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Résumé
Résumé
A powerful story about the fierce friendship between three sisters and their friend as they grow up around wild, artistic bohemian parents.
New York Times Book Review Editors' choice
Winner of Australia's 2015 Stella Prize
"Emily Bitto writes so well about art, childhood, infatuation, loneliness--you name it. The Strays is a knowing novel, and beautifully done." --Meg Wolitzer, New York Times -bestselling author of The Interestings
On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends Eva and her two sisters, daughters of the infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. Lily has never met anyone like Eva, full of unabashed confidence and worldly knowledge. And she has never seen a household like the Trenthams'--a community of artists who orbit Evan and his wife, all living and working together to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930s Australia. Lily becomes a fixture in their home, where she and Eva spend their days lounging in the garden, filching cigarettes and wine, and skirting the fringes of the glamorous lives of the adults, who create scandalous art during the day and host lavish, debauched parties by night. But, as seductive as the artists' utopian vision appears, behind it lies both darkness and dysfunction. With elegance and vibrancy, The Strays evokes the intense bonds of girlhood friendships, the explosive undercurrents of a damaged family, and the yearning felt by an outsider looking in.
"Disturbing and magical. . . .with a grace and eloquence." --NPR Books
"Full of lush, mesmerizing detail and keen insight into the easy intimacy between young girls which disappears with adulthood." -- The New Yorker
Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
The lyrical first novel by Australian Bitto observes the life of a bohemian household in 1930s Melbourne from the point of view of one of the "strays" the artistic Trenthams take in. Narrator Lily, an only child, is eight when she meets Eva, who will be her best friend for years. Bored with her conventional parents, whose idea of a good time is a jigsaw puzzle and a cup of cocoa, she begins to spend weekends with Eva, who lives with her controversial painter father; Eva's mother, whose inherited wealth supports the household; Eva's mature older sister, Bea; and her troubled younger sister, Heloise. As the years go by, other artists and their partners join the household. Eva's father's status is threatened by a young artist whose works sell better than his, and the parents' neglect of the children leads to a horrific outcome. Lily, in 1985 a professor of art history, is a thoughtful and articulate observer, aware of her own emotional investment in the family as well as of the many fractures within its seemingly structure. By placing her so firmly in a comfortable future, however, the core story loses much of its suspense, and too many of the novel's crucial events take place offstage, described rather than depicted. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Critique de Kirkus
A first novel from Australia about an artist and his wealthy wife living with their three daughters on the creative edge in hidebound 1930s Melbourne.Narrator Lily is the 8-year-old only child of overprotective parents struggling their way through the Depression when she meets Eva Trentham and her two sisters, Bea and Heloise, at her new school. Entranced by Eva but also her glamorous mother, Helena, and painter father, Evan, who dont mind flouting convention, Lily is soon spending as much time as she can at their estatelike home, which has belonged to Helenas family for generations. Soon other young artists move in as the Trenthams experiment in creating a free-spirited bohemian utopia. Meanwhile Lily and Eva develop an intensely close friendship; author Bitto is particularly strong at portraying the depth of intimacy in that first chaste trial marriage between girls. Drawn to the atmosphere of carefree detachment in which Helena and Evan raise their childrenEvan unselfconsciously naked much of the time, Helena paying erratic attention to basic needs like food on the tableLily yearns to be part of the family, not just a friend or guest. But what seems Edenic to Lily becomes increasingly problematic for the Trentham daughters, particularly the youngest, Heloise, whose emotional struggles no one takes seriously until too late. The dangers of the Trentham's creative neglect come to fruition when the girls blossom into puberty in close proximity to attractive male artists in their 20s. From the first page, a middle-aged Lily lets the reader know it all fell apart. The novel is framed within Lilys preparations to attend a 1985 museum retrospective of a now-revered Evans work, her visit to the now-elderly Trenthams, her first conversation with Eva since their relationship ruptured decades earlier, and her growing if conflicted desire to write a memoir about them all. Bitto adapts a leisurely storytelling pace that matches the period as she explores with quiet passion both the cost of creative life on family and the definition of family itself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de Booklist
*Starred Review* A note from an old friend sparks Lily's memory, and suddenly it's the 1930s again in Melbourne. Lily is nine, first meeting Eva, who will become her best friend. Eva's well-known artist father, Evan, is always busy painting, Lily learns, while Eva's beautiful mother, Helena, is always busy . . . being glamorous. Lily, fast becoming a witness to all this, is fascinated by the family's bohemian existence, their house always filled with other artists, some of whom actually live there in a kind of chaotic, de facto artist colony calling itself the Melbourne Modern Art Group. With the adults either occupied or careless, Eva and her two sisters are left on their own strays, their mother calls them, including Lily in their number, to Lily's delight. But what seems like a halcyon time changes suddenly when something nearly unimaginable happens, and Lily is left alone and friendless. Soon thereafter the novel flashes forward some 30 years as past and present come together in a melancholy denouement. Winner of Australia's Stella Prize, Bitto's novel is a haunting evocation of life-changing friendship. Stylishly written (an elegant woman is pale and long and light, like a taper), The Strays is a marvel of setting and characterization, re-creating a time of artistic revolution and personal revelation. Memorable and moving, this is a novel not to be missed.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2016 Booklist
