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The Clothes On Their Backs

3.22 of 5 stars 3.22 · rating details · 1,144 ratings · 222 reviews

Orange Prize Winner and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008, Llinda Grant has created an enchanting portrait of a woman who, having endured unbearable loss, finds solace in the family secrets her estranged uncle reveals.Vivien Kovacs, sensitive and bookish, grows up sealed off from the world by her timid Hungarian refugee parents. She loses herself in books and reinv...more

Paperback, 304 pages

Published November 25th 2008 by Scribner (first published 2008)

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Aug 17, 2008 Stewart rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: united-kingdom, booker-2008

Linda Grant comes to this year’s Booker longlist following on from her longlisting for this year’s Orange Prize, an accolade she won in 2000 with her second novel, When I Lived In Modern Times. Her third novel, Still Here, flirted with the Booker back in 2002, but never made it to the shortlist. The Clothes On Their Backs (2008), her fourth novel, might yet see her take one step further to the Booker, especially in a year where, judging by the discussions on the Booker site, the field seems aver...more

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Dec 20, 2008 Stephanie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: immigrant-lit

YES, as the title suggests, this book talks a lot about clothes – silk gowns and vintage cocktail dresses, leather jackets and red snakeskin shoes, rags to riches.
But this is not your usual novel about fashion, written by a disgruntled magazine editorial assistant and studded with designer names. Orange Prize-wining British author Linda Grant takes the familiar phrase used to describe so many immigrants – “they came to this country with only the clothes on their backs” – and turns it into a medi...more YES, as the title suggests, this book talks a lot about clothes – silk gowns and vintage cocktail dresses, leather jackets and red snakeskin shoes, rags to riches.
But this is not your usual novel about fashion, written by a disgruntled magazine editorial assistant and studded with designer names. Orange Prize-wining British author Linda Grant takes the familiar phrase used to describe so many immigrants – “they came to this country with only the clothes on their backs” – and turns it into a meditation on how people use clothes as a way to reinforce identity, to help themselves transform from who they are to who they hope to be.
The narrator is Vivien Kovaks, the daughter of Jewish-Hungarian refugees who immigrated to London in 1938, before the outbreak of World War II. Once safety installed in their rent-controlled apartment, they live a law-abiding, low-profile life, “not so much peaceful as inert”.
Then there is her uncle Sandor Kovacs, a person apparently so vile that her father changed the spelling of his surname to distance himself from him. As a child, Vivien was told by her parents that they wanted nothing to do with her uncle on the grounds that he was a notorious slumlord, renting out squalid rooms to the desperate black immigrants from the Caribbean spilling into London in the 1950s and 60s.
Yet, the one time Sandor turns up on their doorstep in 1963, when Vivian is 10, the girl brought up in donated hand-me-downs is left an indelible image: “A man in an electric blue mohair suit, black hand-stitched suede shoes, his wrist flashing with a fancy watch attached to a diamond bracelet.”
Though her uncle is dismissed from the door by her father in a shouting match, Vivien seeks him out more than ten years later when, now a young widow with no goals, she feels drawn to discover her past.
In the interim, Sandor has been arrested, imprisoned and released for his slumlord crimes. Concealing her identity from him – though he guesses as much – Vivien begins working for him, taking down his dictation of his life story. As Sandor peels backs the layers of their shared family history, Vivien discovers that things and people are not always as they appear.
Naturally, most of the interesting clothes belong to Vivien, their transformative qualities obvious: from her awakening from awkward immigrants’ child to London fashionista when an eccentric neighbour dies and leaves a stash of vintage clothing, to her experiments with punk outfits of when she hooks up with Claude, her uncle’s rough and edgy tenant.
But clothes are also a poignant reminder and reflection of identity. In his account of his past, Sandor describes how he was forced into a labour service by the Hungarian Fascists during the war, marching “off to labour service in a suit which would not leave his back for a further four and a half years” until “they no longer resembled clothes, but a kind of fungus excreted by his skin.”
Outlined like this, what Grant is doing might seem simplistic, even tedious; but she is too deft a writer to let her stitches show. It would be all too easy to say that this book proves the phrase “clothes maketh the man”. In fact, it does the opposite: the man makes his clothes, using them in often quixotic attempts to become what one not yet is.
Like all other things created by Man, clothes reflect the aspirations of their makers. By trying to understand what people wear, we can try to understand where they are coming from: As another phrase goes, we walk in their shoes.(less)

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Apr 27, 2013 M M rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Before I read Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs, I had encountered feuds in few places. Shakespeare and Mark Twain, obviously. In real life, though, a friend once refused to partake of a particular brand of ice-cream. He would not, he said, because it was owned by his uncle.

