Miss Vales: I never ever clap eyes on him.
Mrs Porter: Well, he's around all right, EV, coming and going all day he is - up and down the stairs, in and out the whole day long and half the night ...
To Mrs Porter's establishment - a Home away from Home for Homeless Gentlemen - comes Dalton Foster, recently and reluctantly returning to the community. Dalton is intent on a fresh start. So is Miss Emily Vales, a fellow lodger, and recipient of Mrs Porter's tea-leaves predictions...
Across the park from Dalton's cold, bleak room is the large, overdraped house of his childhood, where now another Consul's family lives. Intrigued and well-meaning, they welcome him into the house, unaware of Dalton's past links - and his yearnings.
(Source: PenguinRandomHouse, 1998)
Epigraph:
'Fiction is... the response to a deep and always hidden wound.'
Flaubert
Epigraph:
(Written in both German and English)
LIEBESLIED (Love Song)
How could I keep my soul so that it might
not tough yours?...
Yet all that touches us, myself and you,
takes us together like a violin bow
that draws a single voice out of two strings.
Upon what instrument have we been strung?...
Sweet is the song.
- R.M. Rilke
The article looks at the last four novels by Jolley which were 'somewhat neglected by scholars'. Taken as a body of 'late work' with some evidence of 'late style' (Edward Said), 'might give them a more acknowledged place in a critical history of Jolley's writing' (122).
The article looks at the last four novels by Jolley which were 'somewhat neglected by scholars'. Taken as a body of 'late work' with some evidence of 'late style' (Edward Said), 'might give them a more acknowledged place in a critical history of Jolley's writing' (122).
