The combination of Agota Kristof, feminist novels, and a Bildungsroman (albeit not a traditional one) results in a truly captivating and somewhat haunting novel.

Agota Kristof's works often explore complex themes and challenge traditional norms. In this particular novel, the feminist undertones add depth and a unique perspective.

The story may not follow the typical structure of a Bildungsroman, but it still manages to take the reader on a journey of self-discovery and growth.

As for Learys secondhand bookshop in Inverness, one can only hope that both God and the readers will come to its rescue. This charming little shop seems to hold a special place in the hearts of many, and it would be a shame to see it disappear.

Perhaps the novel itself will inspire more people to visit the shop and keep its doors open for future generations to enjoy.

L'INCANTATORE by Iris Murdoch left me perplexed as I just couldn't understand it. There are numerous characters whose stories are intertwined. It took me about half the book (consisting of just under 300 pages) to figure out who the incantatore of the title was (which, according to the screenwriting school I come from, is A VERY GRAVE OFFENSE!). I was rather intrigued by the first part as it flows quickly, is captivating and tantalizing, even in terms of the subtle eroticism it is pregnant with. However, the second part is slow. Inescapably boring. I struggled to finish the last 10 pages, which I read at the same time as the first 200. It deals with the affairs of young Londoners, perhaps bored, perhaps messed up, perhaps embroiled in merely family affairs, never really tragic, never really comic, fané, subtly understated. Recommended to aspiring Flemish writers.

On the surface, this book appears to be about a diverse group of characters attempting to break free from the influence of a mostly unseen "enchanter" whose wealth and power hold sway over them. However, it is extremely challenging to summarize as it flits about almost incomprehensibly and confusingly.

The enchanter, Mischa Fox, is one of the few characters who is not fully developed. We witness his actions, hear his words, observe his physical sensations, and see his responses to what the other characters do, but we never truly gain access to his thoughts or understand his motives or concerns, which remain puzzling.

For instance, there is an extraordinary section where Mischa abandons his own party to take a half-naked runaway, Annette, for a drive to the beach. There, he stares at the sea "like a man cornered by a strange animal." Ignored by him, Annette runs into the waves only to be pulled out again and dragged back to the car. "Get into the back seat," he shouts, "and take your clothes off." After that, he takes her home. "Mischa went up to the door and rang the bell. Then he got into the car and drove away, leaving Annette standing on the pavement."

It is like a surreal dream, and we are left, like dreamers, to wonder what it means.

This is all the more remarkable because the writing throughout is far from being unclear. It focuses on intense physical sensations and is based on minute descriptions of things, especially the expressions on people's faces. Iris Murdoch always makes it clear to us the color of a character's eyes.

In another subplot, Rosa, another person trying to escape Mischa's influence, seeks funding for a magazine from one of the shareholders, Mrs. Wingfield, and decides the best way to achieve her goal is through a personal visit. The door is opened by Mrs. Wingfield's lady companion.

The encounter with Mrs. Wingfield herself is even more remarkable, but it is far too long to describe fully here.

This is one of the reasons for reading Iris Murdoch's novels. The descriptions are captivating. The relationships are never dull.

When Rosa and Annette meet at Mischa's party, they pounce on each other like tigers.

There is a great deal more to say about this novel, which is filled with incident. There is also much to think about if you have a philosophical inclination, which of course Murdoch did. This is possibly her first novel and may have been rewritten before it was published after Under the Net, which was her first published novel. In any case, it is still a good novel and worth reading and rereading if you enjoy her work, as I do.

I have been reading the Vintage Murdoch paperback editions, and they all have very good introductions by different people who clearly appreciate the particular novel they are introducing. This one is introduced by Patricia Duncker, and I found comfort in her final assessment: "A baffled reader is not necessarily a frustrated reader. You will be curious, gripped." Very true indeed.

The term ‘Dickensian’ should be used sparingly, if at all. Yet it is hard to avoid labelling the extraordinary characters in this novel otherwise. Their portraits are, for me, the chief joys (but not the only ones) of this highly enjoyable work of art. The reader is meant to like some of these characters and to hate (or at least fear) others. And whichever response Murdoch aims to evoke, she does so in prose that is constantly inventive and surprising. Evelyn Waugh once said he admired PG Wodehouse because he never used a familiar simile. That's one of the many reasons why I read and enjoy both Waugh and Wodehouse. And even though I'm just starting with Murdoch, I know I'm embarking on a journey that will sparkle with similar delights.

