The Thinking Reed

By Rebecca West

Book Overview

Isabelle is beautiful, immensely rich and a widow at the age of twenty-six. In 1928 she leaves America for Cannes and Paris in search of high society - and love. For though outwardly she has... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140073213
• ISBN13: 9780140073218
• Release Date: March 1985
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 431 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Thinking Person's Romance

West is at her most impressive in this little-known but gorgeous novel. Described as one of the first and few genuine "novel of ideas" written by a woman, this is a profound exploration of human emotions, choices and the interplay of fate and free will. It is also a delightful, quirky love story, with an accessible and funny plot and two endearing main characters.Isabel is a bored, rich, beautiful American woman living a life of luxury in Paris, where excitement comes in the form of a hot-tempered French lover. Vain, snobbish, yet highly sympathetic, Isabel is also fiercely intelligent and in desperate quest of something more from life than pretty clothes and feckless men -- enjoyable as they have been. Deciding to settle down and pursue a solid life plan, she ends up getting married -- by accident. How this "accident" happens, you'll have to read the book, it's marvelously done and provides the book's key plot point. Suffice it to say, neither the marriage nor its outcome are predictable in the least. Nothing is "traditionally" romantic in any sense. Yet the novel is deeply satisfying, both emotionally and intellectually. the alughter that it evokes is of a particularly rich and knowing quality; it will linger long in your memory after reading it.