The story of why his family was so unremittingly hostile to his uncle is irrelevant here, but there are similarities to the case of the Kovaks brothers of Grant's book. Both sets of brothers were immigrants to a 'prom...more Before I read Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs, I had encountered feuds in few places. Shakespeare and Mark Twain, obviously. In real life, though, a friend once refused to partake of a particular brand of ice-cream. He would not, he said, because it was owned by his uncle.

The story of why his family was so unremittingly hostile to his uncle is irrelevant here, but there are similarities to the case of the Kovaks brothers of Grant's book. Both sets of brothers were immigrants to a 'promised' land. In each set, there was one brother who was a go-getter, and the other was unwordly and embittered. In each case, the elder brother thought he was helping out the younger, who, seething with moral superiority and acute inferiority, resented his sibling's career, life, and success. But a difference stands out between my friend and the Jewish protagonists of Grant's book: my friend continued the feud of the previous generation into his own, whereas Vivien, the narrator of the book, sought out her uncle, befriended him, learned of her own roots in old Hungary, and recognised a basic affinity between her uncle and herself.

The story is fairly linear. Vivien's parents escape Budapest before the arrival of the Nazis and make a new life for themselves in Britain. They consider their move prescient, but Vivien's uncle reveals that far pettier considerations led his brother to leave his home. Years later, the uncle turns up in London, and realises that there's much money to be made from renting tenements to immigrant West Indians, who nobody else would have for tenants. Vivien's parents lead closed, scared lives, trying hard to assimilate; their pride is Vivien herself. They have no intention at all to embrace her uncle, who arrives one day, all flash and bearing chocolates, leaving an impression of vivid brightness in Vivien's imagination, which is otherwise stifled by the drabness of her life. The uncle, Sandor, you see, is considered a criminal by Vivien's father. Worse, Sandor is a humiliating reminder of his own weaknesses in Budapest, and he wants nothing to do with him.

Vivien herself sleepwalks through her university, where she is so passive that her gay friends sleep with her to test themselves before coming out. Her marriage to a true-blood Englander ends in a tragicomic accident. Riven by guilt, she retreats to her parents, remembers the brightness of her uncle, and decides to track him down. When she finally meets him, they recognise each other at once, but pretend not to, and maintain a polite fiction that she is there just to take down his reminiscences, while he defends his life and career to her.

There's nothing particularly Jewish about the people in the book. The Jewishness is so transparent an artifice that it smacks of a lack of imagination. And, of course, it is de rigueur to mention the Holocaust often these days. The protagonists could have been Irish. Or Pakistani. It would have made no difference at all to the story. They are all stereotypes of immigrants, first and second generation. There's the industrious scared-as-a-mouse immigrant, and there's a carpe-diem immigrant. One immigrant thinks he should efface himself completely; the other looks down upon Britain as a land of fools and criminal enterprise. The assimilatory immigrant is a racist, while the other embraces diversity as a business opportunity. Vivien - herself of the second generation - is rootless and confused, and contrary to the claim on the dust jacket that she is bookish and sensitive, is actually sluggish and passive.

There's little motivation for the acts of the various people in the book. Temperamentally, each is an archetype, and this alone accounts for their development. There's no subtlety in the book, no insight, and nothing new. Linda Grant set out to fictionalise the life of an East End tenement king, and ended up adding palpable dross. I'm surprised this book made the long list for the Booker Prize in 2008. It has little to recommend it.(less)

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Mar 12, 2013 Smcleish rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Originally published on my blog here in September 2009.

The 2008 Booker Prize short list has once again proved dull, to the point that this, the fourth I have started, is the only one I have so far bothered to finish. As well as being an enjoyable book from the short list, it also falls into another small category, Booker-short-listed-novel-not-tapping-into-British-post-colonial-guilt. True, it does have immigrants as characters, but they're wartime Hungarian refugees, not from the former Empire...more Originally published on my blog here in September 2009.

