Product Description

Maria Tambini is a 13-year-old girl with an amazing singing voice. Growing up in the 1970s above her mother's chip shop on the Scottish island of Bute, she is making ready to escape the ordinary life to become a living exhibit in the modern drama of celebrity.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #257306 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 327 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Loosely modelled on the tragic life of Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, Personality, Andrew O'Hagan's second novel, scrutinises the more insidious aspects of fame and the family. Told through an array of different voices--including a fictionalised Hughie Green--it centres on the story of Maria Tambini, a teenager from Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, who becomes an international singing sensation before falling victim to anorexia and the unwelcome attentions of a fan.

The novel opens at the height of the Silver Jubilee festivities. The Tambinis, whose individual stories also drive and augment the narrative, are Italian immigrants. Haunted by a few unresolved ghosts from the war, they struggle to make a living in Rothesay, a resort whose tourist trade has been decimated by "jet engines, Thomson holidays and Lloret de Mar". Rosa, Maria's neurotic mother, runs the chip shop; Uncle Alfredo is a hairdresser and Grandmother Lucia simply nurses memories of her long dead first child, Sofia, "a lovely singer". The weight of their dysfunctional aspirations, not unsurprisingly, fall on 13-year-old Maria. Spotted by a TV talent scout, she wins Opportunity Knocks. Leaving the family far behind, she moves to London and, briefly, takes the international world of light entertainment by storm. The speed with which she is estranged from her old life is neatly, if not completely believably, illustrated in her correspondence with a one-time best friend: while Kalpana chats about Gormenghast and the boys she fancies, Maria's increasingly brief and self-absorbed missives start to read like extracts from beauty manuals.

O'Hagan may indulge in what is best described as "product placement" period detail (references to Girl's World, Cola Cubes and McEwan's Export etc) but this is certainly not an exercise in 1970s and 80s nostalgia. In harking back to a slightly more innocent era, a period when both eating disorders and the downsides of fame were certainly less well publicised, if not well known, this impressive novel makes resonant points about our unwavering obsession with celebrity. "Nowadays", O'Hagan's Hughie Green grumbles, "the kids don't want to be good and they don't care about being the best: they want fame". Plus ça change. --Travis Elborough

Review
'A beautiful, elegiac work, full of piercing insights into Scotland's journey through the 20th Century... required reading for everyone.' Ian Rankin, Evening Standard 'Set against Irvine Welsh's Filth, it looks like a masterpiece.' Sean O'Brien, Times Literary Supplement

Hugo Barnacle, New Statesman
'O'Hagan's writing is exhibition quality.'

Customer Reviews

The best of British
Andrew O'Hagan's 'Personality' is a fine, beautifully-written novel, which firmly cements the author's place among the best of young British writers. Among other things, it's a meditation on the meaning and nature of identities (national, local, sexual, personal) and celebrity, themes the author addresses through the biography of Maria Tambini, a Scots-Italian child star of the 1970s and 1980s clearly (and for me, a bit troublingly) modelled on the real-life Lena Zavaroni. O'Hagan convincingly evokes a variety of social and familial settings -- he must have done wonders for the Isle of Bute tourist trade -- and makes us care for his characters, some of whom (such as Hughie Green, Dean Martin, Princess Diana,Les Dawson)are taken from 'real' life. He has a great ear for Scottish vernacular speech, and he uses this ability to draw the reader into scenes of apparent sentimentality (a Scottish trait, to be sure), but where pain, violence (of one kind or another) and horror are never far away. At times, his depiction of the tribulations of the Tambini women is so painful, you have to put the book down and catch your breath. Otherwise, the book is unputdownable. The reviewer who found it boring would be better off, perhaps, sticking to Tom Clancy.

Personality - couldn't put it down
When I pickd up this book I had no idea how engrossing it would become.
The story of the main character Maria being spotted at a local talent show and being whisked off in to the world of showbiz was very realistic and an emotional ride. For a man to write so emphaticaly about a young girl struggling with anorexia was amazing and not at all maudlin.
There is no doubt that this story was based on the life of Lena Zavaroni in all but name and outcome which made it all the more compulsive.
A brilliant book.

Distinct lack of personality
When Andrew O'Hagan steps up to collect his Booker prize for this novel later in the year, it will be more of a statement about the predictablility of the Booker than of the excellence of O'Hagan's novel. Cloyingly sentimental, with the same familiar O'Hagan glib working-class characatures (he must have really hated those guys he grew up with), this is a mercifully quick read, but also an entirely forgettable one. Chip-shops, quick-tempered fathers, dirty-knees, the distant chime of an ice-cream van - it's Her Benny with a soundtrack and a clapometer. You can almost hear Channel Four films or Stephen Frears rushing to pick up the script.