‘I met the sad menopausee and offered her, at the flick of a switch, a return of beauty, youth, and desire. And – after all, I’m no stinge-merchant – power and money as well. Why not? If a man, such as Dr Faustus, was offered such commodities by myself … why not a woman, in this age of equality?’
Emma Tennant’s ingenious modern-day reworking of the Faust legend describes a young woman’s dark discovery of the terrible fate that was chosen by her ostensibly kindly long-lost grandmother. Penelope Fitzgerald thought the novel ‘brilliant’, the TLS hailed it as ‘an elegant and bitter story … an angry diagnosis of consumerism, pollution, wealth, poverty and war …’
We have one copy to give away to the winner of our quiz. To win, first take a look at the following question:
Name the author who, in 1947, published a novel that retold the Faust story in a manner inspired by the real-life careers of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and composer Arnold Schoenberg.