The 2008 Booker Prize short list has once again proved dull, to the point that this, the fourth I have started, is the only one I have so far bothered to finish. As well as being an enjoyable book from the short list, it also falls into another small category, Booker-short-listed-novel-not-tapping-into-British-post-colonial-guilt. True, it does have immigrants as characters, but they're wartime Hungarian refugees, not from the former Empire at all.

Vivian Kovaks grows up in a central London flat, rented for a song by her parents who originally offered it as charity to a pair of refugees,not expecting them to stay for forty years. She, as narrator of the novel, describes her parents as mice seeking to bring her up as a mouse. A sheltered childhood, followed by study at York University, then marriage.

But there's what might be called an "elephant in the room". Vivian's uncle is Sandor Kovaks, who is a successful businessman; the problem is that his wealth is based on being an exploitative slum landlord, also in London. The character is based on a real person, Peter Rachman, who I vaguely remember reading about (probably in a much later Sunday colour supplement magazine). Vivian's parents won't admit to the relationship, but Vivian remains fascinated by her one childhood memory of her uncle, from the only time he visited their flat. Sandor is imprisoned when she is about ten, but she later meets him again, and the second half of the novel is really about her discovering what the man behind the tabloid horror stories is really like.

The major difference between Sandor Kovaks and Peter Rachman (ignoring the fact that Kovaks is fictional while Rachman was real) is the existence of living, known family members. Rachman too came from Eastern Europe, and after the war was unable to trace his family, though he continued to try to do so until his death in 1962. (Grant also has Kovaks live a great deal longer.) Sandor's brother and his family are useful inventions to the author, as it makes it much easier to explore his character through the complexities of the relationships between him and them - relationships which still exist, even if they have disowned Sandor, even changing the spelling of their surname by deed poll so that strangers will not ask whether they are related.

The story is told in a way which is quite complicated chronologically. The first chapter and the last chapter are set much later than anything else (and are obviously intended to be from the time at which the narrator is telling the story). In the rest of the novel, Vivian apparently adds details from her childhood or illustrative incidents from later in her life as they occur to her, prompted by details in the main flow of the story. And the central part of the novel is taken up with Sandor's life story, which reaches back before the war, long before Vivian was born. But it all rings true, because it is carefully put together so that it mimics the way that people tell anecdotes in real life. Deliberately creating this kind of simplicity through underlying complexity is a skill I admire greatly.

The point of the novel, if there is one, is about the way that people's personalities are reflected in the small details of their lives such as the clothes they choose to wear. (It is exactly the sort of incidental information that creative writing courses suggest using to establish character, because these details are much more telling than a direct description of traits.) Clothe are important in the novel particularly Vivian's trawling of second hand shops to put together a wardrobe of old fashioned but stylish outfits: retro chic long before its time, and the description of how Sandor, forced to work in a slave gang of Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, is never able to change the clothes he was wearing when first conscripted, for months and months.

It's not a happy story; no novel in which the narrator's husband is killed on the second day of their honeymoon could be described as such. But it is a pleasure to read The Clothes On Their Backs, which is in summary an excellent novel, something out of the usual way of things. Both Vivan and Sandor are fascinating characters, and the view of life in thirties and forties Europe is one not often encountered in novels by English writers.(less)

