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Growing up on the Scottish island of Bute, Maria Tambini is a young girl with dreams of escape from her Italian immigrant family. When her amazing voice wins her a talent show at the tender age of thirteen, she is whisked off to London and instant stardom in the entertainment industry.
But even as Maria is celebrating her greatest success, she is waging a hidden battle against her own body, and becoming in the process a living exhibit in the modern drama of celebrity. Can she be saved by love? Or will she be consumed by an obsessive celebrity culture, family lies, and by her number-one fan?
Based closely on the life story of a famous singer, this stunning novel is at once a rich portrait of an immigrant community and a tragic tale of the hidden costs of celebrity.
But even as Maria is celebrating her greatest success, she is waging a hidden battle against her own body, and becoming in the process a living exhibit in the modern drama of celebrity. Can she be saved by love? Or will she be consumed by an obsessive celebrity culture, family lies, and by her number-one fan?
Based closely on the life story of a famous singer, this stunning novel is at once a rich portrait of an immigrant community and a tragic tale of the hidden costs of celebrity.
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Review:
Andrew O'Hagan's Personality opens on Scotland's Isle of Bute with three generations of the Tambini family struggling for success in their adopted home. The blanket of charm that envelops the Tambini's gradually discloses many secrets: forgotten children, torrid affairs, closeted homosexuality, and suppressed ethnic tension. Thirteen-year-old singer Maria Tambini seems to be everybody's antidote to past failures. After she leaves Bute for and audition with the television show Opportunity Knocks in London, she rapidly achieves both fame and fortune buoyed by a voice "like Barbara Streisand['s]" and charisma beyond her years. Friends and family mourn her loss to stardom while taking solace that someone has escaped Bute and achieved success as they imagine it must be on television.
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But Maria's abrupt transformation into a personality leads to obsession with body image, clothes, hairstyles, and make-up; she sees herself as only an object for other people's entertainment: "Her body was apart from her. The person with thoughts was different from the person with arms and legs, a stomach and a face." For Maria, a life of surfaces, a life of pleasing, means self-annihilation. As her self fades into the image that others project on her, her body literally withers away.
O'Hagan experiments with virtually every narrative form in Personality (even including an epistolary chapter). Not all of these attempts work, and the story--driven by its strong characters and not plot--occasionally bogs down in details unnecessary to the development of either. But even in these rare lapses O'Hagan, whose previous work has been short-listed for the Booker Prize, carries his reader through his finesse with Scottish dialect and the wit of his rich supporting characters. --Patrick O'Kelley
Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2003, 0-15-101000-5
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- PublisherHoughton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 0151010005
- ISBN 13 9780151010004
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages320
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PERSONALITY
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(2003)
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ISBN 13: 9780151010004
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: Fine. First U.S. Edition. Maria Tambini is a 13-year-old girl with an amazing singing voice. Growing up in the 1970s above her mother's chip shop on the Scottish island of Bute, she is making ready to escape the ordinary life to become a living exhibit in the modern drama of celebrity. Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. New, unread, first edition, first printing, in fine, mylar-protected dust jacket.{Not remainder=marked or price-clipped} L99. Seller Inventory # 7087
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Personality
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Book Description Condition: New. Buy with confidence! Book is in new, never-used condition 1. Seller Inventory # bk0151010005xvz189zvxnew
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PERSONALITY
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(2003)
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Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 1. Seller Inventory # Q-0151010005
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