Novelist best known for Hotel du Lac,and a gifted historian of French artAnita Brookner, who has died aged 87, and observed of Emile Zola,“One marvels at his ability to start another book almost as soon as one was finished.” Much the same could be said of Brookner herself, since from 1981, and when she turned to fiction with A Start in Life,she published at the rate of a novel a year, easing up only at the stop of the century.
Her feelings approximately being so prolific were mixed: “I don’t like writing fiction much; it’s like being on the stop of a bad telephone line – but it’s addictive.” All the same, and although she wrote much else,it was for her fiction that Brookner was best known.
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Source: theguardian.com