E-book
Garbo laughs
Record details
- ISBN: 9781551994321 (electronic bk.)
- ISBN: 1551994321 (electronic bk.)
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Physical Description:
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1 online resource - Publisher: [Toronto, Ontario] : Emblem Editions, [2010]
Content descriptions
| Source of Description Note: | Description based on vendor-supplied metadata. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Motion pictures -- Appreciation -- Fiction Alienation (Social psychology) -- Fiction Fans (Persons) -- Fiction Ottawa (Ont.) -- Fiction Friendship -- Fiction |
| Genre: | Electronic books. |
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Electronic resources
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2003 September #1
/*Starred Review*/ Greta Garbo is one of many movie stars who fascinate the alluringly eccentric characters found in the latest tale by one of Canada's most gifted novelists. In this witty, gracefully choreographed, and potent Ottawa-based family drama, Hay ponders our enthrallment to movies, conjuring a cast of ardent souls who cope with a catastrophic ice storm, unwelcome guests, undermined dreams, distressing infatuations, lingering illnesses, and sudden death by finding solace, even guidance, in classic films. Harriet, the Garbo-like star of the book, is a novelist who has developed the curious habit of writing but not mailing confiding letters to her hero, the then still-living film critic Pauline Kael, and discussing, at length, such burning cinematic questions as who is sexier, Cary Grant or Sean Connery, with her sweetly precocious and equally movie-mad son and daughter. As Harriet indulges her grand obsession with movies, she struggles with her less than passionate feelings for her real-life leading man and forges a warm but risky friendship with a new neighbor, the earthy Dinah. Imaginative, droll, and incisive, Hay's profound tale of attempted escape and accepted responsibility, of found joy and dreaded sorrow, deftly explores the dangers and benefits of fantasy. ((Reviewed September 1, 2003)) Copyright 2003 Booklist Reviews - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2003 August #1
Garbo, Brando, Sean Connery . . . the stars are out in one Ottawa home that's experiencing video heaven.Canadian Hay follows her widely praised first novel (A Student of Weather, 2001; Small Change, stories, also 2001) with this investigation of love and romance on-screen and off. Harriet Browning's dad would not let his kids watch movies. Maybe that's how her "disease of video love" took hold. Now, in 1997, she's a middle-aged housewife and part-time teacher, married to architect Lew Gold, with two preteen kids, Kenny and Jane, movie-lovers both. Harriet and Kenny wallow luxuriously in film lore; only Lew is unaffected by movie mania, as he waits patiently for his wife's return. But Harriet is an insomniac, and she's also writing (but not mailing) letters to the New Yorker's redoubtable Pauline Kael: a melancholy woman, Harriet, but also smart, sympathetic, and a devoted mother. Does she like movies because "she could love someone who . . . didn't know her . . . but not someone whose face had been blurred and compromised by dealing with her"? That's the heart of the matter. The question takes on new urgency with the arrival among their eccentric neighbors of feisty Dinah Bloom, a single woman, older than Harriet but still attractive; she too is a movie-lover, and joins the club. In fact, she falls in love with the whole family (as does the reader), while noting the dangerous imbalance in the marriage as she and Lew are drawn to each other. Additional complications follow, thanks to Harriet's self-invited houseguest Aunt Leah, who reeks of malice (she's the widow of a blacklisted screenwriter), and her bearlike stepson Jack. Will Dinah and Lew make the leap into adultery? Or will she settle for being Jack's fourth wife (he's wooing her with roses)? We can sense Hay letting her characters guide her through the muddle; the result is a variety of hard and soft landings.A sparkling demonstration of Hollywood's hold on our fantasies-and its awkward fit with our earthbound selves.Author tour. Agent: Bella Pomer Copyright Kirkus 2003 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews September #1
Canadian author Hay's new work is much like an obverse bookend to her first novel, A Student of Weather. While that title is a book of intensity, heat, and unrequited relationships, Garbo Laughs is a novel of emotional winter, ice storms, and underdeveloped relationships. Harriet Browning, her family, and her friends don't so much live life as observe it through the filter of movies. Theirs is a world in which "the hold that Hollywood has on all of our minds" is such "that everything finally is a cliche." The relationships between friends and family are strained by the arrival of a cousin and aunt who represent the wider world, and by the ice storm that encases Ottawa, where the novel is set. Hay's characters are somewhat stilted, and Harriet is a victim of Hay's deft drawing of an insipid and timid woman-the only emotion she stirs in the reader is the desire to give her a good shake. Garbo Laughs has the potential to be a popular cult novel for movie buffs, but for other readers it is like looking at a negative instead of at the fully developed picture.-Caroline M. Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2003 July #4
Garbo hardly ever laughed, and when she did, it was dubbed; reality is similarly transformed in this quirky, dreamy novel infused with movie mania. A plague of cinematic absorption settles over an Ottawa neighborhood in Hay's latest offering (her debut, A Student of Weather, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize). Harriet Browning's ascetic mother refused her the frivolity of the cinema as a child, and as an adult she views films obsessively. In middle age, she is the center of a small group of cinephiles: her son, Kenny, obsessed with Sinatra, watches classic movies to forget his troubles at school; her daughter, Jane, on the brink of adolescence, longs for the glamorous life; her neighbor and friend Dinah may be attracted mainly by the familial activity of watching together. Lew, Harriet's realist husband, is left out of this loop; his escapes come in the form of business trips to South America. The arrival of Harriet's aunt Leah, the trouble-making widow of a Hollywood screenwriter, and her stepson Jack, a lazy, fast-talking writer, leads to shifts in affections and allegiances. It is illness, however, that brings an end to the movie-watching, in true Hollywood weepy fashion. References to Pauline Kael (beloved by Harriet), top 100 movie lists and a lineup of movie greats (Marlon Brando, Sean Connery and Bette Davis are among the favorites) are as integral to the story as the interactions of its film-besotted protagonists. This is a gracefully written novel, mapping out the patterns of tension and release in a family whose members are best able to express their love and disappointment through the films of the past. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
