The Woman Upstairs Epub Download

The Woman Upstairs (Vintage Contemporaries) [Kindle Edition]

Author: Claire Messud | Language: English | ISBN: B00A1O4L50 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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The Woman Upstairs Epub Download
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From the New York Times best-selling author of The Emperor’s Children, a masterly new novel: the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed and betrayed by a desire for a world beyond her own.

Nora Eldridge, an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, long ago compromised her dream to be a successful artist, mother and lover. She has instead become the “woman upstairs,” a reliable friend and neighbor always on the fringe of others’ achievements. Then into her life arrives the glamorous and cosmopolitan Shahids—her new student Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale, and his parents: Skandar, a dashing Lebanese professor who has come to Boston for a fellowship at Harvard, and Sirena, an effortlessly alluring Italian artist.

When Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies, Nora is drawn deep 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, and she discovers in herself an unprecedented ferocity—one that puts her beliefs and her sense of self at stake.

Told with urgency, intimacy and piercing emotion, this brilliant novel of passion and artistic fulfillment explores the intensity, thrill—and the devastating cost—of embracing an authentic life.


This ebook edition includes a Reading Group Guide. 

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• File Size: 1493 KB
• Print Length: 321 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 184408731X
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (April 30, 2013)
• Sold by: Random House LLC
  
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00A1O4L50
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,302 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #2
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Urban
  • #9
    in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Urban Life
  • #13
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Psychological
• #2
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Urban
• #9
  in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Urban Life
• #13
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Psychological

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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