The Queen of the Tambourine

by Jane Gardam

Book Overview

In prose vibrant and witty, The Queen of the Tambourine is a darkly comic novel about a smart, sensitive, and wildly imaginative woman who loses and then regains control over her life. Once the proverbial good woman behind a highly successful husband, Eliza Peabody now finds herself abandoned and isolated in her prosperous London neighborhood. She will have to reach new depths before discovering a path back to health and serenity.

Winner...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1933372362
• ISBN13: 9781933372365
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Do you have a resistance to epistolary fiction?

Like reading a novel in dialect, I often have an adjustment during the opening pages - or the first few letters - of an epistolary novel. If I had not absolutely loved "Old Filth" I may not have tried "Queen of the Tamborine", but I did, so I did. Thank heavens. It is breathtakingly well written and I fell into it from page one. The protagonist, who appears smug and self-righteous at first, just the kind of person who needs to just get a life and stop interfereing with the lives of others, opens up like a flower into a complex and interesting woman. I eagerly anticipate re-reading this novel and ferreting out more and more Gardam.

"I never knew my tribe. I've always been on the edge, just hanging about."

(4.5 stars) Eliza Peabody begins writing to her neighbor Joan, not a close friend, almost immediately after Joan leaves her husband Charles and disappears, leaving behind only a series of addresses around the world where she may be contacted. Eliza takes it upon herself to write to Joan repeatedly, offering unsolicited advice, observations (unintentionally insulting) about Joan's husband and children, and comments about her role as a woman, which she knows that Joan does not share. Joan never answers. Over the course of more than a year, the letters become longer and more revealing, ultimately showing Eliza to be a frustrated and mentally disturbed woman who may need hospitalization. As she spirals downward and begins to hallucinate, most readers will empathize with her (as much as one can empathize with a meddlesome and impossibly tactless woman) while questioning if anything she says is the truth. Jane Gardam, with her supremely subtle humor, creates in Eliza a character few readers will be able to resist. Thinking herself a realist who calls a spade a spade, Eliza has no clue that others regard her as rude, unthinking, and self-centered--someone whose lack of awareness leaves her open to accusations of malice. Her messages to Joan, filled with dramatic irony, show her to be far from the "helpful friend" she thinks herself. When Joan sends her a pair of elaborate earrings, resembling tambourines, she is called the "The Queen of the Tambourine" by Barry, a young man dying in the hospice she sometimes visits. As Eliza goes about her daily life, including her hilarious attendance at a local literary group meeting, the author's ability to create clever satire and wonderful observations about love, marriage, and friendship shine with the candor of one who has little patience with pretension and a person's lack of self-awareness. Few writers can match Gardam's sense of irony, and she is subtle and clever in creating Eliza's letters. Illustrating the absurdities inherent in a suburban lifestyle that Joan has escaped and which Eliza wants to preserve, Gardam creates a leisurely and assured novel about self-awareness, the opportunities and limitations of marriage, and the constraints of society. The liberating role of sex in a healthy relationship, and the role of fantasy, especially as it relates to sex, infuses the novel. Wry, clever, and thoughtful, this Whitbread Award-winning novel from 1991, newly republished by Europa Editions following the success of Gardam's Old Filth, should expand her literary reputation on this "side of the pond" and gain Gardam many new fans. n Mary Whipple

Just read it as soon as you can

Gardam is amazing and this novel is one of a kind, superbly so. Just read it. If I tried to talk about it at all I'd make a mess of it.

A Masterpiece

"Angela's Ashes" is alternately funny and sad, but Jane Gardam's book is three times as funny and three times as sad. A work of genius!I can't recall admiring a novel more.

Great Book!

This awesome book puts you in the mind of someone slowly sleeping into mental illness. Highly recommended!