In het Duits gelezen: Miss Garnet und der Engel von Venedig, best onderhoudend en ook interessant, heeft mijn zoektocht naar Tobias en engelen ingeleid.
If you spend most of your life alone you do not know that you are lonely....
A shimmering first novel of self-discovery, of redemption from numb solitude, and of the matchless consolations to be found in human connection and spiritual nourishment, Miss Garnet's Angel limns—with uncommon subtlety and an engaging, often subversive wit—the thematic parallels and intersections that bind an ancient tale from the Apocrypha to a modern-day narrative about a retired British spinster on sojourn in Venice. A word-of-mouth bestseller and a critics' favorite on both sides of the Atlantic, ' resonant debut achieves something that has become all too rare in recent years: a wholesale blurring of the line distinguishing the "popular" from the "literary" on today's fiction shelves.
After the death of her
longtime friend and flatmate, retired British history teacher Julia
Garnet does something completely out of character: She takes a six-month
rental on a modest appartamento in Venice. An atheist, a Communist, and
a virgin, Julia finds herself falling beneath the seductive spell of
the city's intoxicating beauty and sensual religiosity. She befriends a
young Italian boy and English twins who are restoring a
fourteenth-century chapel. And she falls in love for the first time in
her life with an art dealer named Carlo.
Juxtaposing Julia's journey of self-discovery with the apocryphal tale of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, Miss Garnet's Angel tells a lyrical, incandescent story of love, loss, miracles, and redemption . . . and of one woman's transformation and epiphany. Already a bestseller in England, it is "novel-writing at its finest and most eloquent . . . splendid . . . the sort of book that effortlessly, like angels, or sunlight on Venice's rippling waterways, casts brightness and beauty into those private and most shadowed recesses of the human heart"
In style, Miss Garnet’s Angel reminded me a bit of Possession (although less wordy) or Perfume (less grim) in the way that it intertwined a sense of the historical with a strong narrative style. The book concerns one Miss Julia Garnet, a retired school teacher who after losing Harriet – her close friend and housemate of 30 years – decides to take a six month break in Venice. Julia, seemingly a bit of a hermit at the outset of the story, undergoes a personal journey. She is slowly pried out of her shell by a series of friends who she meets. Her opinions and judgements are challenged in the time that she spends in the watery, enchanting city of Venice.
Salley Vickers
If you spend most of your life alone you do not know that you are lonely....
A shimmering first novel of self-discovery, of redemption from numb solitude, and of the matchless consolations to be found in human connection and spiritual nourishment, Miss Garnet's Angel limns—with uncommon subtlety and an engaging, often subversive wit—the thematic parallels and intersections that bind an ancient tale from the Apocrypha to a modern-day narrative about a retired British spinster on sojourn in Venice. A word-of-mouth bestseller and a critics' favorite on both sides of the Atlantic, ' resonant debut achieves something that has become all too rare in recent years: a wholesale blurring of the line distinguishing the "popular" from the "literary" on today's fiction shelves.
Juxtaposing Julia's journey of self-discovery with the apocryphal tale of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, Miss Garnet's Angel tells a lyrical, incandescent story of love, loss, miracles, and redemption . . . and of one woman's transformation and epiphany. Already a bestseller in England, it is "novel-writing at its finest and most eloquent . . . splendid . . . the sort of book that effortlessly, like angels, or sunlight on Venice's rippling waterways, casts brightness and beauty into those private and most shadowed recesses of the human heart"
In style, Miss Garnet’s Angel reminded me a bit of Possession (although less wordy) or Perfume (less grim) in the way that it intertwined a sense of the historical with a strong narrative style. The book concerns one Miss Julia Garnet, a retired school teacher who after losing Harriet – her close friend and housemate of 30 years – decides to take a six month break in Venice. Julia, seemingly a bit of a hermit at the outset of the story, undergoes a personal journey. She is slowly pried out of her shell by a series of friends who she meets. Her opinions and judgements are challenged in the time that she spends in the watery, enchanting city of Venice.
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