Legal Research

The Clothes on Their Backs

By Jen

Look - another Booker review, if much belated..

Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs, is a portrait of a post-war migrant family to London, struggling to find an emotional foothold in this new country. It is also a coming-of-age tale, recounting Vivian’s (the main character and narrator) young adulthood, as she comes to know and understand both herself and her family.

Vivian’s parents moved to London to escape the threat of communism in Hungary. They lived their lives carefully and fearfully, never really at ease in England, and rarely leaving their charity-allocated West end flat. Vivian grew up not knowing that her estranged uncle was the criminal Sandor Kovacs, an infamous slum lord and pimp. The adult Vivian, reeling from the tragic death of her young husband, covertly befriends the now aging Sandor, acting as scribe as he recalls a life of hardship and struggle, in the book he would like to write to ’set his story straight’.

The book is simply written, with a careful, concise tone that lends a beautiful clarity to the text. Though written in the first person, there is an emotional remove from the action, as the older Vivan recounts these events from her youth dispassionately and somewhat coldly. Throughout the book clothes are used to lend a warmth to the otherwise removed tale. Grant goes into great depth describing Vivian’s clothes throughout her life, as well as the iconic pieces from other characters wardrobes - her punk boyfriends leather jacket, her mother’s woolen vests. I enjoyed this book very much, which was an interesting contrast to the comparatively overwrought emotions of The Secret Scripture. It is a compelling story of communication, revelation, history and family.

Full post as published by Information Overload on November 12, 2008 (boomark / email).