Anita Brookner

Anitia Brookner died the other day. Brookner was an English art historian and novelist. I think I’ve read almost all of her many novels.

At times they grow tedious, but she wrote well and her themes captured my interest. In 1984 she won the Booker Prize for her novel, Hotel du Lac--a tale of a lonely woman coming to terms with her solitary life during a visit to a hotel by a Swiss lake.

At the Hairdressers was her last novel and the first to be published as an e-book. It is the only one I wrote about on this blog. Her others were written before I started blogging. The following post was written four years ago.


…we are all alone, that no reciprocity is to be sought between people formed by different outlooks, and not only outlooks but different environments, both mental and physical. Anita Brookner

There are several firsts in Anita Brookner’s latest novel, At the Hairdressers. It is her first e-book; in fact, it is only available as Penguin Short e-book. It is her first novel after a lapse of several years. For a while, she was publishing a new novel each year like clockwork, most of which I read. Now they appear intermittently and since she is almost 84, I don’t imagine there will be many more.

It is also the first Kindle e-book I have read from start to finish. After many tedious criticisms of e-books in general, I have finally mastered the fine art of highlighting passages and then copying them into my commonplace book. As readers of this blog have been reminded all too often, these steps are essential to my way of reading.

At the Hairdressers is similar to her other novels. There is a lonely woman (occasionally a lonely man), usually educated and reasonably well off, emotionally reserved, and finished with their professional life. They long for friendship or perhaps a lover, a happiness that is never fulfilled, without hope or expectation that anything will happen to them other than yet another blank day.

Solitude is the familiar burden for Elizabeth Warner in At the Hairdressers. She lives in a basement flat in London and leaves the house only to go shopping and have her hair done. Her only “friends” are the people she sees on the streets, the market, or the women at her salon. Mostly, what the 80 year-old Elizabeth longs for is youth.

…a brooding and no doubt disagreeable old woman to whom memories of youth come unbidden, and unwelcome, now that youth is out of reach.

Sometimes the young do nothing for one’s dignity.

At the Hairdressers opens on this theme as Elizabeth recounts a dream. In it she recalls the small group of friends she had as a student in college, imagines what course their lives have taken, and how much she would enjoy seeing them again. Of course it was youth that was being celebrated.

When she chances upon one of these friends, she is immediately disappointed by the wide social gap between them and the comparative inadequacy and failures of her own life. She concludes that the dream only brought back feelings that are gone forever now.

Again, like most of the other books Brookner has written, this short novel is infused with inwardness, continual reflection by the protagonist of their life, their life unlived, and the only life that one can expect now.

I rather hope I shall die at the hairdresser's, for they are bound to know what to do. At least that is what I tell myself.

You have to like this kind of internal dialogue to enjoy Anita Brookner’s novels. And yet it spite of their repetitiveness, self-centeredness and absence of any action, I find it hard to put one down once I start. I may not read it all at once, but I do eventually finish, knowing full well that the next one, if there is to be one, will not be any different.

Anita Brookner

Anitia Brookner died the other day. Brookner was an English art historian and novelist. I think I’ve read almost all of her many novels. As I say in reposting this blog, they are all pretty much the same.

At times they grow tedious, but she wrote well and her themes captured my interest. In 1984 she won the Booker Prize for her novel, Hotel du Lac--a tale of a lonely woman coming to terms with her solitary life during a visit to a hotel by a Swiss lake.

At the Hairdressers was her last novel and the first to be published as an e-book. It is the only one I wrote about on this blog. Her others were written before I started blogging. The following post was written four years ago.


…we are all alone, that no reciprocity is to be sought between people formed by different outlooks, and not only outlooks but different environments, both mental and physical.
Anita Brookner

There are several firsts in Anita Brookner’s latest novel, At the Hairdressers. It is her first e-book; in fact, it is only available as Penguin Short e-book. It is her first novel after a lapse of several years. For a while, she was publishing a new novel each year like clockwork, most of which I read. Now they appear intermittently and since she is almost 84, I don’t imagine there will be many more.

It is also the first Kindle e-book I have read from start to finish. After many tedious criticisms of e-books in general, I have finally mastered the fine art of highlighting passages and then copying them into my commonplace book. As readers of this blog have been reminded all too often, these steps are essential to my way of reading.

At the Hairdressers is like all of Brookner’s previous novels. There is a lonely woman (occasionally a lonely man), usually educated and reasonably well off, emotionally reserved, and finished with their professional life. They long for friendship or perhaps a lover, a happiness that is never fulfilled, without hope or expectation that anything will happen to them other than yet another blank day.