For example, there's the old crone who sits in the corner of the bed-sitting room in Pimlico that she shares with her two sons. She doesn't say a word throughout the novel (at least, not an English word – being Polish, she sometimes spits out what might be a sentence at her sons). So, unusually, the portrait depends solely on the descriptions of her physical features. Despite this lack of speech, she comes vividly alive in passages like this:

‘It was indeed like being in the presence of a native god, in which one does not believe but which can terrify one all the same. The mother was yellow in colour and her skin resembled leather. On her face and neck it was crossed with countless deep wrinkles until it was almost impossible to make out her features, so many other dark lines distracted the eye. Her cheeks were furrowed with deep cracks, like a vessel that had been broken and roughly stuck together again. The lower part of her face had fallen in, so that her mouth and chin hung like a flabby bag from the bony protrusions above. Only her plentiful grey hair seemed to be alive, and her eyes, which were large and dark and moist, and lived in their jagged caves like a pair of jellyfish, their wet and lustrous surface contrasting oddly with the extreme dryness of their surroundings.’

Another female character, Miss Foy, has ‘wig-like hair, which resembled the interior of a mattress’, and dry skin that undulates as she speaks, ‘like the skin of an alligator’. Miss Foy is the housekeeper/companion to a crazy old woman named Mrs Wingfield who could (to go back to the earlier allusion) have come straight out of an Evelyn Waugh story. When she enters the story, Miss Foy is doing the washing up. Mrs Wingfield explains why: ‘I only let her wash up once in three weeks. It takes that long for us to work through all our china. I hate Foy dashing away after a meal to wash up, it destroys my digestion. So we wait till there’s no china left and then Foy makes a day of it.’

‘I see. What a sensible arrangement,’ said Rosa.

‘It’s not a sensible arrangement,’ said Mrs Wingfield, ‘but it’s the arrangement we’ve adopted.’

Rosa has called on Mrs Wingfield to seek financial support for the learned feminist journal Artemis, which is struggling to resist a takeover by a newspaper proprietor whose intentions and methods are, to say the least, unsympathetic. This mission, and the relationships between the proprietor (the Enchanter of the title) and those he deals with, form the plot. It's a novel with a dark heart, lightened by much humour and filled with brilliant prose. I adored the description of a London street after rain: ‘The night was enormous and silent, with an intensity that for a moment made her pause in awe. She was in an unfamiliar street. It was a damp night, with rare stars. It was not raining, but it had been, and a street lamp some way off streaked the roadway with reflections.’

I'm beginning to realize that every one of Murdoch's novels will provide at least one example, and probably many, of her ability to describe even the most ordinary occurrence in words and with images that give it a new meaning or allow me to see the world from a different perspective. Here's someone waiting on the telephone while a call is put through from London to the south of France (an operation that, when the novel was written in 1956, required human intervention along the way): ‘Beside her ear, a long corridor of sound was opening out telescopically, section after section. English voices were speaking to each other in a space of sound. Annette imagined that she could hear the waves of the Channel breaking across the line. A voice in Paris was speaking to a voice in Provence. At last far away there was the sound of a telephone ringing, a French telephone, a telephone in a hotel in Cannes.’ I love ‘telescopically’ – the suggestion not only of a great distance covered but also of the preparation of the telescope by extending the collapsible tubes between the lenses and the journey through the ‘space’ of sound. A damp night with rare stars … eyes like a pair of jellyfish in their jagged caves … these are images that could just as easily have been created by a poet as a novelist. There are so many such images and so many remarkable characters in this very excellent novel. I can't wait to read it again.

The Flight from the Enchanter was Murdoch's second book. However, it was my first encounter with my number-one writing hero. This experience made me have a strong longing to write about love, power, goodness, beauty, and what constitutes a human being. Suddenly, at the age of twenty, I desired to express profound things, just like Murdoch. Being a professor of philosophy, she has a much stronger claim to be able to write such things than I ever will. Nevertheless, if we can't be inspired by the great exemplars, what hope is there?

Once I put down Enchanter, I embarked on a search for all her other books. Then, I continuously awaited her to write the next one. She did so for years, approximately every 18 months. Only her very last book, written while she was in the clutches of Alzheimer's, is not among my absolute favorite reads to this day. Enchanter isn't her best book. For me, that honor belongs to The Sea The Sea. But it was the first one I read. I fell in love with Iris Murdoch from that moment on. Reading her works made me think more deeply, write more passionately, and dream big dreams.

I read this as part of the #IMReadAlong project:

https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2...

I found "The Flight from the Enchanter" to be a more consistently amusing and coherent read than "Under the Net".

The characters were all captivating and felt more or less like well-rounded individuals, rather than mere ciphers for philosophical viewpoints. This holds true even for those I would dread encountering in real life. Take a bow, the Veruca Salt-esque Annette and that rather pitiful middle-aged Mr. Rainborough, filled with resentment and sexual frustration.

The philosophical reflections on the nature of truth and the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of arriving at a correct or verifiable version of reality emerged quite naturally in the dialogue between Blick and Rosa towards the end of the novel.

Mischa was an extremely fascinating character. He seemed to be both the spider at the center of the web, possessing total knowledge and infinite patience, and yet also something of an absence, a non-character. For the other characters, he was a blank canvas onto which they projected their fears and paranoias.

