‘Adam and Sasha appear to have the perfect life - good jobs, a nice home, money and three perfect children. But as their marriage begins to unravel, their ballet-crazy daughter starts starving herself - and her parents are too preoccupied to notice. A haunting, heartbreaking novel.’
Being a tad out of touch with popular culture, I'd never even heard of CLOSER before. Now I see it's piled high on the shelves in the local supermarket.
Apologies for lack of normal blogging recently. Excuses: Tom went on tour for a month, I had too many daft things to deal with in his absence, got ill three times, am still not quite better, and there was the small matter of my first novel hitting the shelves in the meantime. Arguments about the vagaries of British critics and the merits or otherwise of 'Evgeny Onegin' at Covent Garden (principally 'otherwise') started to feel like they could wait for another day.......
Except this: yes, I did write 'Evgeny', not 'Eugene'. Calling the opera 'Eugene Onegin' is one of those tired old customs that make little sense but are hard to change, like saying 'The Marriage of Figaro' instead of 'Figaro's Wedding'... Do we talk about Eugene Kissin? Greg Sokolov? Mike Pletnev? Andrew Gavrilov? I know a few Vladimirs who are known as Bob, but I don't think Pushkin or Tchaikovsky thought of Onegin as a good old Gene.
