A Place of Greater Safety pdf Summary Reviews By Hilary Mantel

A Place of Greater Safety pdf Summary

Capturing the violence, tragedy, history, and drama of the French Revolution, this novel focuses on the families and loves of three men who led the Revolution–Danton, the charismatic leader and orator; Robespierre, the cold rationalist; and Desmoulins, the rabble-rouser.

READ; Beyond Black pdf Summary Reviews By Hilary Mantel

A Place of Greater Safety Review

Brenda Teese

5.0 out of 5 stars demanding writer, awesome book
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2013

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You’ll need to read a history of the French Revolution first, but this fine Hilary Mantel novel is well worth the extra effort. Mantel does not educate her reader to the era; she simply starts in telling the story, she starts with the childhoods of her three principal characters and goes on telling the story to the end. The unschooled reader could of course simply plunge right in after her, but won’t get very far. These characters are all lawyers embedded in revolutionary politics, the story is about the tragic end of politics and the difficult birthing of the republic. Mantel writes in the present tense, using dialogue and inner monologue to tell the story as it is happening. Her writing style generates great immediacy, a gripping experience of the revolution for the reader, but does not allow for the presence of a helpful narrator to give some background, to explain — for example — the corvee, the Estates-General, the Jacobins, Cordeliers and Girondists, the custom posts in the walls of Paris. With ‘Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies’ most English-speaking readers have enough general knowledge of the era to get along without a narrator, but ‘A Place of Greater Safety’ presents a problem for the reader lacking “a background”.

If you already have a background in the French Revolution, or think you might go to the trouble of acquiring one for the sheer pleasure of reading Mantel, here is a sample of the delights awaiting:

Father Herivaux to the Catholic school boy: “Try to learn this truth, Maximilien. Most people are lazy, and will take you at your own valuation. Make sure the valuation you put on yourself is high.”

– Mme. Duplessis thinking about her contemptibly dull husband, a civil servant to the Crown: “How torturing is the situation of fools who know they are fools; and how pleasant is Claude’s state, by comparison.”

Mirabeau contemplating his own aging image in the mirror: “You’ve lived. Do you expect life not to leave a mark?”

– Camille Desmoulins on marriage: “You’ve no idea how time-consuming it is being married, Max. You have to make decisions about the most baffling things — like whether to have the ceilings painted. I always supposed the paint just grew on them, didn’t you?”

– Camille, happily absorbed in writing a column for the revolutionary newspaper: “I wonder why I ever bothered with sex. There’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.”

Camille on happiness: “He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament; or it might be something you learn when you’re a child, a kind of language, harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a good grasp on by the time you’re seven.”

– Lafayette on Camille and the revolutionary colleagues: “He’s one of these law-school boys. Never used anything more dangerous than a paper knife. Where do they come from, these people? They’re virgins. They’ve never been to war. They’ve never been on the hunting field. They’ve never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they’re such enthusiasts for murder.”

As long as they don’t have to do it themselves, I suppose,” the mayor said. (thinking of the grisly lynchings, Paris mobs inflamed by the political pamphleteers)

Lucile Desmoulins on the revolution: “We want to be free; but oh God, the cost of it.” She wondered if Camille had been very frightened; if he had forgotten the calm at the eye of the storm, the place of safety at the heart of all the close designs.”

I read Simon Schama’s history, ‘Citizens’ which gives a perfectly adequate background to read Hilary Mantel easily, but I doubt I would have got past the first 100 pages otherwise.

About Hilary Mantel Author Of A Place of Greater Safety pdf Book

Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel was the bestselling author of many novels including A Place of Greater Safety pdf book, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies pdf book, Book Two of the Wolf Hall Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She also wrote A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O’Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, Vacant Possession, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.

A Place of Greater Safety pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information

A Place of Greater Safety pdf book
A Place of Greater Safety pdf book
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador; First edition (November 14, 2006)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 768 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0312426399
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0312426392
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.28 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.45 x 1.41 x 8.25 inches
  • Best Sellers Rank: #48,478 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #153 in Biographical Fiction (Books)
  • #383 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
  • #2,721 in Literary Fiction (Books)
  • Customer Reviews: 4.2 out of 5 stars    1,365 ratings

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