The Patron Saint of Liars: A Novel
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品牌: Ann Patchett
基本信息出版社:Harper Perennial; 第1版 (2003年3月1日)外文书名:利亚尔斯神圣的赞助人(小说)平装:352页正文语种:英语开本:20开ISBN:0060540753条形码:9780060540753商品尺寸:20.3 x 13.5 x 2.5 cm商品重量:204 g品牌:Harper PerennialASIN:0060540753商品描述内容简介在线阅读本书
Book Description
St. Elizabeth's is a home for unwed mothers in the 1960s. Life there is not unpleasant, and for most, it is temporary. Not so for Rose, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed. She plans to give up her baby because she knows she cannot be the mother it needs. But St. Elizabeth's is near a healing spring, and when Rose's time draws near, she cannot go through with her plans, not all of them. And she cannot remain forever untouched by what she has left behind ... and who she has become in the leaving.
About Author
Ann Patchett is the author of three previous novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; and The Magician's Assistant, which earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994. She is also a recipient of the Nashville Banner Tennessee Writer of the Year Award. Patchett has written for many publications, including New York Times Magazine, Chicago Tribune, Village Voice, GQ, Elle, Gourmet, and Vogue.
Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she took writing classes with Alan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. While an undergraduate, she sold her first story to the Paris Review. Patchett then went on to attend the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, and in 1990, she won a residential fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Here she wrote her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars, which was awarded a James A. Michner/Copernicus Award for a book in progress. The Patron Saint of Liars was adapted into a TV movie for CBS in 1997, and Patchett wrote the screenplay for Taft, which has been optioned by Morgan Freeman for a feature film.
Patchett lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Book Dimension:
length: (cm)20.3 width:(cm)13.7编辑推荐From Library Journal
Unanticipated pregnancy makes liars out of young women, this thoughtful first novel shows, as they try to rationalize, explain, and accept what is happening to them. When she arrives at St. Elizabeth's, a home for pregnant girls in Habit, Kentucky, Rose Clinton seems as evasive and deceptive as the other unwed mothers. But Rose is different: she has a husband whom she has deserted. Unlike most St. Elizabeth's visitors, she neither gives up her baby nor leaves the home, staying on as cook while her daughter grows up among expectant mothers fantasizing that they, too, might keep their infants. The reader learns from Rose how she came to St. Elizabeth's, but it is her doting husband and rebellious daughter who reveal her motives and helpless need for freedom. Together, the three create a complex character study of a woman driven by forces she can neither understand nor control.
- Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Patchett's first novel, set in rural Kentucky in a castle-like home for unwed mothers--where a good woman finds she cannot lie her way beyond love--has a quiet summer-morning sensibility that reminds one of the early work of Anne Tyler. Within the security of everydayness, minds and hearts take grievous risks. ``Maybe I was born to lie,'' thinks Rose, who, after a three- year marriage to nice Tom Clinton, realizes that she's misread the sign from God pointing to the wedding: she married a man she didn't love. From San Diego, then, Rose drives--``nothing behind me and nothing ahead of me''--all the way to Kentucky and St. Elizabeth's home for unwed mothers, where she plans to have the baby Tom will never know about, and to give it clean away. But in the home, once a grand hotel, Rose keeps her baby, Cecilia; marries ``Son,'' the handyman (``God was right after all...I was supposed to live a small life with a man I didn't love''); and becomes the cook after briefly assisting that terrible cook, sage/seeress, and font of love, Sister Evangeline. The next narrative belongs to Son, a huge man originally from Tennessee--like Rose, gone forever from home- -who recounts the last moments of his fianc‚e's life long ago (Sister Evangeline absolves him of responsibility) and who loves Rose. The last narrator is teenaged Cecilia, struggling to find her elusive mother within the competent Rose, who's moved into her own house away from husband and daughter. Like Rose years before, her daughter considers the benefits of not knowing ``what was going on''...as the recent visitor--small, sad Tom Clinton--drives off, and Cecilia knows that Rose, who left before he came, will never return. In an assured, warm, and graceful style, a moving novel that touches on the healing powers of chance sanctuaries of love and fancy in the acrid realities of living. --Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Ann Patchett won the 2002 Orange Prize with the magical Bel Canto, but she was a successful novelist long before that, as this reissue of her first book proves. An elegant and intelligent novel, it's set in a Roman Catholic home for unwed mothers, but St Elizabeth's in Kentucky is not as horrendous and brutal a place as those we have encountered before. Rose Clinton has abandoned both her unexciting marriage and her loving mother to flee to the home, planning to give up the child she is unhappy about having. But soon the effect of the home (and its healing spring) begins to change her decisions. Rose has to take into consideration not just the family she has walked away from, but also those she has encountered at St Elizabeth's, such as the enigmatic Sister Evangeline and the odd-job man at the home. What makes Patchett's book work so well is her confounding of the expectations the setting engenders. From Iris Murdoch onwards, we have come to anticipate that religious retreats will be places of repressed emotion and thwarted lives, but that is not the case here. Some may find that its conclusions are a touch too luminous, but there is no denying Patchett's complex and believable characterization, not to mention the assured plotting that makes this an extremely compelling read. (Kirkus UK)--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
