Kate’s 2¢: “Dark Corners” by Ruth Rundell
“Dark Corners” by Ruth Rundell
saying…
Laura Giannarelli did a good job of reading this story and I enjoyed listening to her voice.
It was interesting how the apparently unrelated characters became connected to bring about the conclusion.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE (née Grasemann; 17 February 1930 – 2 May 2015) was an English author of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries.[1]
Rendell is best known for creating Chief Inspector Wexford.[2] A second string of works was a series of unrelated crime novels that explored the psychological background of criminals and their victims. This theme was developed further in a third series of novels, published under the pseudonym Barbara Vine.
Life[edit]
Rendell was born as Ruth Barbara Grasemann in 1930, in South Woodford, Essex (now Greater London).[3] Her parents were teachers. Her mother, Ebba Kruse, was born in Sweden to Danish parents and brought up in Denmark; her father, Arthur Grasemann, was English. As a result of spending Christmas and other holidays in Scandinavia, Rendell learned Swedish and Danish.[4] Rendell was educated at the County High School for Girls in Loughton, Essex,[3] the town to which the family moved during her childhood.
After high school, she became a feature writer for her local Essex paper, the Chigwell Times. However, she was forced to resign after filing a story about a local sports club dinner she had not attended and failing to report that the after-dinner speaker had died midway through the speech.[5]
Rendell met her husband Don Rendell when she was working as a newswriter.[3] They married when she was 20, and in 1953 had a son, Simon,[6] now a psychiatric social worker who lives in the U.S. state of Colorado. The couple divorced in 1975 but remarried two years later.[7] Don Rendell died in 1999 from prostate cancer.[6]
She made the county of Suffolk her home for many years, using the settings in several of her novels. She lived in the villages of Polstead and later Groton, both east of Sudbury. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1996 Birthday Honours[8] and a life peer as Baroness Rendell of Babergh, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk, on 24 October 1997.[9] She sat in the House of Lords for the Labour Party. In 1998 Rendell was named on a list of the party’s biggest private financial donors.[10] She introduced into the Lords the bill that would later become the Female Genital Mutilation Act 2003 (the intent was to prevent the practice).
In August 2014, Rendell was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September’s referendum on that issue.[11]
Rendell was a vegetarian who was described as living mostly on fruit.[12] She described herself as “slightly agoraphobic” and slept in a specially made four-poster bed because “I like to feel enclosed.”[12]
from NLS/BARD/LOC:
Dark corners: a novel DB86756
Rendell, Ruth. Reading time: 7 hours, 57 minutes.
Read by Laura Giannarelli.
Suspense Fiction
Psychological Fiction
When twenty-three-year-old novelist Carl Martin inherits his father’s house, he takes on an odd renter, Dermot McKinnon. Carl’s father has left an assortment of alternative remedies, and Carl’s overweight actress friend Stacey asks him to sell her some diet pills. The pills kill Stacey, and Dermot quickly exploits the situation. 2015.
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Comments Off on Kate’s 2¢: “The Dark Flood Rises” by Margaret Drabble,
Kate’s 2¢: “The Dark Flood Rises” by Margaret Drabble,
“The Dark Flood Rises” by Margaret Drabble,
saying…
Although Laura Giannarelli did a good job of reading this story, nothing in this story resonated with me the way I thought it might. I guess I’m not old enough to ‘get it’.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dame Margaret Drabble, Lady Holroyd, DBE, FRSL (born 5 June 1939)[1] is an English biographer, novelist and short story writer.
Drabble’s books include The Millstone (1965), which won the following year’s John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, and Jerusalem the Golden, which won the 1967 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was honoured by the University of Cambridge in 2006, having earlier received awards from numerous redbrick (e.g. Sheffield, Hull, Manchester,) and plateglass universities (such as Bradford, Keele, East Anglia and York). She received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award in 1973.
Drabble also wrote biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson and edited two editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature and a book on Thomas Hardy.
Early life[edit]
Drabble was born in Sheffield, the second daughter of the County Court judge and novelist John Frederick Drabble and the teacher Kathleen Marie (née Bloor). Her elder sister was the novelist and critic A. S. Byatt;[1] the youngest sister is art historian Helen Langdon, and their brother is the barrister Richard Drabble, KC. Drabble’s father participated in the placement of Jewish refugees in Sheffield during the 1930s.[2] Her mother was a Shavian and her father a Quaker.[2]
After attending The Mount School, a Quaker boarding school at York where her mother was employed, Drabble received a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge.[1] She studied English Literature whilst attending Cambridge.[3] She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1960, and, before leaving to pursue a career in literary studies and writing, served as an understudy for Vanessa Redgrave and Diana Rigg.[1][4]
Personal life[edit]
Drabble was married to the actor Clive Swift between 1960 and 1975. They had three children, the gardener and TV personality Joe Swift; the academic Adam Swift; and Rebecca Swift (d. 2017), who ran The Literary Consultancy.[5][6][7] In 1982, Drabble married the writer and biographer Sir Michael Holroyd;[8] they live in London and Somerset.[1]
Drabble’s relationship with her sister A. S. Byatt was sometimes strained because of autobiographical elements in both their writing. While their relationship was not especially close and they did not read each other’s books, Drabble described the situation as “normal sibling rivalry”[9] and Byatt said it had been “terribly overstated by gossip columnists” and that the sisters “always have liked each other on the bottom line.”[10]
When sought out for interview by The Paris Review’s Barbara Milton in 1978, Drabble was described as “smaller than one might expect from looking at her photographs. Her face is finer, prettier and younger, surprisingly young for someone who has produced so many books in the past sixteen years. Her eyes are very clear and attentive and they soften when she is amused, as she often is, by the questions themselves and her own train of thought”.[3] In the same interview she admitted there were three writers for whom she felt an “immense admiration”: Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow and Doris Lessing.[3]
Views on the 2003 invasion of Iraq[edit]
In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Drabble wrote of the anticipated wave of anti-Americanism, saying: “My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world”, despite “remembering the many Americans that I know and respect”. She wrote of her distress at images of the war, her objections to Jack Straw about the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and “American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn’t even win”. She recalled George Orwell’s words in Nineteen Eighty-Four about “the intoxication of power” and “the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever”. She closed by saying, “I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn’t been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn’t be here, and none of this would have happened. There is another America. Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon”.[11]
Writing[edit]
Drabble’s early novels were published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1963–87), while the publishers of her later works were Penguin, Viking and Canongate, and a recurring theme is the correlation between contemporary England’s society and its people. Most of her protagonists are women[12][13][14] and the realistic descriptions of her figures often derive from Drabble’s personal experiences; thus, her first novels describe the life of young women during the 1960s and 1970s, for whom the conflict between motherhood and intellectual challenges is being brought into focus, while The Witch of Exmoor, published in 1996, shows the withdrawn existence of an elderly writer. As Hilary Mantel wrote in 1989: “Drabble’s heroines have aged with her, becoming solid and sour, more prone to drink and swear; yet with each successive book their earnest, moral nature blossoms”.[15] Her characters’ tragic faults reflect their political and economic situation. Drabble wrote novels, she claimed in 2011, “to keep myself company”.[16]
From NLS/BARD/LOC:
The dark flood rises DB87316
Drabble, Margaret. Reading time: 13 hours, 58 minutes.
Read by Laura Giannarelli. A production of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress.
Psychological Fiction
Fran, an expert in housing for the elderly–who is advancing in age herself–travels across England for conferences and caring for her family. Her son Christopher mourns the death of his girlfriend while maintaining a professional relationship with Bennett, who confronts his own advanced age in the Canary Islands. 2016.
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