Miss Garnet's Angel

Product Information

When I finally reached the Piazza San Marco and saw the basilica across the square, like a great gleaming pearl, all my prejudices were turned upside down and I fell unreservedly in love with the place. I discovered the story has strong Zoroastrian antecedents —and I became very enamoured of the Zoroastrians. However, she mentions in a discussion on the 'Confessions' podcast with Giles Fraser that she was a "baby of the National Health Service", and her doctor's first "National Health baby" in 1948. Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. The greatest wisdoms are not those which are written down but those which are passed between human beings who understand each other….

A story of journeying, both physical and personal, as Tobias sets off at his father’s behest, in the company of the Archangel Gabriel. When fiction crosses the Danube, critics scratching for a suitable adjective to describe Eastern European otherness go for "Nabokovian" or hint at kinship with Kundera. An incandescent debut, and bestseller in Britain, luminously details transforming encounters that change a lonely spinster's life when she decides to live in Venice. Golightly's Holiday, The Other Side of You and Where Three Roads Meet, a retelling of the Oedipus myth to Sigmund Freud in the last months of his life.Perhaps most of all I loved uncovering the role of the dog i the Tobit story —dog’s were not at all popular with the Jews and Tobias’s dog is the only one who gets a good press in the Hebrew scriptures. When both it and Toby disappear, Julia, though by now disappointed in love, rallies to find the painting, help Sara, and live to the full in the city that has taught her how "to learn and enjoy. The main character Julia Garnet is an elderly lady who has held herself tightly controlled through most of her life, but upon the death of her friend and roommate through the past 30 years she embarks on a journey to Venice, where she is captured by its beauty and magic, and not least the angel Raphael, depicted in paintings and sculptures around the historical city, seems to have a special grasp on her. What would it be like not having to understand something intellectually but actually entering into it, becoming part of the story instead of the critic? Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes.

After her initial teaching career, she retrained as a Jungian analytical psychotherapist, subsequently working in the NHS. She makes new friends, and meets new, interesting people, including a young man and woman, twins, who are restoring a series of panels depicting the tale of Tobias and the Angel, a story which is told in the Apocrypha, and which holds a strange fascination for Julia. Julia Garnet is sixty years old, emotionally repressed, sexually inexperienced and has spent her life in almost sacrificial frugality.A word-of-mouth bestseller and a critics’ favorite on both sides of the Atlantic, Salley Vickers’ 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. Through it all, an overarching, timeless vision of “a world poised between truth and lies” shines through —filtered through the enigmatic character of contemporary Venice itself. Auf dieser Reise findet und verliert sie eine Liebe, findet Freunde und verliert sich seltsam tief in religiösen Mythen.

The habits of a lifetime are not easy to break and Julia seeks out a fairly basic lodging except for one detail: the balcony that presents to her view the glory of Venice's architecture and that indescribable light that so intrigued artists from da Vinci to Canaletto and beyond. I have to share a quote from the Tobit story: “Azarius, I said, You told me once I may find out who or what you worshiped . It's lovely to sit around drinking coffee and talking about books at Cambridge, but I sort of felt that English is a cheat subject. All my characters are aspect on my own selves —and the more successful the character I would say the more unconscious the self. This is a novel that has really withstood the test of time and it is a book I often suggest to people who are off to Venice.A man dies leaving behind a wife and a mistress, but, against the expectation, these women become f not friend allies.

I’m a great devotee of Conrad —when one thinks he wrote not even in his second language but his first, the mind boggles. What, for example, is Julia’s conception of death —and how does it evolve, particularly leading up to her last night in Venice? Based primarily in the unique setting of Venice, it also paints a picture of the city and highlighted some interesting places to visit on our trip. There, as she steps off her water taxi at the Campo Angelo Raffael to move into the apartment she's rented, she notices, high up on the Campo's church, statues of an angel, a boy, and a dog.At first, I kind of enjoyed these philosophy-of-religion tangents (and being able to make connections between the story proper and that of Tobias and Sara--presented in alternating chapters), but eventually I tired of it and found much of it rather repetitive.