Solitude is the familiar burden for Elizabeth Warner in At the Hairdressers. She lives in a basement flat in London and leaves the house only to go shopping and have her hair done. Her only “friends” are the people she sees on the streets, the market, or the women at her salon. Mostly, what the 80 year-old Elizabeth longs for is youth.

…a brooding and no doubt disagreeable old woman to whom memories of youth come unbidden, and unwelcome, now that youth is out of reach.

Sometimes the young do nothing for one’s dignity.

At the Hairdressers opens on this theme as Elizabeth recounts a dream. In it she recalls the small group of friends she had as a student in college, imagines what course their lives have taken, and how much she would enjoy seeing them again. Of course it was youth that was being celebrated.

When she chances upon one of these friends, she is immediately disappointed by the wide social gap between them and the comparative inadequacy and failures of her own life. She concludes that the dream only brought back feelings that are gone forever now.

Like most of the other books Brookner has written, this short novel is infused with inwardness, continual reflection by the protagonist of their life, their life unlived, and the only life that one can expect now.

I rather hope I shall die at the hairdresser's, for they are bound to know what to do. At least that is what I tell myself.

You have to like this kind of internal dialogue to enjoy Anita Brookner’s novels. And yet it spite of their repetitiveness, self-centeredness and absence of any action, I find it hard to put one down once I start. I may not read it all at once, but I do eventually finish, knowing full well that the next one, if there is to be one, will not be any different.

Longing for Company

Anita Brookner has published a new novel, Strangers. It is her first in several years and she says it’s her last. For a while she was publishing a novel with regularity every year. They were all pretty much the same and I enjoyed each one, even though at times I grew weary of their repetitiousness.

They uniformly tell the story of middle age to older, middle class, white, well-educated and well off English men and women who live alone. Solitude is their dilemma. Solitude is the subject Brookner confronts head on in each of her books. To avoid it all, her characters uniformly flee to France or Italy where they do little else but continue to ruminate about solitude. They return to their silent flat unchanged and no less unsettled.

Brookner's latest novel tells the same story, this time about a man, Paul Sturgis, 73 years of age, a retired banker trying to find a way to get through the day in his dark and dreary Kensington flat that we learn all too often he dislikes immensely.

“He lived alone in a flat which had one represented the pinnacle of attainment but which now depressed him beyond measure.”

He has no wife, was never married, is without family, friends, faith, hobbies, or as far as I can tell, any pleasures other than reading and walking. His only encounters occur during his walks and visits to local shops and restaurants. The strangers that he finds during these daily activities are his only companions.

“Sturgis had always known that it was his destiny to die among strangers.”

He does have three very different relationships that sputter on and off throughout the tale. He perfunctorily visits his sister in law once each week until she dies and leaves him her flat and her money. On a flight to Venice he starts talking to a woman who, after returning to London, pesters him with her restless needs and demands. And one day he chances upon a former lover who has aged drastically, is in ill health, and who continues to humiliate him.

All he yearns for is for a little company, a like-minded companion, or at the very least someone to talk to.

“…he longed for conversation, for some sort of exchange, for the sort of questioning he was able to lavish on others, not out of need but out of sheer curiosity.”

In an interview Brookner said, “I wanted to describe a life without work, which is a great problem, as a lot of people are finding out now.” It is also clear that she wants to describe a life lived alone, a condition which is increasing common today. The statistics are revealing. In 1998, 26.2 million individuals lived alone in the United States. This represented 25.6 percent of US households, up sharply from 13 percent in 1960.

The statistics take on even greater significance when broken down by age and gender. In 1998, 48 percent of adult women and 21 percent of adult men 65 years old and older lived alone. Taken together they comprised almost 10 million individuals. It appears that at least for elderly women, living alone is becoming the norm.

Brookner is one of the few contemporary novelists to tackle this problem directly. She writes about an almost taboo topic and other than Vivian Gornick (see her essay On Living Alone in Approaching Eye Level) she describes the state of solitude as honestly and as deeply as anyone I know. In Strangers, Brookner writes about Sturgis:

“Reality was very different, reality was solitude, a consciousness of being left out, of being uncared for.”

“Reality for him was absence, colleagues with whom he had been on good terms…friends who had moved away…”

“Fortunately there was no shortage of strangers; in fact everyone was a stranger.”

One day a young woman at the checkout counter smiles at him. That hasn’t happened in ages. He muses, “That a young person could smile in the face of such dereliction struck him as miraculous. He gazed at her retreating back, thanking her silently for this evidence of a life still being lived.”