The Woman Upstairs [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00B3YKPTI | Format: PDF, EPUB
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From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor's Children, a brilliant new novel: the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and betrayed by passion and desire for a world beyond her own.
Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who long ago abandoned her ambition to be a successful artist, has become the "woman upstairs", a reliable friend and tidy neighbor always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents - dashing Skandar, a Lebanese scholar and professor at the ?cole Normale Sup?rleure; and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist - have come to Boston for Skandar to take up a fellowship at Harvard. When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies who call him a "terrorist" Nora is drawn into the complex world of the Shahid family: She finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora's happiness explodes her boundaries, until Sirena's careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal. Told with urgency, intimacy, and piercing emotion, this story of obsession and artistic fulfillment explores the thrill - and the devastating cost - of giving in to one's passions.
Direct download links available for The Woman Upstairs [Unabridged] [Audible Audio Edition] Epub Download
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 11 hours and 1 minute
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: April 30, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00B3YKPTI
Most of the reviews of the book are overly harsh or overly praising. It's a pretty good book, and as some have complained, with sections that are a little drawn out and repetitive.
The criticism I think that is without merit is that the character isn't likable. The character is an accurate human portrait and if any of us were laid to bare the way this character honestly expresses her feelings and thoughts, I think we too would be less than likable.
Years ago I heard this woman explain an entire attitude of certain women as the ``smugly married." It's easy to look down your nose at her if you have all the adornments of female success, the most important of which is that someone has found you sexually desirable enough to marry you. And once you have children, the deal is sealed. You are woman, hear you roar!
But if you got overly fussy, maybe thought something better was coming, or there was a split or almost no suitors and the shadows grow long on the dock, you do sense that you will probably never marry and most certainly now, never have children. This is of course the reality for Nora, the now spinster school teacher, whose mother who loved her is dead and whose aging father needs her. Nora is the utility person. Life's bat boy. The filler of water bottles and cleaner of equipment but never gets to play the game. The center of no one's life but the agent of many lives. A person of talent unexpressed and un-honed which time will turn to mediocrity because it was simply never developed. A person so inconsequential that those she thinks are closest to her will humiliate her if it serves their own ends. And she's angry because now she knows all this with certainty.
Naturally, she has lied to herself about this truth. It's called coping.
"The Woman Upstairs," by Claire Messud, is a first rate psychological thriller that will keep readers spellbound, in the style of a classic Hitchcock film, right up until the final pages, where a stunning twist illuminates and clarifies the whole. This is a very smart, savvy novel--one that provides sustained story telling, literary, and intellectually pleasure. In fact, it is one of the best books I've reviewed all year.
The plot and characters are brilliantly constructed, the whole fully believable to the smallest psychological detail. Massud is a master storyteller and a fastidious psychological stylist. She's also an exquisite writer. Reading this book is like taking a temporary journey inside the mind of the main character, Nora Eldridge. Readers will emerge gasping at the end, fully comprehending the character they've inhabited and the trajectory of her life.
Nora Eldridge is like a lot of middle-aged people. She believes she is living a lie. She thought she'd grow up to be a famous artist, to have a loving husband, and children. But she finds herself at forty trapped in the ordinary life of a spinster third-grade teacher. She sees herself as the invisible "woman upstairs" living a life of "quiet desperation," a woman with occasional unremarkable boyfriends and a few close girlfriends--a woman stuck in the role of being a moral citizen and a dutiful daughter.
The book starts at the end, when Nora is 42 and fully enraged at life. She is so full of anger that she is bound and determined to break out of the confines of her middling existence and finally start living an authentic life. Most of the balance of the book takes us back five years, to 2004, the year Nora meets and falls in love with each member, individually, of the Shahid family.
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