This is my fourth Brookner and it won’t be my last. There’s been no logic to my selection, just whatever one happens to come my way, and it’s pretty easy to see why those who like her really like her but also why her detractors accuse her of simply writing the same book over and over. Her palate is not a broad one and you can think of her as limited or you can call her a specialist; I’m not sure at this stage in her life either description would worry her because this is what she’s done and you can take her or leave her. I think she’s probably my favourite female author. I’m not sure I’ve read more than two books by any other woman and the list of female authors I have read is not an extensive one but I do find myself drawn back to this woman. I could easily pick up another book by her tomorrow.What amazes me about her—and I don’t think that’s too strong a word (hence the five stars)—is her ability to write page after page of what really amounts to little more than description—and minute descriptions at that—and yet keep my interest. I start to bore myself if I have to write more than a couple of sentences and I think this is why she continues to fascinate me because she does what I can’t do and does it so well. Latecomers is a family saga in essence despite the fact she gets through these lives in a mere 224 pages and yet someone manages to devote and entire chapter to a shopping trip and it not feel either out of place or overkill. She begins with the book’s central characters, Hartmann and Fibich, who come to London as German refugees, meet at boarding school and become lifelong friends, closer than most brothers. I only highlighted one extract as I was reading the book:In the office both Myers and Goodman were apt to be stimulated to unusual loquacity on the subject of past days, days from the beginnings of their lives, and their anecdotes struck Hartmann and Fibich as uninteresting, insignificant. Both felt cut off from such attachments, and also from the need to sentimentalize them, knowing instinctively how endangered they were in this respect. Nostalgia is only for the securely based. Neither men can remember much of their past. Fibich, for example, clings to “an image of himself as a very small, very plump boy, engulfed in a large wing chair which he knew to be called the Voltaire, feeling lazy, replete, and secure in the dying light of a winter afternoon.” Hartmann “from his earliest days … remembered scenes that might have been devised by Proust” but of the two of them he dwells the least on that time; “he had survived: that was all that mattered in any life.” They become very successful—firstly in the unlikely profession of greeting cards, “greetings cards, of a cruel and tasteless nature, which [pay] their way very nicely for about twenty years, until Hartmann, who did little work but was valued for his Fingerspitzengefühl [lovely term], his flair, his sixth sense, suggested that the market in this commodity was self-limiting, and that there were fortunes to be made in photocopying machines.” They marry wives that suit their personalities who somehow also manage to become friends, have kids—the wrong kids it has to be said and by that I mean the Hartmanns would’ve been happier with the Fibichs’ son and the Fibichs would’ve been happier with the Hartmanns’ daughter—watch them grow up, marry and have children of their own. Mostly they manage to be proud of their families or at least never too ashamed. Despite never being short of a bob or two—they don’t have to think twice about buying a flat for their kids or hiring a nanny to help them out—these two men live basically ordinary lives which revolve around work, food and appearances.Both men are called Thomas and so refer to each other by their surnames—as, interestingly, do their wives—but I do think Brookner is making a point by giving both men the same name—I say this because I did exactly the same in my own novel Milligan and Murphy where both brothers are called John—because it suggests that they’re two halves of the same composite individual and the simple fact is they do complement each other very nicely. They buy flats in the same building and spend much of their spare time in each other’s company. The odds of them finding two wives who could accept each man’s very different friend is nothing short of miraculous. Of the two main characters—although to be fair entire chapters are devoted to the wives and children—I was drawn to Fibich because he’s the one who struggles the most with who he is. He’s the one who, in his sixties, ends up having to take trip back to Berlin to face his past, a thing although Hartmann is supportive of he would never need to do. To be fair I couldn’t really relate to anyone in the book—the two I disliked the most were Hartmann’s wife, “Yvette, who possesse[d] an almost fabulous self-regard, a wonderful body and a childlike lack of sexual response,” and Fibich’s son who could be similarly described although he does have a more grown-up (and modern) attitude towards sex. Everyone is wrapped up in his or her own wee world and although this is me calling the pot black, being that way is fine but reading about self-absorbed people can be a bit wearing which, again, is when Brookner surprises me because she holds my interest. I’m not sure I ever got to the stage of caring about these people but I was absorbed by them.So, five stars. Had I reviewed this on my blog I might’ve been a bit more cautious realising that the book’s not going to be to everyone’s tastes but on Goodreads I’m more subjective. I liked it. If I could’ve managed to get through the book in a single day I would’ve.
