"From the stifling fifties, through the swinging sixties, this joyous Jean Rhys-esque novel explores a young woman’s tottering coming-of-age from obsessive first love to freedom."
Set in the fifties and sixties, Rose Tremain's Absolutely and Forever is a captivating coming-of-age character study of manic first love and finding the courage to forge personal freedom.
With its authentic, endearing narrative voice tingling with wit, this remarkable short novel boasts a precision and particular kind of emotional awareness that put me in mind of Jean Rhys’ writing, and the fiction of Simone de Beauvoir, though it’s more comic than the work of both these doyennes of superbly succinct fiction. Directly affecting through its clever clarity, I absolutely adored Absolutely and Forever and, in all likelihood, that will remain the case absolutely and forever.
From the opening pages, Tremain conjures the urgency of Marianne’s first love through her giddily extreme emotional responses, and matter-of-fact utterance of wild romantic imaginings: “soon enough I’m going to marry Simon and travel the world with him and eat dates in Arabia and snorkel among exotic fish along the Great Barrier Reef.”
Marianne’s piercing self-awareness is also fabulously authentic, and funny with it: “The narcissism of a person in love knows no bounds. I began to see myself as Simon would see me, which is to say, absolutely beautiful.”
But when Simon fails the Oxford entrance exam and leaves England to study in Paris, Marianne is left feeling “quite ill with a longing to be there beside him.” When a letter restores her with hope that she’ll become Mrs Simon Hurst, with a future that involves the likes of “riding a camel in Egypt, floating along in a gondola in Venice, driving through the Grand Canyon in a open-topped Cadillac”, a teacher warns her to “try to grow up and start thinking for yourself”.
Marianne’s journey to growing up and thinking for herself sees her stumble through a secretarial course and try to be “like one of the skinny King’s Road girls”. But in the face of big blows and tragedy, Marianne moves to some maturity (“We just have to go on and see what happens”) while wearing her wit wonderfully (“I’m just in the process of turning into my mother”), and beginning to make “decisions about how my story would go on.”
I absolutely adored my time in Marianne’s company — what a wonder Rose Tremain has created in Absolutely and Forever.
Determined, rebellious Marianne Clifford is searching for love and freedom in 1960s London
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Other Genres: | |
| Recommendations: |
Determined, rebellious Marianne Clifford is searching for love and freedom in 1960s London How do you find the courage to make your own life? Marianne Clifford, teenage daughter of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, falls helplessly and absolutely for eighteen-year-old Simon Hurst, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents.
Absolutely and Forever features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Star Books, Historical Fiction, General Fiction, Shorter Reads, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Fiction, Recommendations, Fiction: special features, Fiction: narrative themes
Paperback, Hardback. £8.99, down from the £9.99 cover price. In Stock.
Absolutely and Forever was written by Rose Tremain and published by Vintage an imprint of Vintage Publishing
Absolutely and Forever has 180 pages
£8.99, reduced from £9.99. In Stock.
