Besieged

by James Lasdun

Book Overview

His work has been described by the New York Times Book Review as an "elegant pathology report on the modern soul," and the Village Voice calls his prose "art that burrows into troubling new territory even as it glides by like a dream." Besieged shows his gift for exploring the undertones of contemporary experience at its most haunting and electrically charged. Against a variety of stunningly evoked backgrounds from the teeming banks of the Ganges in Varanasi to a homeless shelter in New York these powerful, intensely focused narratives reverberate, as Michiko Kakutani put it in the New York Times, "insistently in the reader's mind long after he has finished the book." In "Ate/Menos" or "The Miracle," a young man takes unscrupulous advantage of a woman who mistakes him for someone else and finds himself enmeshed in her desperate obsessions and nightmares. In "The Siege," a wealthy recluse falls in love with the immigrant woman who lives in his basement. On discovering she is married and that her husband is a political prisoner, he embarks on a course of action that will lead simultaneously to his destruction and to his salvation. Two of the stories in this collection were made into major independent film. "Ate Menos" was the basis for the film Sunday, which won the Grand Jury Best Feature Award at Sundance. "The Siege" was adapted by Bernardo Bertolucci for his film Besieged."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039332074X
• ISBN13: 9780393320749
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Theme of Possession and Loss of Free Will Pervades

Pointing to the major themes that are present in his masterpiece of a novel The Horned Man, these stories capture an array of seemingly normal people who become possessed by urges, compulsions, life forces, unsavory spirits, and uncanny inclinations that defy their quest for a decent life. Lasdun's stories skewer the notion of free will and seem to say that attempts to defy our destiny, our true urges, will only make those urges stronger. Thus the theme of repression and its discontents runs through all these stories, which are magical, plot-driven and told with poetic acuteness. If you like to read about characters consumed by obsessions as they face the consequences of their repression, you will like this sterling collection.