Word: jessel
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...press misreads Summerchild's lifestyle completely; he is at once more simple and more involved than they imagine. Jessel discovers, through transcripts and cassette tapes, that Summerchild worked on an inquiry of his own: along with philosophy professor Elizabeth Serafin, Summerchild searched for the nature of happiness...
...Jessel lives vicariously what he believes life had been like for Summerchild and Serafin, based on the skeletal framework he constructs of transcripts, tapes, memos and photographs. As they had sought happiness, so does...
...distance from his own life increases as the story of Summerchild and Serafin (and Jessel) reaches its crescendo, and the characters and plot of his own story become more and more alien...
...reader finishes A Landing on the Sun feeling almost sucker-punched, albeit gently. The story allows Jessel to see their achievement of happiness, but the reader ultimately realizes the impossibility of happiness in Jessel's own life. The light touch of Frayn's clever humor makes Jessel's tragedy more poignant...
Frayn gives a whimsical edge to Jessel's serious outlook--and succeeds winningly at a type of comedy that seems particular to the British. But what is important and moving in A Landing on the Sun, and what most likely won it Britain's most valuable fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, is its profound sense of prosaic tragedy. The laughing stops abruptly at the end of A Landing on the Sun, and in this breathless transition Michael Frayn succeeds magnificently...