Forse si solleva un pochettino la parte centrale intitolata “Il passato”, ma è sensazione che dura poco: anche qui Hadley sembra produrre più fumo che arrosto.

My complaints are few. Hadley, who satisfied me with quiet, nuanced strokes—I didn’t need a dramatic plotline—tried to add drama with a few of the climactic events that were just a bit contrived to me. Hadley also occasionally forced lift-off where none felt organically present. And, the sudden presence of a late-coming chracter seemed a bit too symbolically “meaningful.”Although I have encounted Hadley twice before to an 'OK' level she has stayed on the radar because one always felt she had solid novel in her, and this is solid 'liked it' territory. You’re going to be happy with Zachary. Imagine how easy your life is going to be. He’ll adore you and look after you, and you’ll have so much money that everything will be made easy, and you won’t ever have to work unless you want to. You’ll be able to buy all the beautiful clothes you want, and live in a beautiful house.”

The structure is what makes this a particularly brilliant book. Hadley reveals history with the most impactful timing, giving context which, at turns, explains, or even upends your original understanding. As a writer, I really appreciate how important this timing is; the "when" the author chooses to reveal certain information to the reader can alter the entire book.

I will start off by saying...this book is both beautiful and genius. This is my first read of Ms. Hadley and I am so moved, impressed and delighted. Ms. Hadley has the insight of both Elizabeth Bowen and Anita Brookner with the intelligent humor of Iris Murdoch and yes I am going to say it....the quiet and delicious passion of my queen and empress Dame A. S. Byatt !! This is the real McCoy !! Tessa Hadley masters the everyday in Late in the Day: everyday people living everyday lives in everyday situations. While not my life or the lives of people I know, Hadley’s characters and their lives are easily imaginable as real. Late in the Day does not transcend the everyday so much as help us to understand it. a b c d e f The Writers of Wales Database: Hadley, Tessa, Literature Wales, archived from the original on 6 March 2016 , retrieved 4 March 2016

Late in the Day is all about the characters, how they experience loss, and highlighting the complex dynamics of close relationships. The writing is beautiful and so easy to read. I also found it insightful, sensitive, and brilliant. Hadley exposed these characters’ innermost feelings, which are not always pretty or expected. Another work of quiet brilliance by Hadley! As Ron Charles, book editor of The Washington Post, says in his review “The Past” is one of those books that withers in summary. It is hard to describe this and other Hadley novels and stories without them sounding a little like watching paint drying. But in The Past, Hadley captures with beautiful words the story of a reunion of four adult siblings, two children and a couple of teenagers, at their ancestral home of their Grandparents. Will the 3-week holiday they've decided on be the last time they gather here? They have come together to ultimately decide whether it's time to sell the house that stands empty, used only for holidays. Three sisters, (Harriet, Alice, and Fran), and one brother, ( Roland), and their children return home to their country home. The Master Bedroom (2007) focuses on a single character, a female academic in her mid-forties who leaves London to look after her elderly mother in Wales and finds herself sexually pursued by a teenager and his father. [10] [26] [27] The novel explores early middle age, as well as the impact of mental deterioration. [10] [27] Liesl Schillinger, in a review for The New York Times, describes it as "a chess game of slow-burn erotic maneuvers that produce tantalizingly unpredictable outcomes." [26] Briscoe, writing in The Guardian, highlights the novel's "stylistic and observational brilliance," but criticises Hadley for "refus[ing] to let dramatic action, an escalation of tension, or any other conventional narrative lubricant dictate the rhythms of everyday life," considering that "she exercises such restraint that her brilliance is ultimately muted." [27] The London Train [ edit ] Tessa Hadley's writing is like a specific taste - think cilantro, marzipan, or liver. You either like it immediately or it doesn't mesh with your tastes. I found myself trying very hard to get into the flow of the narrative but it was like an undertow. No matter how hard I tried to stay afoot, I kept going down.I honestly don't know what more readers of literary fiction could possibly want, than what Tessa Hadley has done here.

Nostalgia is so very sweet and so very sad in this book and the desire to love and be loved far outweighs our more aggressive impulses to hurt and destroy. A British middle-class family of three adult sisters and their brother arrive at their grandparents’ old house, a small English rectory, for a three week summer holiday, which ends with a meeting to decide on whether or not to keep the house. Hadley’s skill makes it effortless for the reader to follow the many characters. We are in 21 st century real-time narrative in a house that is hauntingly full of the past. Gorgeous repeating images of mirrors, rain, the imprint on the bottom of antique teacups (lineage being another theme), and slight shifts in light heighten our experience of the siblings’ nostalgia and other yearnings. Claustrophobia is lessened by the extension beyond the inside of the house and its inhabitants to landscape and history, including the 1968 workers and student riots in Paris and the disappeared of Argentina, home country of Pilar, new wife of Roland, the brother in the family. There is also an old woodland cottage, like something out of a fairy tale, ‘The children were aware at once that the cottage smelled awful – not innocently of leaf-rot and minerals like outside, but of something held furtively close, ripening in secret,’ where many of the significant events of the novel take place. Like the rectory its continuing presence in the family’s life is poignantly precarious. From novels about parenting to making love last, here are some great reads to accompany our forties Tessa Hadley is a very talented writer, and she has a keen eye for dialogue and character development. From the very outset I predicted how the story would unfold, and I'll admit I was a little disappointed, because it seemed almost too predictable. I really never understood what the characters saw in each other except the pull of gravity keeping them together, and I felt that Lydia, Christine, and Alex were fairly unlikable, full of recriminations yet unwilling to say what's on their mind. You know how sometimes you would meet some people who were friends and after knowing this fact and even spending time with them you just can’t help wondering “Have I miss something? Why are they friends, again”? Yes. That was exactly how the main characters’ group feel like to me. Especially between Christine and Lydia whose friendship was so fraught and strange I found it absolutely bizarre they couldn’t see through it themselves. Well mostly that Christine couldn’t, a sophisticated and articulate woman that she was.

Their children also play a part in the book. Lydia doesn't want to see Zachary's dead body while her art student daughter Grace wants to make a death mask of him. Grace also has a tremendous crush on Sam, Alex's son from his first marriage. Sam is now a famous musician and Grace's feelings are not reciprocated. I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones. The novel form is made for rereading. Novels are by their nature too long, too baggy, too full of things – you can't hold them completely in your mind. This isn't a flaw – it's part of the novel's richness: its length, multiplicity of aspects, and shapelessness resemble the length and shapelessness of life itself. By the time you reach the end of the novel you will have forgotten the beginning and much of what happens in between: not the main outlines but the fine work, the detail and the music of the sentences – the particular words, through which the novel has its life. You think you know a novel so well that there must be nothing left in it to discover but the last time I reread Emma I found a little shepherd boy, brought into the parlour to sing for Harriet when she's staying with the Martin family. I'm sure he was never in the book before.” The Past falls into that group of novels in which a family of adult siblings get together in the home where they grew up for a last reunion before that home must be sold. I think we are drawn to such stories because they examine at least three generations, because all families have their quirks and issues, sorrows and joys, and because we can see how the passing of almost one hundred years affects the way life is for each generation.