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ISBN:1848873069
Fay Weldon English
Author: Fay Weldon
ISBN13: 978-1848873063
Title: Chalcot Crescent
Format: azw lrf lrf rtf
ePUB size: 1460 kb
FB2 size: 1409 kb
DJVU size: 1824 kb
Language: English
Publisher: Corvus; Main edition (2010)
Pages: 288

Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon



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About book: I can imagine the scene in Hunter’s Alley, before NUG realized it was a problem and closed it down, so there was nowhere my family could meet. I bought the house because it was such a pretty place in such a squalid area, of storage warehouses and car-part dumps, and seemed a good investment (those were the days). I thought the boys could always make use of it as they grew older and wanted to be nearer the heart of the metropolis, and, frankly, away from what I saw as Victor and Venetia’s rather stifling home life, but still near to Polly and Corey and the girls

Chalcot Crescent book. I love Fay Weldon, but I could not get into this book. I kept setting it aside and then restarting it only to put it aside again. This book must not be for me, but that doesn't mean I won't read other books of hers again.

html?hl ru&id elldxm2f7RkC. Although the first part of the book promises more than the rest delivers, the author's observations, when she wanders from the narrative are priceless, . I was not particularly looking forward. Fay Weldon was brought up in New Zealand. Creator of the slogan 'Go to work on an egg', writer of the first ever episode of Upstairs Downstairs and current Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University, Fay is best known for her novels Praxis, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and Worst Fears. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE.

Weldon Fay. Download (epub, 720 Kb). FB2 PDF MOBI TXT RTF. Converted file can differ from the original. If possible, download the file in its original format.

FREE shipping on qualifying offers. It is the imagined life of Frances. But, in fact, it is difficult to predict what will happen next in Chalcot Crescent, as it is essentially plotless (Seattle Times). Readers may find themselves confused by the myriad unnecessary characters and offshoots from the main story.

One thing is sure about Chalcot Crescent: Fay Weldon's many followers may find it too alarming to love, but they are going to greatly admire it. It is set in 2013, by when it has become apparent that recession is not a temporary departure from the norm but an awakening from a happy but foolish dream of prosperity into a grim and enduring reality: this is how it is and it will go on like this, only worse. The narrator is Frances, Weldon's younger sister who never was. Family resemblance is so strong that one wonders why Weldon bothered to invent her - indeed, she forgets to take much.

One thing is sure about Chalcot Crescent: Fay Weldon's many followers may find it too alarming to love, but they are going to greatly admire i. - The Guardian (UK). Weldon has always been alert to the circular nature of key arguments. In Chalcot Crescent it is less a case of the personal being political than the other way around. The helplessness of old age and the timelessness of the pain Frances has picked up on the way are poignant. Moving in and out of time zones is a good way to evoke this, but it comes at the expense of momentum.

Fay Weldon at the Copenhagen Book Fair in 2008. Fay Weldon CBE FRSL (born 22 September 1931) is an English author, essayist, feminist and playwright.

Fay Weldon’s new book is told by Frances, Weldon’s imaginary sister - one she would have had if her mother had not had a miscarriage a few years after Weldon was born. Frances steals a husband from Fay, becomes a successful novelist and finds herself in a changed world in 2013. Oh, and Frances is an unreliable narrator.