Critique du New York Review of Books
"FAMILY," HELENA TRENTHAM asserts early in the Australian writer Emily Bitto's remarkable first novel, "should be the people you choose to surround yourself with, not the people you happen to be related to." The wife of an avant-garde painter and the mother of three daughters living in 1930s Melbourne, Helena has therefore constructed a "big, noisy, quicksilver" community of artists, all working and living together in a ramshackle house. But she fails to consider how this seemingly charmed bohemian life is affecting her own children, neglected and nudged to the periphery. The narrator of "The Strays" is Lily, 8 years old at the beginning of the novel, who meets Helena's middle daughter, Eva, at school and becomes hypnotized by her new friend's strange and exciting household, where meals are erratic and sometimes nonexistent and parties frequently rampage into the night, a riotous display the girls watch from a crow's nest balcony on the roof, dizzy with stolen wine and reefer. For Lily, part of the allure of the Trenthams is the increasing element of menace she senses in their midst: the graphic, possibly obscene nature of Evan's paintings; the lack of rules; the virile young men Helena and Evan bring into their family. It isn't surprising, then, that one night, listening as scenes from "Lady Chatterley's Lover" are read aloud, Lily becomes aware of "a darkness that fluttered at the edges of my feeling, a tiny trace of rot on the jasmine-scented air." "The Strays" is inspired in part by the Heide Circle, a group of Australian abstract artists led by John and Sunday Reed. But Bitto (who is herself from Melbourne) concentrates less on recreating versions of these real-life figures than she does on conjuring the invented Trentham children: Bea, the eldest, charged as caretaker for her two sisters; Eva, vibrant and self-assured; and Heloise, the youngest, the most neglected since she's shut out by her parents as well as her siblings. Lily, a self-described "voyeur in their midst," observes the brief glory of the Trenthams' social experiment and its decline, as the group's delicate equilibrium is disturbed when Evan invites more artists into the fold. Almost as fascinating, though, is Lily's friendship with Eva and the thrill of their intimacy: "Chaste, and yet fiercely physical," the two are "draped constantly about each other's bodies." Yet other emotions corrode Lily's obsessive affection: "I could not damp the hot envy that tinged my love for Eva with a desire to see her fail in some small way. To want what she had." Bitto's scenes of the Trentham commune are vividly written, almost painterly. Helena is "pale and long and light, like a taper, swathed in floaty cream fabric." Describing the gardens surrounding the house, Lily recalls "the pale gray pillars of the lemon-scented gums, the eucalyptus citriodoras, towering out of mist, gigantic." Methodically, a sense of impending catastrophe is woven into the narrative, making it seem inevitable, given the egos of the painters and their deliberate disruptions. Bitto focuses most intently on the women of the commune, noting how they're sidelined by their male peers and, ultimately, by history. Helena, once a promising painter, is relegated to the role of artistic enabler, welcoming talented "strays" into her home to liberate them from the strictures of convention that still subtly bind her. Late in the novel, when Lily - now middle-aged and a mother herself - is pulled once again into Eva's orbit, the story loses some of its power. The grown-up Lily is less compelling as an interpreter of her own "ordinary life" than she is as a youthful observer of the glamorous debauchery of the Trenthams and their acolytes. Even as an adult, she struggles with reconciling the allure of their lifestyle with the destruction it wreaked on their circle. Evan and Helena, she perceives, made a Faustian bargain "that involved lives, loves, spectacular fortunes and falls from grace. But it was their own daughters . . . who paid the debt that was owing." In this Australian novel, artsy parents fail to consider the effects of their life on their children. SOPHIE GILBERT is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Critique du Library Journal
In 1930, eight-year-old Lily becomes instant best friends with Eva Trentham when they enter third grade in Melbourne, Australia. An only child, Lily is delighted to spend every spare moment at the sprawling Trentham enclave, a bohemian household headed by Eva's vulgar, self-centered, brilliant artist father, Evan, and his vigilant wife, Helena, a hot-and-cold maternal presence. Several young artists are drawn to the -Trenthams' aura and eventually move in, and Lily herself is absorbed into the household. For a few years, the creative endeavors of the adults around her power an astonishing output of work, but as Lily, Eva, and her two equally beautiful sisters grow into adolescence, sexual tensions and artistic jealousies among the residents lead to a shocking scandal that shreds the household's fragile balance of talent and self-absorption and leads to the implosion of Lily's and Eva's friendship. VERDICT Published in Australia in 2014, this debut novel is a layered tapestry of family half-truths, deceit, and desire stretching across five decades, with blurred lines tangling the lives of Lily and Eva and thwarting Lily's quest for resolution and redemption. Reminiscent of Ian -McEwan's Atonement yet uniquely, gorgeously -Bitto's own. [See Prepub Alert, 7/1/16.]-Beth -Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.