a quarter of a century apart 

Andrew Miller: Oxygen. 2001. 

Previously, from author Andrew Miller I read The Land in Winter (2024) and that book, oh I loved so much. And since that reading was such a delight, pleasure, for me, I purcahsed also his book Oxygen, first published 2001, and since reading the two, I say, Miller nowadays, in The Land in Winter, appealed to my liking more that the book, Oxcygen, written quarter a century ago, even though, this, do not get me wrong, this was not a bad book, not at all. 

In this book Miller takes us to West Country, and there to the year of 1997. There is Alice, a mother of two grown sons. We also get to go to California, where Larry, one of the sons live and work(ed) as a a day time soap opera star / actor. Alec, the other son, the younger one, lives and works as a translator. Alec gets to translate a play of Laszlo, a hungarian living in Paris. To me, the story of Laszlo, hungarian and his friends, was too stressed, too grand for the wholeness to the theme I was reading the book, too grand to the plot. I would rather read more of the strained relations of the two sons, their rivaly of mother ´s love and attension. Also, mothers life, now in ending in cancer would have interested me, her thoughts of her choises, her past, more than a mystery trip to Hungary, to the shady happenings with Lazlo. But still, 

strong writing, 

yet not as much loved as the oh so wonderful The Land in Winter.