This is a wickedly sharp, history-bending, cosmos-colliding novel from one of Britain's most iconic authors. Meet Frances, Fay's might-have-been younger sister, an unreliable narrator who bends history and blends universes to create a sparkling and prophetic portrait of a once and future Britain. It's 2013 and eighty-year-old Frances is listening to the debt collectors pounding on the front door of Number 3, Chalcot Crescent. While she waits for the bailiffs to give up and leave, Frances writes. She writes about the boyfriends she borrowed and the husband she stole from Fay. She writes about the Shock, the Crunch, the Crisis and the Bite, about NUG the National Unity Government, about ration books and National Meat Loaf (suitable for vegetarians). She writes about family secrets...The problem is that fact and fiction are blurring in Frances' mind. Are faceless assassins trying to kill her younger daughter? Are her grandchildren really plotting a terrorist coup upstairs? What on earth can NUG have against vegetarians? And just what makes National Meat Loaf so tasty?
Reviews: 5
Gholbithris
It is 2013. And in England the collapse of the economy in 2008 is playing itself out because nothing has worked to bring it back. The NUG is in control--the National Unity Government--and those readers who know Orwell's "1984"--and who doesn't?--will experience what very well might actually happen. It is a world filled with paranoia, with surveillance cameras everywhere: "Dath by caual push is rumoured to be one of NUG's favoured methods of assassinaiton," she says at one point in the novel. "...paranoia has swept the country: we who used to be so trusting, so welcoming of immigrants, dismayed by a smacked child, hopeful of globalism, who felt loyal even of our mortgage company, are now thoroughly suspicious." As well they should be. And as well as most of us might be if we were to collectively acknowledge just how scary it is to live in a world where Wall Street rules supreme. Google continues to exist is "This page cannot currently be displayed" is any indication of just how scare information is. Oh, yes, and there is a NW. A Neighbourhood Watch. Fay Weldon draws well, in a timely way, from Orwell.
This tale is told brilliantly--at least most of it is--by an octogenarian published writer who lives with her grandson, Amos, on Chalcot Crescent. And when the novel opens, outside her door, men are attempting to get her to open up so they can perform some type of foreclosure since this house she has owned for nearly 50 years is now in jeopardy as have been millions of other homes.
At times our narrator berates her own writing, telling us we might do well to stop reading the book. But I don't think you will. Or telling us that what we are reading is "a bowdlerised version"--note that I am using the British spellings--and she will get around to editing it later. And she seems to know just about everything that is going on, recreating conversations she would not have heard except she is able, she claims, to piece things together based upon what people tell her in phone conversations and emails when she can get them. The electricity is often off. Water is very scare, mainly because it has become the only significant export England has. You do know it rains a lot there, right?
Everything has become nationalized including the meatloaf: National Meat Loaf which she claims everyone likes, the current staple food that has replaced bread, pasta, rice and potatoes. Why? Because Europe is no longer able to import food since "everyone has their own people to feed."
"The European Community is in disarray and, though not formally disbanded, might as well be: it can no longer enforce its rulings through financial penalties and has no other means of doing so."
I have highlighted the political/economic satire. But know this is a novel with a wonderful cast which include the narrator's daughters, their children, their several former husbands and lovers, her former husband and lovers. And we are constantly aware that she is about to lose her home, the one she has had to fight for in divorce court, the one she has paid for from selling her novels, back when she was a popular writer. Yes, there is lots of laugh at although darkly.
And I for one am becoming more and more convinced that by 1213 we might be living under the constant surveillance of Big Brother as our politicians cave in even more to Big Brother CEOs.
Thorgaginn
In a world much like our own, but darker, Weldon imagines the life her younger, stillborn sister Frances might have had in an Orwellian 2013 England where the economy has truly tanked. The National Unity Government (NUG), "composed not of politicians but of sociologists and therapists," distributes National Meatloaf ("suitable for vegetarians") and monitors the mostly unemployed populace with CiviCams.

Frances, the narrator, 80, hides from the bailiffs come to repossess the house and recalls her youth, when she stole two of her sister's boyfriends and married one, became a famous novelist (while sister Fay moved to Australia and became a cookbook writer), had two daughters, and got divorced and remarried and divorced again.

She made a pile of money but heady splurging and bad investments have ruined her and now the bank wants the house she has lived in for 40-plus years. Her neighbors are gone, their houses abandoned, and NUG has commandeered the back gardens for a communal vegetable plot. Her son-in-law, a former research scientist, is now climbing the ranks of the National Institute for Food Excellence (NIFE) and keeps her in the occasional pound of real coffee or jug of milk.

In between reminiscences, regrets and might-have-beens, Frances faces the real-time antics of her grandchildren and cohorts, who invade her house as a meeting place for (possibly) terrorist activities and treat her with the timeless disregard of youth.

Weldon's sharp wit spares neither past nor present, from the Sexual Revolution and leftist politics of the 60s and 70s to the excesses of the 2000s and their aftermath: the Shock, the Crunch, the Recovery, the Fall, the Crisis and the Bite.

Frances' voice is sardonic, but tempered with the wisdom of age. Her satirical view spares herself no more than her family and fellow citizens. Vivid urban details of crumbling infrastructure, patriarchal rule and paranoia are as funny as they are realistic and chilling. Weldon fans will find her at the top of her game.
Fog
The only ridiculous aspect of this edition is the cover; in reality Chalcot Crescent is akin to a pleasantly Bohemian English village that enjoys a splendid urban location in the middle of London. The stonking great mansion flats in the image bear no resemblance to the real thing whatsoever.
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