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A Private View | 
 enlarge | Author: Anita Brookner
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £6.99
Buy Used: £0.01
You Save: £6.98 (100%)
New (1) Used (66) Collectible (1) from £0.01
Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 839573
Media: Paperback
Edition: New Ed
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 4.8 x 0.7
ISBN: 0140236538
EAN: 9780140236538
ASIN: 0140236538
Publication Date: January 3, 1998
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Nice clean condition. crease along spine and front cover where been read, Fast despatch by first class post
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| Customer Reviews:
 The understated story of an ageing man November 11, 2007
Philippe Horak (Zug, Switzerland)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
George Bland has planned to spend his retirement in leisurely travel and modest entertainment with his friend Michael Putnam. However when Putnam dies George has to try to impose some purpose on his solitary life.
One day a lady of about thirty-five, Katy Gibb, appears as a temporary resident of a neighbouring flat. She claims to be acquainted with the owners' apartment, the Dunlops, although nobody in the house has been notified of Katy's arrival. She is a greedy, selfish, alluring and manipulative person and she immediately exerts a strange influence on George. Because of Katy George is forced to acknowledge that his fastidious and careful life so far has shown the evident lack of passion and daring. As this realization takes hold, George has to decide how much - or how little - he is willing to do to transform the satus quo.
Anita Brookner explores the complications that arise when one solitary man comes up against a woman who seems determined to invade his solitude. The main character is an ageing bachelor whose existence has been virtually a mirror image of his name. But can Katy's presence really change his character or is there an age when one his past changing?
 An unlikely premise August 14, 2007
Mrs Everywoman (London)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am a huge admirer of Anita Brookner, particularly "Hotel du Lac" and "Bay of Angels" and I DID enjoy this novel, but I have one major problem with it, and I apologise to Ms Brookner if I am missing something here. Ms Brookner has always been a fascinating chronicler of the female heart and mind, but if I hadn't read most of her other novels this one might have put me off, because of what seemed to me such out-of-character behaviour on the part of the main character, interestingly ordinary though he was in general.
I don't think Ms Brookner is the sort of female novelist who thinks men are complete idiots, but I DO wonder about the central character here.
The action takes place in London in what appears to be the Knightsbridge, or Mayfair area. The plot is generated when the protagonist, a retired personnel director aged , I think, 67, agrees to allow a young female, who is a complete stranger to him, to occupy a neighbouring apartment, to which he holds the keys in the owners' absence. This seems totally at odds with the character of the protagonist, who is cautious, has avoided marriage, after a long relationship with a woman, and has just lost a close male friend to cancer, and inherited the friend's estate. He has worked in the same firm all his life, working his way up from the bottom, taken holidays and walks with the close male friend, and caution appears to be his middle name. He was so cautious that his girlfriend of many years became exasperated and married someone else, a doctor many years her senior.
The young woman says she has met the owners of the neighbouring apartment in America, and they told her she could use their apartment. She has nothing in writing to confirm this, nor has our hero had any communication from the owners. Now this is an apartment building presided over by an inquisitive and rather overweening desk clerk or doorman, and these are sort of places where, in my experience, strangers are not encouraged. The young woman, who is plainly on the make, tries to borrow money from the protagonist to start a business . In the meantime she makes use of the contents of the refrigerator in the borrowed apartment, and start's to wear the wife's clothes, etc. When she eventually leaves, after extracting money from the protagonist, she drops the keys into his letter-box, though he has not even bothered to make sure she returns them. Then he gets his cleaning woman to spend a couple of hours cleaning up the neighbours' flat, and the couple who own it are delighted, on their return , at how spick and span it is.
Would another woman not notice someone had occupied her flat for several weeks? Who's been sleeping in MY bed? What about the unlaundered sheets on the bed, the items missing from the fridge, the fact that the wife's clothes have been worn by a woman of more buxom build, and the likelihood that items might even be missing? The protagonist isn't even particularly infatuated with the young woman, so far as I can see, though he had contemplated taking a holiday with her, and even a future where her youth and his money would struggle for dominance in the relationship.
To make matters worse, our hero's former (now widowed) girlfriend makes a surprise visit on a Sunday, which is not her usual day of the week to visit, and informs him she is in London because she had to take her son to the dentist. On a Sunday? Novelists, once they have gained our confidence, can get away with quite a lot, but, coming as it does at the outset of this novel, the protagonist's decision to allow the young woman the use of his neighbours' apartment lacks credibility, for me at any rate, and it irritated me right through the novel, as I kept expecting the penny to drop for our pensioner as to what he had let himself in for, but not a bit of it!
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