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Portobello
 
 
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Portobello (Paperback)

by Ruth Rendell (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product Description

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The Portobello area of West London has a rich personality - vibrant, brilliant in colour, noisy, with graffiti that approach art, bizarre and splendid. An indefinable edge to it adds a spice of danger. There is nothing safe about Portobello...Eugene Wren inherited an art gallery from his father near an arcade that now sells cashmere, handmade soaps and children's clothes. But he decided to move to a more upmarket site in Kensington Church Street. Eugene was fifty, with prematurely white hair. He was, perhaps, too secretive for his own good. On a shopping trip one day, Eugene, quite by chance, came across an envelope containing money. He picked it up. For some reason, rather than report the matter to the police, he wrote a note and stuck it up on a lamppost near his house: "'Found in Chepstow Villas, a sum of money between eighty and a hundred and sixty pounds. Anyone who has lost such a sum should apply to the phone number below." This note would link the lives of a number of very different people - each with their obsessions, problems and dreams and despairs. And through it all the hectic life of Portobello would bustle on.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Horror and Humor, Dec 31 2008
By Eileen Pollock (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Portobello (Hardcover)
I imported Portobello from the UK in an excess of impatience to read the new Rendell, and I am thrilled to report it is horrific, claustrophobic, and yes, droll in turns. Rendell's genius still burns brightly, her sharp edge is unblunted, and we readers may rejoice, while compulsively turning the pages in a chill of ever-increasing dread. In this wicked tale, a well-to-do art gallery owner, Eugene Wren, is hiding a secret addiction from his doctor fiancee, Ella. He finds an envelope of money and posts an ad, whereupon his fiancee becomes professionally embroiled with the owner of the envelope, Joel, whom we realize is, yes, insane. Meanwhile, a petty thief and burglar, Lance, is on the prowl in Eugene's wealthy neighborhood. Lance is living with his parsimonious Uncle Gib, a reformed thief now member of a fundamentalist church. Lance and Uncle Gib provide much of the comic relief. Goodness knows we need it, as Ella the caring doctor becomes disturbingly involved with Joel, whose madness is growing worse. There are burglaries, murders, drowning of a child, the firebombing of a house, and a pilfered chocolate cake. Tragedy is juxtaposed with absurdity, as in Eugene's terrible addiction to - sugar-free sweets, the euphoniously named Chocorange. The well off characters have the luxury of obsessing over imagined ills, while ignoring the unlocked garden gate, which will, we know, lead to real grief. The lower class characters get by on cunning, ruthlessness, and the dole; while the comfortably cocooned upper classes are chattering and, utterly naive about what it takes to survive, are the natural prey of the lowlifes who haunt the Portobello Road area. It is as if Theodore Dalrymple's social commentary were wedded to Ruth Rendell's story-telling talents. All told, a marvelous read, with a richly satisfying conclusion.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not entirely what I expected., Feb 28 2009
By C. Knudsen (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Portobello (Hardcover)
In 'Portobello', Rendell creates an elegant tale of interwoven lives. Readers are shown the profound impact that strangers can, without realization, have on one another's lives.

The setting of Portobello Road and Notting Hill is vividly rendered, almost to the point that it is another character.

The suspense is extremely subdued. I repeatedly found myself expecting it to peak higher than it did. Having not read Rendell's work before, perhaps this is a feature of her writing for which I was not entirely prepared.
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