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Becoming Strangers, by Louise Dean
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After more than half a century of marriage, Dorothy and George are embarking on their first journey abroad together. Three decades younger, Jan and Annemieke are taking the last in their tumultuous union. At first the luxury of a Caribbean resort is no match for the habits of domestic life. Then the couples’ paths cross, and a series of surprises ensues—a disappearance and an assault, most dramatically, but also a teapot tempest of passions, slights, misunderstandings, and small awakenings that punctuate a week in which each pair struggles to come to terms with what’s been keeping them apart. Becoming Strangers is a different kind of love story—bittersweet, bitingly funny, and ultimately redeeming.
- Sales Rank: #2018529 in Books
- Published on: 2007-01-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .80" w x 5.25" l, .61 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
- ISBN13: 9780156032667
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
From Publishers Weekly
What keeps an unhappily married couple together? In her impressive debut, long-listed for the 2004 Man Booker, Dean dissects two hollow unions against the sultry backdrop of a Caribbean resort. George and Dorothy Davis, an English couple married more than 50 years, are worn down by neglect and boredom; Jan and Annemieke de Groot, Belgians married 31 years, are pulled apart by Jan's terminal cancer, which exposes issues they've suppressed for years. Dean is at her best in interior moments, when characters ponder their lives with private, brutal candor. "This was how they had always been," Annemieke reflects on her marriage, "his illness had simply developed the difference between them as light develops photographic film." As for George and Dorothy, they seem awfully reminiscent of Edward Albee's spiteful George and Martha. "You couldn't tell him that there was any marriage that wasn't equal measures love and hate," George Davis reflects, who decides bitterly that his wife now "wasn't content to have the last word; she had to have it twice." On holiday, friendships form, affairs spark and revelations startle. Adept at sharp dialogue and brisk plotting, Dean is also attentive to character development, choosing authenticity over sentimentality in a book that is poignant, often funny and unexpectedly redemptive. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Long-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize and winner of the Betty Trask Award, Becoming Strangers is far more sophisticated than the typical first novel. Based on the lives of one set of Dean's grandparents, the novel delves into marriage, relationships, romantic love, and friendship. Dean skillfully develops these themes and the relationships among the four primary characters and all the secondary ones, showing how ordinary people bury and then unearth the realities that their lives have become. One critic thought that Dean drew her men more realistically than her women, but overall, "Dean peels back the skin of these marriages with an unflinching lack of sentimentality and an immense talent for close observation and evocative, often poetic detail" (Atlantic).
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
Travel can broaden the mind, but it can also serve to affirm old habits and prejudices if, as is the case with the Europeans populating this novel, emotional baggage is lugged along with the suitcases. At a Caribbean resort, elderly Britishers Dorothy and George Davis are thrown together with a younger and more urbane Belgian couple, Annemieke and Jan De Groot. Although this is the Davises' first trip abroad (courtesy of their pushy daughter), it may well be the unhappily married De Groots' last, for Jan is slowly dying of cancer. Although he hopes the holiday will help them become better friends, Annemieke spends most of her time in pursuit of extramarital sexual adventure. George and Dorothy, meanwhile, are coming to terms with the fact that Dorothy is in an increasingly advanced stage of Alzheimer's. The novel might have sunk under the weight of its themes of loss, but Dean suffuses it with a comic touch and handles her several narrative threads with skill. Give this to readers who enjoy thoughtful -character-centered fiction. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Four Stars
By Sandra Montana
I like it well enough to be reading it for the second time. Setting, intrigue, thoughtful themes.
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
The Memories Locked In Each Other
By Eric Anderson
Louise Dean's first novel focuses on the stories of two couples who travel to a holiday resort in the Caribbean as a treat from their children. None of the four individuals particularly want to go on this holiday, but they feel obligated to because both couples realise that it might be the last one that they have together. Both couples are struggling to deal with illness. A middle-aged Belgian couple named Annemieke and Jan go on this holiday with the knowledge that Jan is suffering from a terminal cancer. The older English couple named George and Dorothy realise that Dorothy is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's disease. Despite the depressing idea of couples going on a final holiday while facing their own mortality may seem terribly depressing, Dean is able to suffuse the narrative with comic touches that gives it a great deal of humanity and makes it a rewarding, moving read.
This thirty-four year old writer has unusual insight into the complex way a long term marriage can develop a significance beyond the mere routines which come with the bonding of two people. In some ways the individual identity of each person becomes lost because the memories from each of their lives are inextricably linked to this other person. What the characters in this novel are struggling to decide is if they will lose their own sense of themselves if they leave their partner. George tries to meticulously record his past by writing a memoir and Annemieke attempts to completely rediscover a self worth in anonymous sexual encounters. Dean's writing is incredibly enjoyable to read in its richly detailed short chapters and startlingly emotional scenes. At the same time it is able to explore some very complex ideas about the nature of relationships and personality in original, meaningful ways. This is a unique and beautiful first novel.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
"Death was a binary affair, not cumulative."
By Luan Gaines
Against a lush Caribbean landscape, two couples on vacation meet and act out the small dramas of their marriages in a careful study of relationships honed on habit and unhappiness. But in this tropical paradise, an elegant resort that caters to its guests' every whim, both couples will come to terms with the realities of their choices. Jan DeGroot is dying of cancer, although he has gamely fought its determined advance for the last six years: "The knife-and-forking of his body seemed to give a perverse impetus to his will to survive." This Northern European couple has been sent on their "last holiday" by their grown sons, Annemieke DeGroot long trapped in her own discontent, almost anxious to get on with the rest of her life, her beauty fading while she waits for Jan's demise. In contrast, George and Dorothy, an English couple, have been married nearly sixty years, their habits entrenched with the daily bickering over nonsense that has become familiar.
George makes friends with Jan, though Dorothy and Annemieke could hardly be less compatible. Yet the heightened awareness of distance brings a flavor of friendship, at least for the men, who surprisingly find a sympathetic ear as they exchange stories and disappointments, lingering over drinks. While Dorothy drifts along in her own musings, George's complaints turn to a more honest appraisal of their shared years: "You couldn't tell him that there was any marriage that wasn't equal measure love and hate." Even Dorothy enjoys occasional insights, although she'd rather be at home amid her things: "Being an old lady was not as hard as being an old man." With a supporting cast of other resort-goers, a South African with a penchant for honesty who has a short fling with Annemieke, a long-haired, tattooed tile-setter, "the Americans" who demand their needs be instantly attended and the resort director, Jan and George sort through memories and plans for the future, limited though it may be, while Annemieke thrashes about in an effort to avoid her own shortcomings.
The characters are drawn with deft precision, their flaws and eccentricities stark against the lush background of the Caribbean resort. Each couple suffers the detritus of years of marriage, the petty rivalries and jealousies, silences and resentments. The author writes with such clarity that each page bespeaks a glance into a mirror, these protagonists as familiar as the spouse who snores when sleeping or habitually remarks on the other's failures, days of meant-to-do-better, years finally passed. In a novel that is neither maudlin nor depressing, the author carefully manipulates the myriad contradictions of each marriage with a compassionate eye and a talent for incisive observation, balancing flaws, fictions and attributes in an incisive characters study. Luan Gaines/ 2006.
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