Review by Booklist Review
Best-selling novelist and Newsweek columnist Quindlen has always been an indefatigable reader, and British novels set in London, indisputably the capital of literature, have been a particular passion. Quindlen acquired a vivid impression of the city from absorbing Dickens, Eliot, Galsworthy, Doyle, Woolf, and Lessing, writers for whom London was as much a living character as their indelible protagonists. But she admits she was reluctant to travel there and obliterate the imagined with the actual. Finally, a book tour sends her to this fabled place, and she does revel in London's evocative complexity as she undertakes pilgrimages to literary landmarks. Deftly contrasting the London frozen in the amber of great fiction with today's city, Quindlen discerns the key lesson of English literature: the unvarying nature both of social problems and personal dramas. The continuity that links, for instance, characters and predicaments in Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003) to those in Dickens' works. A consistently enlightening and enjoyable writer, Quindlen presents a smart, bookish, wry, and stimulating portrait of the most literary of cities. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This latest entry in National Geographic?s series of famous writers on famous cities is like the British dish bubble and squeak: a hash of thrown together bits and pieces that might be tasty but isn?t very filling. An avid reader, Quindlen (Living Out Loud, etc.) developed an acute case of literature-induced Anglophilia at an early age. As a precocious youngster, she was enchanted by the terrace houses, green squares and horse-drawn carriages of the written worlds of Daniel Defoe, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens and Henry James?s London. Later swept away by Virginia Woolf and the Mitford sisters, Quindlen doesn?t actually visit London until her mid-40s while on a trip to promote one of her own books. Quindlen?s narrative essays, while thematic, lack enough specific locations to make them consistently interesting. While she comments on the extraordinary fact that one can still find one?s way around London based on 18th-century literary plot points, she doesn?t take explicit literary tours herself, leaving readers to wonder to what extent the expectations of a lifelong love affair with the London of her mental library are met. Instead, Quindlen shifts the focus away from herself and toward her experience of traveling with her 20-something writer son, comparing and contrasting their generational impressions of the city. Map not seen by PW. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Review by Library Journal Review
Novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Quindlen indulges her love of London with a short but satisfying tour of the real and the imagined city. Though she has visited London innumerable times in the pages of literature, she did not make her first real trip there until 1995. Here, she takes the reader with her as she discovers her imagined London and recalls the pages and places of writers from Shakespeare and Dickens to Kathleen Winsor, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith. Musing on London as literary home for both writers and their stories, Quindlen finds a familiar presence in the streets, squares, and landmarks, notes the blue enamel plaques designating writers' houses, recognizes the slang, and runs into literary ghosts around every bend. Recommended for public and undergraduate libraries, and all Anglophiles. [Quindlen's book is the latest entry in the "National Geographic Directions" series, in which literary greats e.g., Robert Hughes in the recently released Barcelona reflect on their favorite places. Ed.] Melissa Stearns, Franklin Pierce Coll. Lib., Rindge, NH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An affectionate, richly allusive tribute to the city the author first encountered in books as a child and finally visited in person in her early 40s. Part of a series that links noted writers with their favorite cities, these are personal observations and reminiscences rather than comprehensive travel guide. Like many readers of Dickens, columnist/novelist Quindlen (Loud and Clear, p. 121, etc.) expected London to be foggy and squalid and was surprised by the quite different contemporary reality: gentrified row-houses face tended squares; notorious Southwark, once the site of the debtors' prison where the Dickens family was incarcerated, is the site of the Tate Modern; and daylight formerly blackened by coal fires now charms with its "silver-gilt quality." No literary snob, the author seeks out the houses in which Galsworthy's Forsytes were supposed to reside as enthusiastically as she looks for the places Dickens immortalized, and though she makes frequent allusions to literary figures like Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, whose books are set in London, she doesn't neglect such popular authors as P.D. James and Elizabeth George, whose mysteries often take place there. Quindlen pays the obligatory but disappointing pilgrimage to Sherlock Holmes's block of Baker Street, where an anonymous office building now stands; she muses on the differences between American and British English; and she highlights the changes wrought by immigrants to the city as she notes the ethnic isolation of the characters in Monica Ali's Brick Lane, to whom historical London is a foreign country. She recalls the adolescent pleasure of reading the then-shocking Forever Amber as well as Georgette Heyer's popular novels of debauched Regency bucks and penniless beauties. Quindlen is an unabashed Anglophile, entranced as much by London's literature as its history; she mentions for example that the German bombardment during WWII destroyed Paternoster Row, the home of numerous British publishing houses. Not definitive, but enjoyable for the author's evocative response to a great city. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
