Garbo Laughs

By Elizabeth Hay

Winner of the Ottawa Book Award
Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award
A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
A Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year
A Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year

Elizabeth Hay’s runaway national bestseller is a funny, sad-eyed, deliciously entertaining novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real life and the films of the past. Inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child, Harriet Browning forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Into this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood: Harriet’s Aunt Leah, the jaded widow of a screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s, and her sardonic, often overbearing stepson, Jack. They bring harsh reality and illuminate the pull of family and friendship, the sting of infidelity and revenge, the shock of illness and sudden loss. Poignant, brilliant, and delightfully droll, Garbo Laughs reveals how the dramas of everyday life are sometimes the most astonishing of all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781551994321

Reviews for Garbo Laughs

[christinedux · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Movie preferences and plots take precedence over characters and events--but it works.

[chicapeligrosa-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I did enjoy the story very much but found the flipping around from one POV to the next a bit confusing at first (especially without any significant separation in the text). Sometimes it wasn't clear whose head the narrator was in. The story jumps back and forth in time, which only adds confusion. The author introduces an idea, then goes back to explain it so it fits into the storyline. Also there was quite a lot of foreshadowing that became distracting guessing what would happen to Harriet. [Spoiler] "Kenny would remember his mother ..." signalling that she won't always be around. So of course when Harriet gets cancer it comes as no surprise and we know intuitively that she's not going to make it.The other quirky bit is that the writing is funny but I wasn't finding it funny until the main character, Harriet, admits that's she's not funny, then proceeds to be very, very witty.The ending is odd, too. It's as if Elizabeth Hay was trying to flip the notion of the standard ending scenario of a comedy vs. tragedy on its head. I think she even mentions it in the text somewhere: A comedy ends with a wedding, a tragedy ends with a death. Was this intentional? If so, good trick. Either way, I'm still a bit confused.

[tattooedpixie · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have to say, I'm a bit sad I didn't enjoy this book more. The story in itself was a great concept, but I did not enjoy the way it was written.The author seems to be clumsy with her writing, stumbling through small plot lines, and quite a few times I was left confused about why she had written a certain phrase, or why she had a certain character say something.Also, for me at least, it's not until towards the end of the book that you feel you know the characters well enough. Several times towards the middle of the story, I couldn't figure out why the author had put characters into a plot line, when we didn't know the characters well enough to understand it.Overall, I enjoyed the concept more then the book, so I give it 3 stars.

[oldblack-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

At the end of this book I just sat back and felt lost for words. What a writer. Elizabeth Hay really understands people and knows how to tell stories about the interactions between people. This book has so much focus on movies that at times I thought it was distracting, taking away from the substance of the story. But by the time I reached the end I had decided that Hay actually had the balance just right. I'm not intellectual enough to be able to analyse why it works, but my heart told me that it did. Somehow this book was deeply satisfying in a way I find so rare in my normal reading experience.

[paradiseporch · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not about Garbo, but vintage b&w films play a part. Hay always delivers a good story filled with human insights and poignancy

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Elizabeth Hay introduces her novel with an epigraph from legendary film critic, Pauline Kael: “We will never know the extent of the damage that movies are doing to us.” That brilliantly sets the underlying condition for the principal characters in this novel: Harriet, a harried novelist suffering from loss of sleep and extreme emotions; Harriet’s two children, Jane who is eleven and wants to be an actress and Kenny, who is nine and wants to be Frank Sinatra; and Dinah who lives across the road, yearns for Harriet’s husband, Lew, and takes an instant liking to Kenny, whose first words to her are, “Who do you like better, Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando?” Movies, especially the movies of a bygone age, form the basis of their conversation, their desires, and their judgements. Just how much damage this obsessing over film has done to them remains an open question.Hay beautifully evokes life in Ottawa in the late nineties. But the focus here is more narrowly upon the street on which they live which is a vibrant community of its own, stocked with eccentric characters, old hands, and angry North of England types. In their ways, they are each connected to the arts. Most are writers or journalists or wannabe writers or CBC radio personalities. All, however, are passionate about the early history of cinema. And since this takes place in that now fading era before the Internet took hold and IMDB replaced such tomes as Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies, nuggets of cinematic information, real or apocryphal, are like gold traded between them and sometimes horded. But the real story lies between Harriet and Dinah and Lew. Their desires and commitments unfurl like the fractal spores of the rare fern that Lew has brought back with him from Cuba. As Harriet observes late in the novel, “How oddly disjointed so much of life is, she thought, and how little it takes – a few words, arranged a certain way – for it to make sense again.” It is a beautiful observation and, I think, it captures Hay’s disorientingly close narrative technique. It does feel disjointed, just like life, and yet, in these few words arranged into a novel, it does seem to make sense. Recommended, along with everything else Elizabeth Hay has written (or will write).

[marthajeanne · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The main character is an unsuccessful writer obsessed with movies. If that describes you, you might enjoy this. Otherwise you will probably get tired of all the mentions of movies you haven't seen, or only seen once.