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Aug 07, 2012 Pascale Plänk Steig rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Vivien, the protagonist in this unfocused and bland novel, reminisces on her youth and her attempts at understanding her uncle, a famous slumlord in London, through his narrative of his upbringing in pre-WWII Hungary. Well, if at least Vivien was an interesting character, the reader may want to know more about her as she discovers her family’s background. Alas, Vivien is as bland as the story she tells. Her parents are two-dimensional caricatures of timid Jewish refugees, and the reader suspects...more Vivien, the protagonist in this unfocused and bland novel, reminisces on her youth and her attempts at understanding her uncle, a famous slumlord in London, through his narrative of his upbringing in pre-WWII Hungary. Well, if at least Vivien was an interesting character, the reader may want to know more about her as she discovers her family’s background. Alas, Vivien is as bland as the story she tells. Her parents are two-dimensional caricatures of timid Jewish refugees, and the reader suspects that this may have been as a matter of convenience to the author (to sort of shove them into the background and to add the feel-sorry-for-us factor). How many times does one need to know that Vivien’s parents lived in the same place, never did anything, never went out, and never talked about anything? The apartment Vivien grows up in is as exciting as a tomb. Amazingly, over the course of some twenty years, she is the only child ever growing up there, which is plain unbelievable, but is another unsuccessful plot device to try to indicate alienation. Aside from the characters’ lack of credibility, Vivien is just plain someone I personally could not care less about.
I picked up the book at the Belmont Library, because the mention of the characters’ Hungarian background intrigued me (and also perhaps swayed by a recent review in the Oregonian?). I plodded along, essentially forcing myself to read on, and the story never got any more interesting, with flimsy and vague descriptions of the background as it pertained to Hungary, characters with the substance of paper doll cut-outs, and a protagonist who was unsubstantial and uninteresting. Attempts at “fleshing her up,” such as by introducing some preposterous tragedy in her life, - a husband choking to death on a piece of steak on his honeymoon -, were almost comical, and the subsequent abortion of the child she expected does not elicit any sympathy in the reader, but come off as cheap tricks to bulk up her life experience (what, with the childhood spent with her two-dimensional parents). Lots of unexplained, unresolved issues, such as Eunice, the ex-girlfriend of the slumlord uncle, who, by the way, the author repeatedly describes either as a man with a golden heart or as the “face of Evil,” with no explicit examples of when, why, how, and who cares? Anyway, at the beginning of the novel, Eunice, the ex, accuses Vivien-the-niece of having broken her uncle’s heart, with no explanation as to how that was achieved. Vivien, in her tepid reminiscences, relates that someone who’d met her uncle had told her that said uncle had once insinuated that he had a child (Vivien), but then our author veers course and conveniently notes that said uncle’s testicles had been crushed, rendering him sterile (wouldn’t that also render him impotent, thereby dooming the relationship with women and prostitutes he was famous for?) Anyway, there is no follow-up about this uncle-with-child story. Vivien also tell how she introduces herself to her uncle as “Miranda,” and later on is referred to seamlessly as “Vivien” by her uncle; I don’t know, it seems to be that this would at least warrant a little conversation between the uncle and the niece.
The uncle is apparently dispatched by his attempt to kill the niece’s lower class boyfriend (and his subsequently being tossed in jail where he shortly dies from a stroke), but the reader is left in the dark as to any motive for this action. It turned out that the loser boyfriend has a girlfriend and a child as well, who both appear to “take him back home” (read “dispatch”; I guess, since the uncle didn’t succeed in killing the boyfriend, the author had to intervene). Vivien, whose first husband (a boiled-beef faced vicar’s son) warranted a few pages of text at most, apparently marries again; her second husband is another plot device, since the man just died and is not mentioned again; the same goes for her two “fat” daughters (whatever that means)
Ah, let us not forget the random introduction of a “sub-storyline,” the Skinheads, Neo-Nazis, etc. The introduction of graphics in a text-only novel generally indicates something significant and important. I cannot figure out why the author even bothers with the sign used by the Hungarian Nazi-sympathizers or with the logo for the National Front in England. Who cares? Write it if you must, but don’t introduce any graphics unless you’re writing “The Da Vinci Code” and your graphics lead to the discovery of some incredible esoteric secret. Anyway, it’s obvious the attempts at introducing some neo-Nazi theme is to give some edginess to the story, but, as in the rest of all attempts, this fails again.
The theme of the novel, at least as suggested by the title, may relate to how one’s status in life is affected by one’s clothes, but this narrative does not seem to be the thread that weaves (no pun intended) through the novel. What I get is that Vivien is as much a dullard as her parents and the purchase of a dress that fits her, the excuse for the start of this sorry mess, and the plot device to conclude it, fail to justify the some two hundred and forty pages in the middle. In the end, the only part that was interesting was the read dress that fit perfectly and molded itself tightly and made her feel sexy. I wanna one of those for myself.
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Jul 20, 2012 Regina Spiker rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: identity, london, refugee, survivors, loss

An unusual story of love and loss in many ways, The Clothes On Their Backs is a novel of great depth - Vivien Kovacs is the only child of Hungarian refugees. Timid and mousey, her parents had fortunately escaped their home country only months before the war. They only want to assimilate themselves into the quiet London neighborhood where lonely Vivien grows up - the only child on the block. When a neighboring spinster passes away, Vivien and her mother scoop up the clothing that has been left be...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Catherine Woodman added it

