaid at her best friend's lavish wedding. Also present is a man named Harris Arden, whom Ann has never met . . .
After three marriages and five children, Ann Lord lies in an upstairs bedroom of a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What comes to her, eclipsing a stream of doctor's visits and friends stopping by and grown children overheard whispering from the next room, is a rush of memories from a weekend 40 years ago in Maine, when she fell in love with a passion that even now throws a shadow onto the rest of her life. In Evening, Susan Minot gives us a novel of spellbinding power on the nature of memory and love.
As Ann Lord lies on her deathbed, her daughter delivers a balsam pillow from the attic. At first the ailing woman is confused, but suddenly the scent reminds her of the "wild tumult" she experienced 40 years earlier:
Something stole into her as she walked in the dark, a dream she'd had long ago. The air was so black she was unable to see her arms, it was a warm summer night. Above her she could make out the dark line of the tops of spruce trees and a sky lit with stars. She felt the warm tar through the soles of her shoes. The boy beside her took her hand.In the porous world between conscious and unconscious the protagonist of Evening revisits the great passions of her life, along with its considerable disappointments. The boy in the dark remains the fixed point--not so much because he is the most important man in her life, but because of the untapped possibilities he represents. Meanwhile, friends and relations come to sit by Ann Lord's side as she veers between clarity and feverish recollection.
In her third novel, Susan Minot takes some new risks--her narrative spanning seven decades of memory and her style ranging from Stegneresque particularity to the exquisite abstraction Virginia Woolf perfected in To the Lighthouse. Equal parts memory and desire, fiction and poetry, Evening is a seductive story made more so by the measured pace of details emerging, one by one, like stars. --Cristina Del Sesto
Minot, Susan Books
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