Rating: 
Summary: You probably have to be a fan
Review: If you enjoy this writer as much as I do, then you will love this book. It's wonderful,humorous, evocative, and short. Eccentric characters in a very damp situation. Pure Penelope. EKW
Rating: 
Summary: One more chapter?
Review: In this novel, Penelope Fitzgerald develops a group of fascinating characters and relationships. She manages to do this just over 130 pages. However, this story does not seem complete. It leaves the reader with many questions and wishing for perhaps one more chapter.
Rating: 
Summary: the genuine article
Review: It's a bit difficult to summarize the appeal of Offshore, but unique as it is, it's the real thing: every sentence, every word counts; it has a gorgeous story (the breakup of a community, poignant and full of ironies); and people who are utterly real in their inconsistencies, their impulses, their irrational needs. You hardly realize as you're reading how perfect the thing is; that comes later, on reflection.
Rating:
Summary: Deserving of its Booker prize
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald could not write poorly if she tried. This slender novel has time to do no more than sketch half a dozen characters and their daily struggles, but in doing so, Fitzgerald shares her profound insight into the questions that we all face, especially those concerning love, family, and loyalty. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Incomplete, yet intriguing
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald's "Offshore" is an intriguing and complex work. On one hand, it's filled with vivid scenes and lively, realistic characters. On the other hand, the book feels incomplete, and we're left wondering...what? who? where? Do we actually learn anything crucial about these characters? I think so...but I'm not sure what. First, the scenes are definitely vivid, peopled with real-feeling characters. Fitzgerald is marvelous at characterization. Woodie's unconcern about his boat's leak because the water has risen only as far as the first bunk in his bedroom. Tilda and Martha's discovery of an antique tile in the river bottom and their subsequent haggling with an antiques dealer. Heinrich's polite demeanor - we learn more about him through what he doesn't say. But all in all, the main characters, especially Nenna, are indecisive. Nenna doesn't visit her husband because she doesn't want to face the possibility that she might lose him. Nenna lives on the barge because she doesn't know where else to live. Nenna and her family move to Canada only because her sister's forceful personality overwhelms her. Such indecisiveness is not the great stuff of memorable literary characters. But...as Nenna's neighbor Maurice mentions, the people on the barges live half on the water and half on land precisely because they can't decide who they are. The barges then are the metaphor for this indecisiveness...and that's ultimately what the novel is about. I wanted more than that. I wanted a novel three times as large, a book that lived with the characters longer, and illustrated the conflicts more clearly. What exactly was at risk for Nenna in not seeing her husband? She admits that seeing him might dash her hope of living with him - but people say a lot of things, and she appears quite content living without him in the first place. I would've also liked to have visited with the characters after the crucial changes that altered their lives. Why exactly did Nenna choose to move to Canada? How has Richard come to accept his fate as faithful suburban husband? In any case, Fitzgerald's prose is fantastic, and the layout of scenes is near perfect. I think it's rather a compliment to her that I feel this book is incomplete. I plan to read more of her books in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Get past the language first
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore could well have been excellent, but it poses some problem for American readers. The language is written in dank Edwardian-period like prose, full of turn-of-the-century Briticisms and hopelessly outdated coinages that seriously no one in the world speaks nowadays (not even in England). Hence despite its short length it's not breezy reading. If you prefer American vernacular like Twain's Huckleberry Finn, you may well want to give this novella a miss. Otherwise this short miniature study of character and setting -- about a group of quirky outshore personalities living off the Thames bargeway -- brings its own rewards. "Turner watercolor" is exactly right.
Rating:
Summary: Perfectly spare and engaging.
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald's talent is immense and I'm becoming a greater fan of her work. I'm a big fan of A.S. Byatt. Her work is, superficially, of greater length than Fitzgerald's. I'm learning to appreciate the concise quality of Fitzgerald's work and Offshore is a beautiful example of her lean wit. I need to re-read Fitzgerald's Blue Flower again. I don't think I understood her style well enough.
Rating:
Summary: Perfectly spare and engaging.
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald's talent is immense and I'm becoming a greater fan of her work. I'm a big fan of A.S. Byatt. Her work is, superficially, of greater length than Fitzgerald's. I'm learning to appreciate the concise quality of Fitzgerald's work and Offshore is a beautiful example of her lean wit. I need to re-read Fitzgerald's Blue Flower again. I don't think I understood her style well enough.
Rating:
Summary: Spare and brilliant
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald's work is not about length. It's about depth. Her mastry lies in her ability to be as nuanced and profound as she in such few words. I think this is her best book.
Rating: 
Summary: hardly worth the periodic chuckle
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald, though she did not publish her first novel until she was sixty, had, by the time she died this year, become one of England's most awarded and revered authors. Critics describe her as a miniaturist, by which they apparently mean that her novels are small sketches of particular aspects of life. Offshore, for which she won her first Booker Prize, is a good example of this form. Based in part on her time spent living on a barge in the Thames, the novel tells the story of a brief period in the lives of a group of eccentrics who live aboard ship in Battersea Reach on the Thames. Actually, it only barely tells a story, it is more an exercise in establishing characters and a setting than anything else. In order for this to work, you either have to have fascinating characters or a spellbinding setting, she has neither. At first, as you're reading, she seems about to update Our Mutual Friend, with it's central theme of people, on the margins of society, living on and off of London's great waterway. But where Dickens creates unforgettable characters and plops them down in a labyrinthine plot, these characters are only mildly amusing and there's virtually no plot. The other author who sprang to mind is Joseph Mitchell, the great New Yorker essayist whose works are collected in Up In The Old Hotel. He was a master at crafting portraits that were small masterpieces around the bums and lunatics of New York City, but there are no Joe Goulds in Offshore. This is a quick enough read (my copy is just 141 pages) and there's a periodic chuckle, but I found it difficult to care about the characters and am mystified by the book's reputation. One of the obituaries below refers to Ms Fitzgerald's "remarkable sensitivities." I am perfectly willing to concede that I am a man of severely limited sensitivities and so the fault for my not enjoying the book may well lie with me. GRADE: C-
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