I really enjoyed this short book, which has a small coned down scope--it is a story of two brothers who are seperated first by choice and then by war--think Go Zucker--they are a Jewish family in Hungary, and the situation is changing, where there are quotas and only so many Jews in each job--the younger brother, who is a Mama's boy, has a sexual indiscretion and decides to emigrate to England rather than have his fincee find out about it--and it turns out to be the decision that saves his life-...more

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Apr 19, 2011 Felice rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In The Clothes On Their Backs an impulsive decision to revisit a former place of employment before it goes out of business affords Vivien Kovaks the chance to examine a time in her youth that set the stage for the rest of her life. As the daughter of immigrants in some ways Vivien's life has been a series of closings. Her parents, Ervin and Berta, came to England from Hungary in 1938. Upon arriving one of the things they closed the door on was their Jewishness. They showed their gratitude to the...more In The Clothes On Their Backs an impulsive decision to revisit a former place of employment before it goes out of business affords Vivien Kovaks the chance to examine a time in her youth that set the stage for the rest of her life. As the daughter of immigrants in some ways Vivien's life has been a series of closings. Her parents, Ervin and Berta, came to England from Hungary in 1938. Upon arriving one of the things they closed the door on was their Jewishness. They showed their gratitude to their new homeland for taking them in by living a barely breathing kind of life. They work, they sit at home and they go to bed. They live without being noticed. When Vivien is born they have her baptized and are thrilled to have the record of the baptism as proof of their belonging, their safety. They will assimilate and homogenize at any cost.

In 1963, at age ten, Vivien finds out about an Uncle she never knew she had. To a child's eyes Uncle Sandor is a glamor puss relative. The family views Sandor as a black sheep and worse but he is also seductive in his zest for life. When Sandor's behavior threatens their quiet life, Ervin bans Sandor from their home. Shortly thereafter Sandor is arrested. During his trial the press headlines him as "The King of Crime" and "The Face of Evil". He is a slum lord and an unrepentant one at that. Sandor's life prior to coming to England was a brutal, forced labor camp existence so as bad as he treats others in his mind they still have it better than he did.

When Uncle Sandor is released from prison Vivien visits him on the sly. Her behavior thrills her and she is more and more powerfully drawn to Sandor's daring. At first Vivien sees her parents joyless, narrow existence and Sandor's excesses as her only lifestyle choices. In a way Sandor's behavior offers Vivien justification for the excesses she experiments with as a young woman. She is taking her first steps outside of her parents timid existence. She gets a job in a dress shop and through it exposure to a wider variety of people and more freedom than she has known thus far in her life. When Sandor offers to hire Vivien to help him write his memoirs she agrees. Vivien sees Sandor's reminiscences as a chance to get the answers to her questions about her family's past that her parents are too reticent to give.

In Linda Grant's hands Vivien's scrutiny of her younger self makes for a fascinating novel. Vivien's constant search for an interesting past, present and future and her own identity is a journey we all make but Grant makes that commonality anything but commonplace. Vivien's emergence from a cloistered life into the morally questionable but enticingly alive world of Uncle Sandor leave her open for tragic heartbreak and abuse. Ping-ponging between the extremes of her family also help her to discover her own strength, voice and moral compass. Grant takes us there and back again with expressive, commanding writing. Even better she lets us recognize for ourselves the power in Vivien's odyssey toward adulthood rather that hit us over the head with it. I was impressed.
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Feb 09, 2011 Louise Silk rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

This is my kind of book- a well-written novel from a woman's point of view that has layers and layers of meaning. The story is captivating and the characters fully realized and multidimensional without being overly conscious.

The joys to be had in dressing and costuming in all of the ways that clothes express who we are or who we wish we could be ties all of the parts of the book into a great package.

The main character, Vivien, is endearing through as she searches for her family history by talki...more

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Sep 17, 2009 Dymphna rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction

The Clothes on Their Backs, by Linda Grant is a story of a first generation American woman's search for her family's past, something her parents have deliberately kept from her. Isolated in their British flat, her parents keep a kind of old-world mixed with fear outlook on life.

Growing up in the 60's and 70's of such parents, the narrator naturally begins to explore her world in a way that horrifies her parents, even if much of it is kept secret from them.

She gravitates towards her much disapp...more

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Dec 28, 2008 Felicity rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

How could anyone not like a book in which the author has one of her characters state the following about George W. Bush (whom he fervently admired)?

