Tennyson's Gift |
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Lynne Truss
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Pages: 288 (Paperback)
ISBN: 1861977131
Pub: Profile Books Ltd
Pub date: 2007-07-01
Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 281165
Editorial Review:
Farce is one of the hardest literary forms to bring off: in Tennyson's Gift Lynne Truss manages the correct combination of inventiveness, planning and energy. All of her historical figures have fixed ideas that make them act against their own best interests--Tennyson is paranoid about reviews and photographs and Lewis Carroll is a snob fascinated by photography and small girls; the painter Watts agonises about past betrayals while ignoring his young actress wife Ellen Terry.
This is all the more a tour-de-force because Truss knows her material well enough to make much of the comic exaggeration come from things that were actually the case--the Tennysons spent their time on the Isle of Wight desperately hoping for a royal visit. She adds to the mix a phrenologist with an obnoxious child and a writer of anonymous letters, so that the sections of this novel continually build up comic intensity.
Most of the comedy here comes from excellent structure and timing and only in part from our preparedness to view eminent Victorians with the condescension of hindsight; this is an extravaganza with its roots in good sense and a fascination with the famous dead as they actually were. --Roz Kaveney
Reader Reviews:
Dark and delicious (1/1 people found this helpful)
This is by far the best book Lynne Truss has written. The characters are strong and the imagery she conjours up is brilliant. The jacket is awful, but once you get over that, the journey is wonderful, and of course rather funny. But, be aware, the humour is dark and delicious.
Brilliant! (7/8 people found this helpful)
Having read and loved Eats, Shoots and Leaves, I then bought Making the Cat Laugh, which is a collection of Lynne Truss's (hope I got the apostrophe in the right place!) articles on single life. It was so funny and so much like my own life that I was desperate to read something else by Lynne and delighted to come across Tennyson's Gift. She brings together in the same place Tennyson, Lewis Carroll and several other eminent Victorians and makes a wonderfully warm and funny novel out of it. It's now my favourite of her books - and there are still two novels I haven't read yet! Highly recommended.
It just didn't do it for me! (4/9 people found this helpful)
I was introduced to Lynne Truss via her excellent, informative and witty "Eats Shoots and Leaves", and I took out "Tennyson's Gift" from the library full of expectation. Maybe it was just me, but I found it unnecessarily wordy and very slow to get going. I rarely give up on a book, but this one just didn't do it for me, and I returned it to the library after Chapter Four. There will be those who love it, I'm sure! On a positive note, Lynne, the punctuation was absolutely first rate!
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