Hartmann and Fibich come to England as children before the Second World War on the historic kindertransport. They are in every sense of the phrase: displaced persons, and remain so all their lives. They meet and bond with each other in a wretched boarding school. In London they spend their childhood and adolescent years with Hartmann's Aunt Marie, before moving on to lives as successful businessmen, though their business is a frivolous one, low-brow greeting cards at one point, that neither takes seriously. The overarching theme for Hartmann is one of sensuous burial in the present as a means of avoiding unpleasant memories. Yvette, his wife, is deliberately out of step with the liberated women of her generation. She has a severe deficit in the empathy department; and her shallowness is admirably reflected in her materialism, which makes her a perfect fit for Hartmann. Everything with Yvette is appearance, surface, display. Everything with Hartmann is pleasure, indulgence, release. Fibich by contrast is someone who has not left his past behind. He is haunted by the Shoah, particularly the loss of his parents. He suffers keenly all his life from what psychologists call "survivor guilt." He wishes to understand it, but it's too much cognitive dissonance that will never lend itself to neat answers. (One is reminded of the guard in Auschwitz who says to Primo Levi: "There is no why here.") The woman Fibich marries, Christine, is Aunt Marie's niece and a more self-effacing and humble character you are unlikely to come across this side of Dickens; though she is without the unbearable tics Dickens gives his characters, or the cloying cheerfulness. Fibich meets Christine when she arrives every Friday to help Aunt Marie prepare her only dish: braised tongue à l'orientale. She stays with Fibich during the aunt's precipitous decline and death, and by then they are bound to each other by mutual pain and loss. Life for Brookner's characters, some of them, is a constant risk and worry. Whatever they do they are marked by a certain paralysis by analysis, stuck to the point of inaction. Though they try they can never remedy their affliction. Such are Fibich and Christine, such is also Hartmann, though Yvette is all instinct, and intuitive grasping. As for the writing, the novel all but leaps to life in your hands. Brookner is such an efficient writer; by p. 84 she has gone through the upbringing, childhood and adult psychological life of all four main characters. The section in which Christine and Fibich have a son of their own, Toto, whose sheer life force all but bowls them over, is dazzling. Toto's familiar is Yvette, with whom he shares an adoration for surfaces. He wants to be an actor, and one has to admit that seems perfect for this debauched Narcissus. This is one of my favorite Brookner novels and I highly recommend it.
What do You think about Latecomers (1990)?
Story of friends and business partners who first met at school in England as refugees from Germany, though like many of her books, if she didn't say when it was set, you probably wouldn't guess. Fibitch and Hartman are very different in personality and how they cope with loss and trauma from their childhoods, and indeed the troubles that come afterwards in their outwardly successful lives, but they have an intense friendship that lasts throughout their lives, so that each is closer to some members of the other's family than their own. Most chapters focus on one character, but it manages not to be disjointed; instead you feel more empathy with and thus understanding of the character.
—Cecily
I've found a new author, and she's prolific. Will she maintain my interest and the standard I enjoyed so much in 'Latecomers'? I intend to find out. 'Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter dark chocolate on his tongue, and while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette.' Opening sentence 'Latecomers' Anita Brookner. Delicious sentence - perhaps 'a voluptuary' is an oxymoron? Not to nit pick, the rest of the book is as beautiful. The language, the insights, the skill, the simple story, are exquisite, and absorbing.
—Marie Clair
