About this title: The highly anticipated new novel from the author of the acclaimed "What Was She Thinking?" is a rich, comic chronicle of one family's struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt.
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Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Very Good. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book! Minimal wear. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Purchasing this book supports the King County Library System Foundation. Thriftbooks and KCLSF have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date published: 2010
ISBN-13:9780061430213ISBN:0061430218
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Date published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780141024677ISBN:0141024674
Description: Acceptable. EXCELLENT value for money and ready for dispatch. Delivery usually within 3/5 days. Our reputation is built on our Speedy Delivery Service and our Customer Service Team. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Date published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780141024677ISBN:0141024674
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Date published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780141024677ISBN:0141024674
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Date published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780141024677ISBN:0141024674
Description: Good. This book is in GOOD overall condition. It shows signs of having been read and has general light wear to the cover, spine and pages. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Date published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780141024677ISBN:0141024674
Description: Very Good. Family business dispatching books to all over the world within 24/48 hours. Next day delivery and gist wrapping are available. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Fig Tree
Date published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780670916122ISBN:0670916129
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Fig Tree
Date published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780670916122ISBN:0670916129
Description: Good. Our aim is to create an overall satisfying buying experience for our customers through the provision of affordable books and a personalized approach to customer service. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Date published: 2009
ISBN-13:9780141024677ISBN:0141024674
Description: Good. Our aim is to create an overall satisfying buying experience for our customers through the provision of affordable books and a personalized approach to customer service. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Fig Tree
Date published: 2008
ISBN-13:9780670916122ISBN:0670916129
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. First Edition. 1st edition, 1st issue Cloth hardback in a lightly rubbed and bumped dust jacket Clean and tight with minor wear. Over twenty years selling secondhand books. read more
"I became interested in this book when I learned that the author also wrote "Notes on a Scandal" which was made into a really good movie a few years back (Cate Blanchett plays a school teacher who has an affair with her student, and is exposed by her supposed friend, Judy Dench). This book did not disappoint. I was captivated from the first page. The story concerns a NYC family who rallies around their father and mother when the father suffers a stroke which essentially puts him in a coma. The dad is a famous left-wing lawyer who represented various causes and infamous characters throughout his long career, and who had been a legendary beacon of moral good for his entire family. But in Heller's book,as in real life, no hero emerges with his reputation completely intact.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the book for me was watching how his adult children developed, having been raised by this absolute beacon of goodness, equality and justice. Karla is a hospital social worker with a serious weight problem and a bullying husband. Rosa is a beauty who suddenly becomes fascinated with Orthodox Judaism, having been raised by her parents to be "antitheistic" ( a new word to me). Lenny, the adopted son is constantly struggling with heroin addiction. Audrey, the wife, has got to be the most bitter angry shrew ever to come down the pike in literature. Yet each is portrayed in such vivid detail, I felt that I knew these people. There is not a note of falsity in this book.
And though the book is more about morality than religion, there are some interesting passages about religion, such as the following, where the Rabbi talks with Rosa who is struggling with intellect vs. faith.
"Faith is hard, Rosa. Nonbelievers often speak of faith as it it were something easy, a cop-out from the really tough business of confronting a meaningless universe, but it's not. It's doubt that's easy. The invisibility of Hashem, the fear we sometimes have that he is indifferent to earthly suffering, the explanations that science seems to offer for almost all the phenomena we once considered mysterious---these things make believing an enormous challenge.""
"I loved this author's evil snarky "Notes On A Scandal", but the follow-up, "Everything You Know", while also packed with delicious razor-sharp observations, was far too insubstantial in terms of story. Happily, "The Believers" both possesses these and a represents a return to form. Like the other two, the plot isn't clever: it simply sees a wife and her three grown-up children at turning points in their lives, and a few incidents feel just that, incidental, but the various strands are suitably rich and reach realistic conclusions. The characters are believable and sympathetic; the drama is moving; and as well as addressing standard major themes - love, death, purpose, perspective - specific matters are explored too, including socialism, Judaism and charitable work. My only criticism is that it was gratuitously vulgar in places. The central character has a grim view of the world, and the author agrees to an extent, but I still feel fiction should be an escape from, or at least a victory over, the horrors of reality."
"As radical political activist and lawyer Joel Litvinoff lies in a coma after a major stroke, his unusual family threatens to begin it's own breakdown. Joel's wife Audrey, always razor-tongued and opinionated, must not only deal with Joel's absence from her life but also come to terms with the nasty secret that her husband has been hiding from her for years. Meanwhile, Joel and Audrey's adopted son Lenny, a wastrel and drug addict, is working his usual game of manipulation and subterfuge on the rest of the family, seemingly unconcerned that his father lies incapacitated and dying. Daughter Rosa, once a socialist and activist like her parents, has decided to begin studies as an Orthodox Jew, much to the chagrin and disappointment of her antitheist mother who takes her conversion as a personal affront. Rounding out the bunch is daughter Karla, an obese and unhappy woman who is struggling not only to find fulfillment, but also to become pregnant at the behest of her uncaring and oblivious husband. As days turn to weeks with no news or improvement from Joel, situations begin to heat to a rapid boil, and each member of the family comes to their own moral precipice and must decide whether to let go and jump off, or to hang on to the things that are pulling them apart. Both comically astute and morally penetrating, The Believers is Heller at her skillful and avant-garde best.
A few years back, I had the unexpected pleasure of picking up my first book written by Zoë Heller. The book was What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal, and even with my relative inexperience at writing reviews at that time, I knew this author was someone to take seriously. When the opportunity came for me to read and review this book as part of a TLC Book Tour, I jumped at the chance. The book certainly didn't disappoint, and not only did I find it really hard to tear myself away from the pages of the story, I read the book in two sittings.
First of all, I felt that in her creation of the Litvinoffs, Heller does an amazing job of capturing the idiosyncrasies of a modern family in turmoil. Each character was like the point on a star, twinkling away in disorder and confusion. Although most of the characters had a somewhat repulsive outlook on life, they were the kind of characters you love to hate and whose antics you ingest feverishly in order to see just how bizarre and recalcitrant they will become. Each character was remarkably detailed and original, and for a work of fiction, these people were crazily realistic creatures. I think Audrey fascinated me the most. She was so scathing and fierce about everyone and everything that she came in contact with. I cringed in embarrassment and discomfort whenever she opened her mouth, but Heller had a way of making her so intriguing and interesting that you couldn't help but be completely absorbed by the woman. Audrey was a true original and although I was mostly scandalized by her behavior, I was unendingly entertained by her. Although I chose to focus mainly on the qualities of Audrey, I was truly impressed by all of the characters in this book. I didn't really like most of them but I felt that there was enough character dissection and detail in their creation to be able to understand what made them tick and why they acted as they did. I also liked the fact that Heller doesn't spend a lot of time worrying over the acceptability of her characters' beliefs and morals. There are no apologies here; these characters are who they are with no holes barred and no reservations.
I thought there was a huge amount of social commentary and irony here. One of the greatest ironies in the story was the fact that although the characters (mainly Audrey) constantly spouted socialist rhetoric and worked from that mindset, in their personal worlds people were far from equal and the common man in society was somewhat peevishly denigrated. It seemed as though they aspired to much loftier ideals than they could ever attain. This came up repeatedly throughout the story in their complaints about female doctors, their opinions on the hopeless futures of children of minorities and their unhappiness with their subjugated Latin housekeepers. They would walk through the story believing that they were on the side of the working man, the minority and society, but in reality their idealism was stripped away by their everyday experiences and actions. This book was simply a satirical masterpiece and I marveled at the way Heller created such meaningful social commentary in a tale full of miscreants.
I also thought that the research Heller did for this book was interesting. In the subplot involving Rosa, the reader is given a deep and extensive look into the tenants and rituals of Orthodox Judaism. I am very green to this subject but I felt that Heller did a wonderful job of explaining and highlighting these concepts for me. The book also also had some hysterically funny moments. The humor in this book was much like the characters: scathing and searing. I found myself snorting with amusement at these people and their absurdities and idealism. I think Heller has an incredible gift in the executions of her characters, and although I have never really found any of her characters to be likable, I do find them all engrossingly cruel and wickedly amusing.
If you are the type of reader who doesn't necessarily have to like the characters in a book in order to be fascinated with them, then this is definitely a book you need to read. Those who enjoy works of great satire and irony will find much to amuse themselves here as well. After completing this book, I must conclude that Heller is a writer at the top of her form. I am a huge fan of her work and can't wait to see what she offers her readers next. A highly original and entertaining read, highly recommended."
"I originally said this book was "neat and tidy," and that the narrator was "peevish." That was my terse review; now I get wordy.
These characters are so thin that prosciutto is jealous. The wife/mother is a turbo-charged bitch and that doesn't change. Doesn't progress, doesn't soften, doesn't develop. We get a paragraph where she ponders what made her so shallow and pinched, and she concludes it was something she started when she was 18 and didn't bother stopping. Viola. Character introspection. In the end she does something uncharacteristically nice, which is apparently what we get in the way of resolution.
One daughter is a prudish, feminist atheist who finds the concept of God makes no sense to her, so she converts to orthodox Judaism. Resolution. The other is fat and unhappy in her marriage to an ass, so she meets a man who thinks she's beautiful and runs away with him. Resolution. The sun is a junkie loser, who cleans up and then relapses, but what can we expect from losers? Shrug!
Ultimately, we just don't care what happens to any of them. We give them 335 pages to become interesting or to puff up like Jiffy Pop into 3D characters, but they fail us and slip through the cracks into some paper-thin purgatory where uninteresting writing goes to mildew.
I first gave it two stars, figuring if I had finished it it must at least be "okay." I'm changing that to one star, and giving myself one star for wasting my time."
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