"Not a smart man, but's that what you want--the last thing we need is for the intellectuals to gain power; I tell you, some ideas are so ridiculous only a professor could swallow them." (15)

Contrary to what you might expect, the novel is actually set in 1970s London against the backdrop of the rise of the National Front. But much of it is also set in...more

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Jul 11, 2012 Jane rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I found this story very interesting set in London in the 1970's. The book opens in the present day when Vivien has returned to London and 'accidentally' re-acquaints with her Uncle's fiancée. The author takes us back to Vivien's childhood in Benson Court. Her Jewish parents have fled from Hungary to London and live a quiet, cosy existence keeping the past and the bad outside their door. Her father Ervin, works in the jewellery quarter, Hatton Garden and her mother Berta, has a limp and carries a...more

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Sep 02, 2009 LindyLouMac rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The narrator of the novel is Vivien Kovacs the only child of Hungarian immigrant parents, Ervin and Berta who keep themselves to themselves and are even secretive about their past with their own daughter. It is a tantalizing portrait of life for this family in 1970’s London, it is only after Vivien is grown up and once again living back at home after a personal disaster that she decides to discover her roots. Using snippets of information she has overheard as a child she discovers her father’s e...more

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Jan 08, 2009 Wendy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Generally, I don't like when a book is simply about a theme - for instance, a review that starts out - this book is about racism, or classicism, or whatever ism. For the most part, I like a story that comments on a theme, makes you think - and with that said, I was immediately skeptical of a book that has such a hit you in the head metaphor as its title, as well as its running theme. Luckily, this book is about a story, not about a big "ISM", and while the metaphor is perhaps to simplistic for t...more

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May 01, 2009 Brian rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Set in the nineteen seventies, The Clothes On Their Backs is a novel about identity. Vivien, the narrator is the daughter of Hungarian Jewish refugees who have spent their time since coming to London trying to achieve anonymous respectability. Both their anonymity and their respectability are threatened however, by the towering figure of Uncle Sandor, the black sheep of the family, a slum landlord whose character has been based upon the notorious Peter Rachman.

While there are some things about t...more

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Aug 19, 2012 Elaine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ebooks

I was torn between rating this with 4 stars or 3. Some sections even merited a 5. Linda Grant is clearly talented, even brilliant, but uneven. The first thirty or so pages were "Yech! Chic lit." Not my thing. Then, suddenly, it grabbed me, this story about refugees from Hungary, trying to blend into the woodwork of their London flat. The metaphor of the crowded streets of London is brilliant:
people like blood pulsing though arteries. The story itself is unusual, not predictable. But we never fi...more

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Dec 22, 2012 Alice Heiserman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a quirky compelling tale about a girl raised without knowledge of her heritage and family except for her reticent mother and father. She learns that her father has a notorious brother--a slum lord and pimp--and meets him and becomes his biographer as a way to learn about her heritage. The family were Jews from Hungary who emigrated to England and wished to live there as inconspicuously as possible--even having their daughter baptized as a Christian. This tale explores the yearning for kn...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Lucy rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011

I read this book for a bookclub (a very rare event for me) and it that sense it was the first compulsory book I've read in ages. I think this might account for my initial dislike because as the book progressed I really began to enjoy it.

A coming of age tale which tracks a young woman's attempt to forge her identity as a second-generation immigrant set against the backdrop of 1970s London and the rise of the NF.

It brings into consideration what makes our identity: our clothes? our nationalities?...more

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May 19, 2009 Caitlin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009

I really loved this book with its sharp, incisive character studies & underlying exploration of how a wardrobe can reveal & conceal.

The main character, Vivien, embarks on a search for her family history by talking with her father's estranged brother, Sandor, once convicted of being a slum lord. Sandor is a complex character - a slum lord, a pimp, a survivor of slave labor camps during WWII, an escapee from communist Hungary. He is by turns "the face of evil" & the soul of human kindn...more

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May 14, 2011 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I thought this book was great. I don't understand some of the 2 star ratings and people who said it was boring. It is a coming of age story, a story of discovering your roots, and a story of coming to terms with who you are and where you come from. Clothing does play an important role, as the title suggests, but in a way that paints important pictures of the main characters - Vivian Kovaks and her uncle Sandor. Clothing is very important to each character but for entirely different reasons. For...more

