- Hardcover: 228 pages
- Publisher: Viking UK (Dec 7 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670869066
- ISBN-13: 978-0670869060
- Product Dimensions: 22.1 x 14 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
While Lively's novels always reflect the ironies that life delivers to people looking elsewhere at the time, their insights generally occur in subtle, satisfying observations about society and human nature. Here again she writes of a woman whose interpretation of events is distorted by inbred expectations and the failure to see clearly. Newly retired, unmarried and childless, social anthropologist Stella Brentwood buys a cottage in England's West Country, a region of stolid farmers and bucolic charm. Yet she finds it difficult to settle in: for a professional observer who easily integrated herself into communities in Egypt, Malta and the Orkney Islands, she feels oddly unmoored in her native land. Two people with whom she reestablishes contact?the widowed husband of her best friend at Oxford and a former colleague, a female archeologist?awaken memories of Stella's youth, of her one great love, another man who wanted to marry her and the demands of a peripatetic life that prevented her from establishing bonds or maintaining commitment. As Stella adopts a dog, learns about such local institutions as the general store and ruminates on the passage of time and the long shadow of past decisions, she remains unaware of the whirlwind of verbal abuse and simmering violence in the house just down the lane, where an emotionally deranged woman, her husband and her damaged adolescent sons are time bombs about to impact on Stella's life. Lively wisely avoids melodrama in the denouement, choosing instead to suggest Stella's poignant realization that her detachment, independence and self-sufficiency will determine her future as well as her past. Though the leisurely pace and purposefully digressive narrative are somewhat slow to build suspense, Lively's perceptive vision about the insularity of modern life rings true.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Anthropologist Stella Brentwood, who has lived in tents, mud huts, and tiny studio apartments, is about to retire, so she buys a cottage in Somerset, England, and sets about learning to live the country life. Of course, Stella is still an anthropologist, observing the strange customs of her neighborsAa point Lively (The Five Thousand and One Nights, LJ 1/96) has the grace and good sense to state up front. In the process, Stella gets reacquainted with the husband of her oldest friend, now dead, whose life was decidedly more domestic. (There's some room here for comparing fates, but it's hardly strident or ideological.) Stella also has occasion to encounter her neighbors, a family that seems far more uncivilized and violent than any Stella may have encountered during her work. Stella's new life is, predictably, shattered by a terrible incident involving this family. Lively makes her point, but the pieces of this story don't quite fit. Stella's slow settling into country life is nicely told, but her neighbors never seem quite believable in their ugliness; they're more a device. Buy where Lively is popular.ABarbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
A lovely moment in a career of distinction,
By A. Hickman (Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria) - See all my reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good but a little unsatisfying,
By A Customer
This is the story of Miss Stella Brentwood, a recently retired, successful anthropologist who suddenly realizes that she is old and lacks any strong connections after a life lived all over the world, and attempts to put down roots for the first time by buying a cottage in the English countryside, but has trouble shaking her habitual scientific detachment and continues to observe her own countrymen as if they were a kind of exotic tribe. (The "spiderweb" of the title refers to Stella's perception of the ties that bind people to one another, which she has always managed to avoid.) The book was funny, quite moving, and well written.In my view, the subplot of the violently troubled family down the lane repeatedly threatened to upstage the rather more tame, domestic, and meditative central narrative, though it did provide a welcome dose of suspense, and was very dramatic and disturbing in its own right--perhaps worthy of a book in itself. Ms. Lively has a wonderful eye for detail and is obviously in control of her prose style, and her cross-cutting of different timelines as Stella reviews her past was in the end very effective. I agree, however, with the reviewer below who felt that the ending was somewhat abrupt. I, too, kept flipping pages at the end, looking for the rest of the book. I was left feeling an almost painful lack of closure with Stella's character, which was disappointing because up until that point I felt I'd come to know her quite intimately. All in all a very good, but not a great, novel.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.6 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews) 13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Puzzling Novel That Doesn't Quite Gel,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Spiderweb: A Novel (Hardcover)
Penelope Lively so dazzled us with her Booker Prize winning novel "Moon Tiger," that the publication of a new novel is a real event. But this is the problem, then, with "Spiderweb." Ms. Lively has raised our expectations to such heights that it is difficult for even her to fulfill them. In "Spiderweb," Ms. Lively's obsessions are again on display. The protagonist, a 65-year-old just-retired social anthropologist, moves into a cottage in the country and mulls over her exotic past even while studying her new surroundings with an anthropological eye. As in "Heat Wave," there are visits to stately homes, and as before, British archaeology makes a cameo appearance. But somehow, all of these elements do not add up, juxtaposed as they are against the story of the unrelentingly revolting and dangerous neighbors down the lane. Lively fans will want to read this novel; new readers would do better to start with "Moon Tiger" or her memoir, "Oleander Jacaranda."
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good but a little unsatisfying,
By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com
This is the story of Miss Stella Brentwood, a recently retired, successful anthropologist who suddenly realizes that she is old and lacks any strong connections after a life lived all over the world, and attempts to put down roots for the first time by buying a cottage in the English countryside, but has trouble shaking her habitual scientific detachment and continues to observe her own countrymen as if they were a kind of exotic tribe. (The "spiderweb" of the title refers to Stella's perception of the ties that bind people to one another, which she has always managed to avoid.) The book was funny, quite moving, and well written.In my view, the subplot of the violently troubled family down the lane repeatedly threatened to upstage the rather more tame, domestic, and meditative central narrative, though it did provide a welcome dose of suspense, and was very dramatic and disturbing in its own right--perhaps worthy of a book in itself. Ms. Lively has a wonderful eye for detail and is obviously in control of her prose style, and her cross-cutting of different timelines as Stella reviews her past was in the end very effective. I agree, however, with the reviewer below who felt that the ending was somewhat abrupt. I, too, kept flipping pages at the end, looking for the rest of the book. I was left feeling an almost painful lack of closure with Stella's character, which was disappointing because up until that point I felt I'd come to know her quite intimately. All in all a very good, but not a great, novel. 8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
An appetizer, not a Main serving, from an excellent writer,
By geebs@erols.com - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Spiderweb: A Novel (Hardcover)
I found this a small delight from an author who has created fuller, deeper, more satisfying stories in the past. Not as minor an achievement, in my opinion, as Heat Wave, but well to the rear of my favorites such as According to Mark and Road to Lichfield. An awful lot of interior dialogue and telling rather than letting a story unfold. It does feel a bit patched together, a collection of fascinating characters that we dip in and out of, the weavings of a life. Some wise summarizings. But summaries aren't so often compelling fiction. It does add up to something that at times is moving and rich. In small servings. But the ending felt rushed, almost dispensed with too quickly, and I almost felt cheated by it. I felt the author abandoning her character and the story! I literally flipped the empty end pages in frustration, looking for more.
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