The melancholy of defeat

She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.

As gentleness is not (necessarily) kindness, courage, hard work and virtue is not invariably rewarded, I learned as a child listening to George Brassens’s song  about the poor brave little white horse that never saw spring. Life is no bed of roses for the middle-aged widow Florence Green. When she decides to open a bookshop in the dozy coastal Suffolk town of Hardborough (Southwold), she will have to find out that a kind heart is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation. By purchasing the dilapidated, clammy ‘Old House’ for her bookshop, she almost parenthetically thwarts the plans of the local ‘first lady’ and patroness of all public activities in the town, Violet Gamart, who actually envisages the Old House not as a bookshop but as an art and music centre, worthy of competing with mighty Aldeburgh.

n  n

Notwithstanding her innocuous kindness, in her optimist denial and determination, Florence refuses to give in to the lady’s wishes, and gossip, class and money issues, political and legal machinations and a poltergeist will sweep the small community in the battle of local loyalties, independency of spirit and authority.

She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminates, with the former, at any given moment, predominating. Will-power is useless without a sense of direction. Hers was at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instructions for survival.

n  n

Delightfully perceptive and witty, her prose parsed with gemlike bouts of irony and understatement, Fitzgerald deftly portrays the quirky characters populating this subtle tragicomedy, from the somewhat clumsy, quixotic, lonely outsider Florence to the crisis marking later middle age for the upper middle-class in East-Suffolk, ‘after which the majority became watercolourists, and painted landscapes’, the spiteful and scheming Violet and Florence’s bright and feisty shop assistant, the ten year old Christine Gipping. Particularly colourful and striking is Fitzgerald’s farcical depiction of the representatives of the legal profession, preposterous and not of any use to Florence (‘The solicitor explained that rights were in no way affected by the impossibility of putting them into practice’). Sketching slightly surreal, absurdist rules, she inventively illustrates how the law is ruthlessly turned into a cunning weapon, tailor-made by and for the ones in power to get their ways, incorporating raw institutional injustice. How words are able to destroy words, and lives.

Much is left unsaid and left to the reader to imagine. Human nature, Fitzgerald seems to tell us, is cruel, and if not intentionally causing harm out of malevolence, such often happens out of stupidity, conceit, selfishness.

A brilliantly dark and spiky tale that touched me to the core and a marvellous first acquaintance with a fascinating author I will definitely read more of and about (I enjoyed reading the insightful essay of Julian Barnes in Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story on what he calls her ‘deceptiveness’ as a writer a lot).

Sept 15, 2018 update: Just saw the movie based on this starring Emily Mortimer and really enjoyed it! Bill Nighy awesome as usual. Makes me want to revisit the (print) book to see what I missed.

I wanted to like this book, having enjoyed Offshore by the same author. This short book was just a little too odd for me with nothing much happening in a rather bleak town in late 1950's coastal England. I kept wondering if I'd like it more if I wasn't listening to one of the worst narrations in audiobook history! But I don't think so.

Questi fantasmi



Ecco, mi ha fatto pensare a questo, al mare d'inverno: bello ma triste, e malinconico.
E non mi aspettavo, dopo aver letto della stessa autrice la raccolta di racconti Strategie di fuga, di incontrare la sottile ironia che pervade questo romanzo.
La penna di Penelope Fitzgerald è affilata, niente affatto pizzi e trine , sicuramente tendente più all'amaro che al dolce, e affonda le radici in una storia che a quanto sembra ha molto di autobiografico.
La stessa Fitzgerald, negli anni Sessanta lavorò in una libreria a Southwold, nel Suffolk, e tutto lascia pensare che anche lei, come Florence Green, la vedova di mezza età protagonista del romanzo che nel 1959 sconvolge la sonnacchiosa cittadina di Hardborough con l'idea di aprire una libreria nei locali abbandonati dell'Old House, si sia dovuta scontrare con le piccole invidie degli abitanti di un paesino di mare chiuso in se stesso, irraggiungibile dall'esterno con i mezzi pubblici, e poco propenso a modificare ritmi di vita ormai consolidati dall'abitudine; un piccolo paese che si entusiasma all'apertura della libreria, si lascia sedurre dall'idea di una biblioteca circolante, decreta il successo di «Lolita» nel Suffolk, ma è poi subito pronto a rientrare nei ranghi e a ricordare che gli uomini si dividono «in sterminatori e sterminati, con i primi che predominano, in qualunque momento».
Il paesaggio, freddo ma limpido e luminoso dell'estate, al quale si contrappone quello umido e piovoso dell'inverno, la spiaggia con i suoi ciottoli multicolore capace di richiamare al primo pallido sole i suoi abitanti ancor prima dei villeggianti, ha fatto sì che quest'angolo di Inghilterra a me sconosciuto, l'East Anglia, diventasse immediatamente familiare e, a suo modo, rasserenante.
Sarebbe stato un piacere, credo, poterlo leggere in lingua originale, perché la sensazione è che la traduzione non riesca a rendere pienamente giustizia allo humor tendente al nero brillante della Fitzgerald, che non manca di inserire nella sua storia anche un elemento very british, i fantasmi, chiamati affettuosamente i picchi, che infestano senza troppa invadenza la libreria e la storia, ma che forse sono messi lì a simboleggiare i pregiudizi e a raccontarci che le chiusure mentali, spesso, sono causa di immobilità, ingiustizia e prepotenza.

«Una volta aveva visto un airone in volo sull'estuario tentare, restando in aria, di inghiottire un'anguilla che aveva catturato. L'anguilla a sua volta si dibatteva per svincolarsi dalla gola dell'airone e ne sbucava fuori un quarto, una metà, o ogni tanto tre quarti. L'indecisione manifestata da entrambe le creature era penosa. Avevano azzardato troppo. Florence sentiva che se non aveva dormito affatto - e spesso le persone dicono così quando non intendono dire niente del genere - a tenerla sveglia doveva essere stato il pensiero dell'airone.
Aveva un cuore tenero, anche se questo non è di grande aiuto quando si arriva alla questione dell'autoconservazione.»

Sjusamillabakka

There is strength and beauty in the margins, where we easily, maybe deliberately, fail to look.

While I was reading this, I came across an archaic Shetland fishermen’s taboo word, sjusamillabakka, for the shifting, liminal space betwixt land and sea.

Sjusamillabakka is perfect for this book:
•tGeographically: set in a small, remote coastal town, on an island between sea and river.
•tConnectedly: every fifty years or so “it had lost, as though careless or indifferent to such things, another means of communication” (river navigability, bridge, railway, and tidal wall).
•tChronologically: between the starchy 50s and the swinging 60s.
•tSocially: a town with clear class boundaries - except for Florence. Like a governess, a bookseller is too educated to be lower class, but payment means she’s NQOTD (Not Quite Our Type, Dear).
•tSupernaturally: the ebb and flow of rappers (poltergeists, not Eminem or Jay Z!), mirrors Florence’s situation. But this is not a ghost story. They’re an occasional metaphor.


“A heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel… The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape... The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much.”

Don’t judge

“‘Are you talking about culture?’ the [bank] manager said, in a voice half way between pity and respect.”

Few want to admit to class-based snobbery, but is cultural or literary snobbery any different?

I was reading this in a small amphitheatre. The acoustics mean that you sometimes catch snippets of conversations quite far away. Two men in their early 20s, roughly dressed and rougher spoken, were chatting. I was trying to focus on this novel, but I learned that both had been in prison, one was a recovering alcoholic, and the other had mental health issues. Fights, drugs, and gangs were mentioned. And gaming. I pictured a shoot-em-up. But no, Lord of the Rings. They went on to compare the games with the films - and the book. At that point, I couldn’t read mine: their passion for books, not just LotR, could not be ignored. Should not be ignored. I silently bowed my head in shame.

Redemption is possible. LotR is about doggedly keeping going, clinging to hope however slippery it is, rather than surrendering to the deceptively welcoming arms of despair. Books can be a pathway through that valley of shadows, to a brighter future beyond.

Books

Florence has faith in the power of books to improve individuals and the community, but less faith in herself. She’s stoical and sometimes assertive. But she’s usually reactive, rather than proactive; she’s not a natural businesswoman. And she doesn’t trust her own judgement of literary merit, so we never learn much about her own tastes.

Books matter, but this is at least as much a portrait of a community. People judge and are judged by who reads what. The books themselves play along: when new stock arrives, they “fell into their own social hierarchy”, the cheap paperbacks being “brightly democratic” and in “well-disciplined ranks”.

Few titles are mentioned, with a major exception, Lolita (see my review HERE).
“It’s a good book and therefore you should try to sell it… They won’t understand it, but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.”
That’s back to snobbery.

Don’t read this for plot

In many ways, nothing much Happens, and what does, is mostly offstage, and sometimes of uncertain agency to those affected. But it’s not frustrating or incomplete.

In a small coastal village in Suffolk, a childless, middle-aged, lower middle class widow decides to open a bookshop. She’s a relative newcomer (having lived there for less than ten years), and although 1959 was the cusp of great social and economic change, Hardborough lags (no fish and chip shop, no launderette, and cinema only two Saturdays per month). More significantly, not everyone is keen on her converting the Old House into a bookshop, and some actively want to stop her. That’s it. And not. Small town political machinations. Even selling the scandalous Lolita is a bit of a damp squib.

Maybe don’t read it for the ending

Understated, unexpected, and gut-wrenching. Utterly plausible, though.

But DO read it

“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.”

There's more depth, strength, and occasional waspishness than appears at first glance - in the book and in Florence herself, even though she’s not really the driving force.

And when you’ve read and loved this, pick up Offshore (see my review HERE). Like this, it draws on elements of Fitzgerald’s own life, and is set in another self-contained community of people who are not quite sailors, nor landlubbers. The tone and appeal of the two are very similar.

“Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.”

Although it seems effortlessly natural, I assume Fitzgerald gave everything she had. She certainly succeeded in creating a fascinating and believable community I care about.

Real characters

My mother still lives in the village where I grew up: a somewhat insular community, with its own strict, but unwritten hierarchy, where everyone knows about everyone else, and power is held by venerable families and institutions. Although this is set before I was born, I recognise most of the characters: affectionate portraits that never quite descend to caricature. There is true precision in such writing.

Every summer and Easter, we holidayed in another village, a seaside one. A home away from home. We felt like honorary locals, but I doubt the villagers thought of us that way. Fitzgerald describes people from there, too.

Before I started primary school, most of the UK stopped selecting pupils for either academic or vocational secondary education, and went comprehensive. But the 11+ exam (much mentioned in these pages) is still used where we live, and our child went through it. I have seen its effects for good and ill, “nothing more painful or decisive”. One aim was social mobility, but it can entrench privilege. A girl who doesn’t pass “will be pegging out her own washing until the day she dies”.

At the other end of the social scale, General Gamart’s “hovering experimentally” at his wife’s party could almost be because he was becalmed beyond the familiar waters of Wodehouse.
“From long habit, Mrs Gamart rejected the idea that her husband might be necessary for anything.”

There’s another person who would be at home in an Iris Murdoch novel: tentacles extending far outside the community, with indirect ability to affect the lives of all, while maintaining the veneer of vague disinterest and occasional philanthropy.

That person is balanced by the quiet, mostly unseen goodness of another, who also has “unseen roots” of information and possibly influence. They recognise each other’s power, but who will prevail?

Quotes


“Rooks circled in the warring currents of the air.”

•t“She… had recently come to wonder whether she hadn’t a duty to make it clear to herself and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.”

•t“Her winter coat, which was of the kind that might just be made to last another year.”

•t“She drank some of the champagne, and the smaller worries of the day seemed to stream upwards as tiny pinpricks through the golden mouthfuls and to break harmlessly and vanish.”

•t“The hall… breathed the deep warmth of a house that has never been cold.”

•t“The light struck the sluggish glass of a large venetian mirror.”

•t“His fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it found it could settle down to its own advantage.”

•t“One can have a very satisfactory party all by oneself” if in the right frame of mind!

•t“Looking critically round the hall, as though it were an outlying province of his territory which he rarely visited” - Reclusive Mr Brundish at home.

•t“A brilliant, successful and stupid young man.” He’s an MP!

•t"[He] went through life with singularly little effort... What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started."

•t“Shabby, hardly presentable, he was not the sort of figure who could ever lose dignity.”

•t“At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done.”

•t“Though her visitor might be conducting the conversation according to some kind of rules, they were not the ones she knew.”

•t“Defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired.”

Possible Alternative Real-Life Ending

A man won a (profitable) bookshop in a raffle, and then decided to run it with an Icelandic friend he only known online (maybe from GR, who knows?):
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

Film Adaptation of 2017



I've only just seen the film. It looks pretty, there's a good cast, having Christine as narrator is fine, and the revised ending was apt. But there were too many things that did not transfer well to screen, and thus served as a distraction: inconsistent and incorrect accents, scenery that clearly wasn't Norfolk, the village looking far too small for the number of a controversial book Florence stocks, the love angle being exaggerated, and the vendetta seeming less plausible than on the page.

Details on imdb here.

Reading this in conjunction with other nominees for the 1978 Booker Prize, like Jane Gardam's God on the Rocks and Kingsley Amis's Jake's Thing, really does give you this impression of 70s England as a place of small towns, insular gossip, hostility to new ideas, and a preoccupation with quotidian concerns over any sense of the wider world. In a sense, fair enough – but one does slightly yearn for a little more ambition and pizzazz in the novelling world. By comparison, