Acclaim for Anita Brookner’s
A PRIVATE VIEW
“Elegant. … Brookners formidably dandyish satire has always exercised itself rewardingly on options and consolations. … Her poetry of forlornness is stronger and stranger than ever. ”
—Hermione Lee, The New Yorker
“Anita Brookner is justly praised for her restraint and insight. … Think of Graham Greene’s unhappy wanderers or Henry James’s travelers. … The clean lucid prose is Brookner’s own. … The reader finishes this novel with admiration for her skill. ”
—Frederick Busch, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“A sly, amusing and ironic comedy of manners. … A Private View shows Brookner writing at the top of her form, with subtle humor, great intelligence and level-headed sympathy for her characters and all their foibles. ”
—Houston Post
“Brookner’s many fans will be pleased to hear that in A Private View she is in form and in familiar territory. … She is painstakingly skillful [and] masterly in her control. ”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“The best novel she has produced. ”
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
“Beautifully written and piercingly acute. ”
—The Times (London)
Also by Anita Brookner
A Start in Life
Providence
Look at Me
Hotel du Lac
Family and Friends
A Misalliance
A Friend from England
Latecomers
Lewis Percy
Brief Lives
A Closed Eye
Fraud
Dolly
Anita Brookner’s
A PRIVATE VIEW
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Anita Brookner is the author of fourteen novels, including Fraud, Dolly, Providence, and Brief Lives. She won the Booker Prize in 1986 for Hotel du Lac. An international authority on eighteenth-century painting, she became the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge University in 1968. She lives in London.
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Copyright © 1994 by Anita Brookner
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. , New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1994.
First published in the United States in hardcover by Random House, Inc. , New York, in 1995.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Brookner, Anita.
A private view/Anita Brookner.
p. cm.
1. Middle-aged men—England—
Psychology—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052. R5816P73 1995 823′. 914—dc20 94-26413
eISBN: 978-0-307-82629-9
v3. 1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
1
GEORGE BLAND, IN THE SUN, REFLECTED THAT now was the moment to take stock. Nice, a town which he had not visited since his first holiday abroad, some forty years earlier, spread its noise and its light and its air about him, making him feel cautious; he was not up to this, he reckoned, having become unused to leisure. He had been here for four days and had found nothing to do, although there was much to occupy his thoughts, most of them, indeed all of them, proving unwelcome. Nice had been an unwise choice, though in truth hardly a choice at all; it had been more of a flight from those same thoughts, which faithfully continued to attend him here. He had sought a restorative, conventional enough, after the death of an old friend, Michael Putnam, who had inconveniently succumbed to cancer just when they were enabled, by process of evolution, or by that of virtue rewarded, more prosaically by the fact of their simultaneous retirement, to take their ease, to explore the world together, as had been their intention. They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and, more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.
