Leaving Home, by Anita Brookner

 

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it was ok
bookshelves: novel

This is a novel about a young unemployed graduate student who is unsatisfied with her life in London, so she moves to Paris to make a new life. She justifies her existence by saying she's working on developing her graduate dissertation into a book, and the trip will help her do research (but it's pretty clear she's never going to have a book at the current rate of progress.)

She leaves England to distance herself from family, but her friends she finds in France end up being as oppressive and imposing as the family she had left. She's forced to return the England to take care of business related to the death of her mother, and for a time she equivocates between staying or going back to France. [ She ends up living in England. French life wasn't much better than English life. ]

I was under the impression that the story being told in the book was taking place during the 1970s though I'm not sure if the date is specifically mentioned. I may have just wanted it to be the 1970s because I was an unemployed graduate student who traveled through Europe in the 1970s, and some of my time was spent in both London and Paris. I thought perhaps I could related to the story because of my youthful travels, but there wasn't much in the book with which I could identify. The protagonist of this book is looking for a place to settle down, I was a vagabond tourist. Not much similarity there.

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