A superb love story from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Anna Quindlen Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens ...
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A superb love story from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Anna Quindlen Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life. Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.
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Good. 6 AUDIO CD SET withdrawn from the library collection. Some library marking. We will polish each of the Audio CDs for a good sound. You will receive a reliable set. Enjoy this presentable AUDIO CD performance.
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Sixty year old Rebecca Winter's Warholian fifteen minutes of fame have elapsed and she is now struggling financially to keep her head above the proverbial water-line. With payments being made for maintenance of the New York flat, nursing home charges where her dementia suffering mother resides and rent for her father's flat, she decides to lease her high rent New York apartment and rent a ramshackle cottage in an unspecified rural community in the New York State.
Rebecca Winter is a photographer who became well known for a series of photographs entitled The Kitchen Counter series, one of those being known as Still Life with Breadcrumbs. As Rebecca tries to engage with her new surroundings more often than not through hikes in the nearby woodland, she encounters small white crosses with various pieces of memorabilia next to them. As she begins to hunt the woodland for more of these crosses and photograph what she finds she meets Jim Bates sitting on a platform built into the branches of a tree, watching birds of prey and holding what looks like a gun.
This is not a book about a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. It is not a book about a woman going through a mid-life crisis. It would be very easy and very lazy to read the inside book jacket and come to either of the above conclusions but that would be doing a huge disservice to the author and this book. If the reader was to simply skim read their way through this book, that reader, though enjoying the book, would be missing the myriad of levels and nuances that permeate the book.
Still Life with Breadcrumbs is as elegant and intimate as an Annie Leibovitz photograph but also has the truthfulness of a Diane Arbus.
? ...?You?re Lucky?, Rebecca had been suspicious of the sentiment, and the intervening years had proved her correct. You?re so lucky, to the couple at an anniversary party who, in private, scarcely spoke. You?re so lucky, to the young mother who heard a stirring and cry at night from the crib and swore she would lose her mind. Lucky from the outside was an illusion.?
(Page 89)
Rebecca Winter attempts to make sense of the world, to define her world, through the lens of her camera. The camera acts as a buffer to the real world beyond her aperture. When photographing the white crosses with their accompanying pieces of memorabilia, trophy, plaster cast of a handprint etc she thinks only in terms of composition, framing, and light. She doesn't ask why the crosses and memorabilia are there or what they represent. And this thinking occasionally bleeds into her other parts of her life as well and in so doing she misses out on what life has to offer.
Anna Quindlen has an unerring ability to flesh out her characters without appearing to write very much about them. Her style of writing appears deceptively easy and with the least amount of effort. However, as one reads the words the reader finds themselves breathing the same air as the characters; one feels the characters becoming part of one's DNA.
I will finish the review with a wonderful passage on page 104 that will help display Anna Quindlen's wonderful prose.
?There are two kinds of men: men who want a wife who is predictable, and men who want a wife who is exotic. For some reason, Peter had thought she was the latter. But even if that had been the case, the problem inherent remains the same ? once she becomes a wife, the exotic becomes familiar, and thus predictable, and thus not what was wanted at all. Those few women who stayed exotic usually were considered, after a few years, to be crazy.?
(Page 104)
Number of Pages ? 252
Sex Scenes ? None
Profanity ? None
Genre - Fiction