RIP

[Soon]

After reading this interview, I realize why I was so drawn to her books at one point in my life. I think I read Hotel du Lac at least a couple of times in my twenties.

Anita Brookner, the final interview: 'praise is irrelevant'

Brookner prize-winning author and art historian Anita Brookner died on March 15, 2016, aged 87. The bestselling novelist, who won the 1984 award for Hotel Du Lac, lived a reclusive life in her final years. This, her last interview, was conducted by Mick Brown in 2009, when it was first published in The Telegraph.

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And I read the first sentence: "Dr Weiss, at 40, knew that her life had been ruined by literature." I thought, well that's a damned good sentence – such an interesting sentence that I had to read on. Her books have a very page-turning quality. They're beautifully constructed. And while there aren't hugely dramatic events taking place, within the world about which she writes you get a very clear and compelling portrait of human nature.'

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In Hotel du Lac the timorous, middle-aged romantic novelist Edith Hope, sent into exile by her friends for reneging on her wedding promise to dull, dependable Geoffrey, has her moral probity challenged by the suave voluptuary Philip Neville. 'One can be as pleasant or as ruthless as one wants,' Neville argues. 'If one is prepared to do the one thing one is drilled out of doing from earliest childhood – simply please oneself – there is no reason why one should ever be unhappy again.' 'Or perhaps entirely happy,' Edith replies.

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Anita Brookner’s subversive message – the courage of the single life deserves respect

“I do not sigh and yearn,” she says, “for extravagant displays of passion”. What she wants is something much more modest. “What I crave,” she says, “is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards.” But you can’t do this, she decides, with someone you don’t love. And so she turns him down.

Brookner’s heroines are single not because they are too dowdy, but because they are too honest. They know that life is full of compromise, but they still see a compromise too far. If they don’t exactly live what the philosopher Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation”, they have certainly learned to live with quiet courage because of the choices they have made.