This is where the concept of the enchanter becomes truly captivating. Is Mischa enchanting Rosa and others, and are they fulfilling some inner desire to be enchanted through him? The complex relationships between Rosa, Jan, and Stefan are in a similar vein. Who is controlling whom? Who is exploiting whom?

Like @tworavensrose, I adored the trustees of Artemis and immediately recognized the portrayal of these indomitable women who are hard of hearing and firm in their principles.

The foreword aptly described my feelings at the end of the novel. I felt satisfied having enjoyed the overlapping narratives, without any sense of closure or resolution beyond, in some cases, liberation from a corrosive addiction to an enchanting other.

To conclude by picking up on Liz's point about Murdoch's humor, the vaguely Orwellian description of SELIB's bureaucratic inertia and dysfunction was both wryly amusing and worryingly accurate.

Interesting 50s office sexual politics presents a captivating scenario. Secretaries in that era were often seen as slowly and carefully climbing the career ladder, getting promoted and taking over positions without much challenge. This could be attributed to various factors, perhaps the prevailing gender norms and expectations of the time.

Additionally, the influence of the Cold War added a sinister aspect, especially when considering central and eastern Europe. The political tensions and uncertainties during that period might have had an impact on the office dynamics as well.

Moreover, there is a right-of-passage novel aspect regarding one character. This character likely goes through a series of experiences and challenges in the office environment, which not only shape their professional growth but also their personal development. It could be a story of self-discovery, learning to navigate the complex web of office politics, and ultimately finding their place in the corporate world.

Overall, the 50s office sexual politics, combined with the Cold War influence and the right-of-passage novel element, create a rich and engaging narrative that offers insights into the social and political context of that time.

Lesser Murdoch, in my opinion, does possess several qualities that are praiseworthy in her writing.

Her use of language can be quite vivid and engaging at times, drawing the reader in and making them curious about what will happen next.

However, when it comes to the overall story, there are some不足之处.

The supposed spell of the "enchanter" feels overwrought, as if it is being forced upon the reader rather than developing naturally within the narrative.

Moreover, the story itself seems underdeveloped, lacking in depth and complexity.

There are certain plot points that could have been explored more thoroughly, and the characters could have been given more dimension.

Despite these flaws, Lesser Murdoch does show promise as a writer, and with further refinement and development, she may be able to create more compelling and engaging stories in the future.

Engaging story, with Murdoch's usual intelligence and energy. It features the lively immediacy that was characteristic of her earlier novels. The later ones, although enjoyable, could sometimes seem like heavily-laden platters. This particular novel perhaps has an abundance of characters and a plethora of plot-lines that are constantly developing or evaporating. However, it is still a good and enjoyable read. Moreover, it serves as an informative text on various aspects of British fifties life. It provides a vivid snapshot of that era, with its unique social, cultural, and political backdrop. The characters are well-drawn and the plot is engaging, despite its complexity. Overall, it is a worthy addition to Murdoch's body of work.

What is it about her writing that I simply can't put down?

My obsession with Murdoch persists unabated.

Her words seem to have a magical allure, drawing me in and holding my attention captive.

Perhaps it's the way she weaves intricate plots, filled with unexpected twists and turns.

Or maybe it's the depth of her characters, each one fully realized and complex.

Whatever the reason, I find myself constantly reaching for her books, eager to lose myself in her fictional worlds.

Murdoch's writing has become a source of inspiration and entertainment for me, and I can't imagine a time when I won't be eagerly awaiting her next release.

It's a love affair that shows no signs of waning, and I'm perfectly content to let it continue.

Reading this was like taking a plunge head first into Alice's rabbit hole, a world filled with an array of characters. In the words of my lecturer, "if they were the only people living in my city then I'd move."

It is truly a remarkable experience. However, it is also one of the most clever and unpredictable books that I have come across in a long while.

Murdoch's unique style of juxtaposing comedy immediately after tragedy is both beautifully executed and strangely unnerving.

It keeps the reader on the edge of their seat, constantly surprised by the twists and turns in the story.

The characters are so vividly drawn that they seem to leap off the page and into the reader's imagination.

This book is a must-read for anyone who enjoys a good mystery or a thought-provoking story.

It will leave you with a lasting impression and a desire to explore more of Murdoch's works.

Edit: I need to give this 4 stars (one more than before) because I can't get it out of my head. It appears everywhere I go, on so many levels.

This book is not the best Murdoch I have read. I did like the part about the Polish brothers and Rosa's inner turmoil. It was quite engaging and added depth to the story. However, mostly every other character was on my nerves.

I think the author didn't sell Mischa as the "enchanter" she wanted him to be. He just didn't have that charm and allure that was supposed to make him so special. It feels like a weak imitation of Julius in "A fairly honorable defeat". The character development of Mischa was lacking, and I couldn't really connect with him or understand his actions.

Overall, while there were some good aspects to the book, it also had its flaws. The inconsistent characterizations and the weak portrayal of Mischa prevented it from being a truly great read. But still, it managed to stay in my mind, which is why I gave it 4 stars.