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Jun 13, 2011 Jessica rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think 3.5 stars would be a more accurate assessment of my review. I enjoyed this story of a family's dissimilar ways of enduring loss and hardship and how the past affects the present. However, I don't think Grant did a convincing job of conveying character's personalities and transformations through their clothes. She certainly is detailed about what they are wearing at any given time, but I thought that it was TMI on most occasions. Perhaps this clothing/personality correlation would work be...more

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May 04, 2011 Susan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

I'm not sure how Linda Grant got on my "to read" list, but it probably was not because this book was short-listed for the Booker prize. THE CLOTHES ON THEIR BACKS was not quite depressing enough to win the Booker, close, but no cigar. The 50+ narrator Vivien Kovacs, a Londoner and daughter of Hungarian refugees who is excessively interested in clothes, tells the story of how she came to know who she was when, having been widowed in a freak accident on her honeymoon, she went in search of her unc...more

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Dec 19, 2009 Hubert rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: European, British enthusiasts

Recommended to Hubert by: bookcrosser

Shelves: fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Feb 09, 2009 Leah rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

BORING! i was very disappointed in this book. i expected so much for. i found it long, vague, going nowhere.

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Jan 19, 2010 Liz Nuttall rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a novel about a Hungarian family. The narrator, Vivien, is the daughter of parents who come to England before WWII. They have lived an inconspicuous life in a flat in Kensington. Vivien has had a closeted upbringing, marrying the boy she meets at University. He dies on the second day of their honeymoon. By contrast, her father's brother, remains in Hungary through the war, making a living as a pimp and rackateer. He comes to London after the war and becomes a slum landlord. Based on the...more

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Jun 02, 2012 Brooke rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't like writing negative reviews. This time I have to.

From the opening page I had issues with the style and the stilted dialogue. I decided to give it a chance but at page 106 and only 39% read, I have declared defeat.

The main character, Vivian, is underdeveloped and unlikable. Her parents are unrealistic shadows of people. Her first husband dies from an accident that evokes no feelings of sympathy. Vivian then goes in search of her mysterious uncle who is banned from her parents flat and h...more

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Oct 23, 2009 Jgknobler rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The daughter of Hungarian Jewish refugees in London learns about her family's background after a series of interviews with a disgraced uncle. This novel takes a surprisingly forgiving view of the activities of a slumlord and pimp (somehow seen as byproducts of the indomitable human spirit in tough times). There are a number of grammatical errors in this book which I cannot believe are intentional and which made it difficult to read--and also difficult to reconcile with the fact that the book was...more

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Nov 27, 2012 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Having enjoyed Linda Grant’s latest novel “We Had It So Good”, I was looking forward to reading her previous book. It did not disappoint. It is narrated by Vivien, the only child of Hungarian refugees, looking back from the present day to the year when she became 25 in 1977. Her parents will not tell her anything about her notorious uncle who she saw once when he visited their flat when she was ten. Alone and heartbroken, she tracks down Uncle Sandor who reveals at last, the story of their famil...more

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May 09, 2013 Sally Whitehead rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-read-in-2013

Whether it's the cover picture, or the blurb which has an unusual focus on the strange unwelcome uncle's clothes which led me to believe this was going to be a little too "chick litty" for my tastes, I'm still not sure. Whichever it was, it made me avoid reading it for a good few years.

I should have paid more attention to the Man Booker shortlisting, for this is a far more intelligent and interesting novel than I had assumed.

Yes, there is a slight thematic pre-occupation with clothes, but in bar...more

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Jan 13, 2010 Ian Mapp rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

70s london recreated and lots of references to clothes. The story of a timid jewish family - mom, dad and mainly daughter - Vivien. She is finding herself as she goes through univeristy but is more interested in her notorious uncle, Sandor Kovas. He visited once when she was a child but was thrown out by her father in one of his rare displays of emotion. Sandor is a criminal slum lord and pimp. Vivian meets up with him after university and writes his autobiography, discovering some fairly obviou...more

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About Linda Grant

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads' database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Linda Grant was born in Liverpool on 15 February 1951, the child of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. She was educated at the Belvedere School (GDST), read English at the University of York, completed an M.A. in English at MacMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario and di...more

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title link	preview: The Clothes On Their Backs
avg rating	preview: The Clothes On Their Backs Goodreads rating: 3.22 (1144 ratings)
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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6049174-the-clothes-on-their-backs?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347716972l/6049174.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6049174-the-clothes-on-their-backs?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]The Clothes On Their Backs by Linda Grant[/url]

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