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Eleanor Rigby

By Douglas Coupland

(66)

| Paperback | 9780679313380

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Book Description

“The Liz Dunns of this world tend to get married, and then twenty-three months after their wedding and the birth of their first child they establish sensible lower maintenance hairdos that last them forever. Liz Dunns take classes in croissant baking, and would rather chew on soccer balls than deny their children muesli… I am a traitor to my name.”

Liz Dunn is one of the world’s lonely people. She’s in her late thirties and has a boring cubicle job at a communications company, doing work that is only slightly more bearable than the time she spends alone in her depressingly sterile box of a condo. Her whole life, she’s tried to get to the root of her sadness, to figure out what she’s been doing wrong, with little success. But then, one night in 1997, everything changes: while standing in the parking lot of a video store, arms full of sappy movies she’s rented to help her convalesce from oral surgery, she witnesses the passing of the Hale-Bopp comet. For Liz, this streak of light across the sky is a portent of radical change — and for her, radical change means finally accepting her lot: “I realized that my life, while technically adequate, had become all it was ever going to be … No more trying to control everything — it was now time to go with the flow.” In that moment, and for the first time, Liz feels truly free.

A day after Liz makes the decision to seek peace in her life rather than control, along comes another comet, in the form of a stranger admitted to the local hospital with her name and number inscribed on his MedicAlert bracelet. For the new Liz, the phone call from the hospital feels like “the fulfillment of a prophecy”; the young man, it turns out, is her son, whom she gave up for adoption when she was sixteen. Jeremy shows the scars of his years as a foster child and his most recent drug reaction, but is otherwise beautiful and charming. And when he moves in with Liz to recuperate, it’s as if both of them had been waiting for this moment all their lives.

A lost soul and occasional visionary, Jeremy upends Liz’s quiet existence — shocking her coworkers and family, redecorating her condo, getting her to reevaluate her past and take an active role in her future. But he’s also very ill with multiple sclerosis. Her son’s life-and-death battle induces a spiritual awakening in Liz — then triggers a chain of events that take her to the other side of the world and back, endangering her life just as an unexpected second chance at happiness finally seems within reach.

With Eleanor Rigby, Douglas Coupland has given us a powerful and entertaining portrait of a woman who could be any one of us — someone who thinks it is too late to make anything of her life, who feels defeated by the monotony of her days, yet who also holds within her the potential for monumental change and for great love. When Liz asks, “What happens when things stop being cosmic and become something you can hold in your hand in a very real sense?” she’s not just talking about stray meteors anymore. The excitement of not really knowing the answer is what life’s all about. In the end, Liz discovers that life is no longer a matter of keeping an even keel until you die, or settling for peace and quiet, but of embracing faith and hope and change.

Critics

Eleanor Rigby

1997. Liz Dunn è forse la donna più sola in tutto il Canada: è sovrappeso, ignorata dagli uomini, guardata con sospetto dai parenti, ha un lavoro noioso, una casa arredata malissimo e i denti del giudizio che le fanno male. A sconvolgere questa calma ... (read full critics)

mangialibri published on Sat, 18 Feb 2012

Amazing grace

Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland 250pp, Fourth Estate, £15.99 What happens when the official chronicler of youth writes about the no-longer young? In other words, what happens when Douglas Coupland hits middle age? Coupland began the 1990s giving th ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

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4 Reviews

" it's difficult to speak with beautiful people. no matter how hard you try to pretend otherwise, you still want them to like you. we are a wretched, shallow species. "

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kovalski said on Nov 1, 2011 | Add your feedback

I liked it, which comes as a surprise, given the mostly bad reviews I read on some newspapers' websites.
It's a book about loneliness, about the power of unforeseen surprises in life to change a person's perspective on the world and themselves.
I actually liked Liz Dunn: it's true, sometimes she ... (continue)

I liked it, which comes as a surprise, given the mostly bad reviews I read on some newspapers' websites.
It's a book about loneliness, about the power of unforeseen surprises in life to change a person's perspective on the world and themselves.
I actually liked Liz Dunn: it's true, sometimes she reminds us a tad too much of how friendless and lonely she is, but she doesn't do so with self-pity, and from her special position of loneliness and silence, she watches and describes the world that surrounds her wittily.
Nice characters, nice story and good writing. It's my first Douglas Coupland, and I'm glad I started with one of the least read ones and liked it.

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natalia said on Dec 5, 2009 | Add your feedback

Can't even remember what this book is about.

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leo said on Jun 27, 2008 | Add your feedback

Review at http://community.livejournal.com/bookopolis/9382.html

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Hold Your Spin said on Jul 8, 2007 | Add your feedback

Book Details

Rating:
(66)
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English Books
Paperback 272 Pages
ISBN-10: 0679313389
ISBN-13: 9780679313380
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Pub date: Oct 11, 2005
Dimensions: 1290 mm x 839 mm x 129 mm Just how big is that?
Also available as: Hardcover, Others and eBook
In other languages: other languages Livres Français, Deutsche Bücher, Libri Italiani