Look at Me

Possibly Brookner’s best book- a lonely heroine falls in with a dominating couple after finding love with a work colleague. I won’t spoil the story by saying more but it’s a hard book to put down, and the heroine is a very sympathetic character. Recommended!

On one level, LOOK AT ME is a typical Anita Brookner novel about a single, intelligent, lonely English woman. In this case, her name is Frances Hinton. She works in the reference library of a medical research institute in London. Her mother died about two years ago (leaving her an orphan) and she shares her parents' old flat with Nancy, an elderly spinster who had been her parents' maid and cook. Frances leads an extremely ordered and proper and self-effacing existence, and a dull one. She wants some excitement and, ideally, requited love. And, more than anything perhaps, she wants to be able to assert herself and say "I hurt" or "I hate" or I want", or, more generally, "Look at me."Frances Hinton tries to stave off loneliness and despair by writing short stories and novels in the evenings and on weekends and holidays. That suggests that she is an alter ego of Anita Brookner (trained as an art historian, a writer on the side, and never married).If you have not heretofore read anything by Anita Brookner, you might find LOOK AT ME more captivating than I did. It is a finely crafted short novel (less than 200 pages). But there is virtually no action; it is a novel of interiority, featuring a phenomenally introverted protagonist. If you are a confident, decisive person, you may well find Frances Hinton intolerably dithering. LOOK AT ME is my fourth Brookner novel, and Frances Hinton is the most extreme - the most pathetic, if you will - of the intelligent, lonely Brooknerian females I have encountered.What partially redeems LOOK AT ME, and distinguishes it somewhat from other Brookner novels, is the contrast it draws between Frances Hinton, on the outside looking in, and those on the inside, those who are cocksure of themselves, those who say "Look at me" in everything they do. To the extent that there is a narrative arc to the novel, it traces Frances's friendship with Nick and Alix Fraser, a golden couple of bonhomie, badinage, and blazonry. At first, Frances is starstruck and envious and then she compromises herself to become a constant companion, audience, and foil of the Frasers. But what fuels the Frasers' easygoing and glamorous "Look at me" existence is a base self-centeredness, and Frances ends up being hurt and spurned. Life on the outside might be lonely, but it is not shallow and it is not cruel. Oddly, though, while this lesson is manifest to the reader, it is unclear whether Frances herself recognizes it at novel's end.

Francis or Fanny, the protagonist in 'Look at Me' reminds me of Emily Dickinson's poem which goes something like 'I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too?' Fanny walks a lot and talks to herself an awful lot. The descriptions of the London setting were good though. Just when you think Fanny is going to have some fun in her life, the book ends and you can only hope she and the reader find joy after it ends.

Brookner creates a fascinating window into the interior monologues of human beings, particularly women. In Fanny you can see all the ways one can mentally reformat their experiences to try and make them more tolerable. You also see how practiced one can become at forgiving instead of becoming angry, and how we may not always be paying attention to those who really love us.

From the very start of the novel, I felt that I was in the hands of an expert. It is difficult to write so engagingly about a quiet, shy protagonist but the author did it well. The author captured the loneliness of the protagonist beautifully and-most of the time-demonstrated a mastery at depicting her complicated emotions. At some points, though, the thought patterns of the protagonist didn’t seem consistent with her overall personality and at times, the evolutions of her emotions wasn’t clear.

I loved this book. Took a little while t get involved but once I saw where it was going I couldn't put it down.

Things move very slow in this world, but each interaction is fraught with tension and subtext.

This book does not have much of a plot, but that is not the point of it. Look at Me delves into the character's inner most thoughts as she navigates her relationships. The realism, complexity and humanity of this novel made it a page turner for me.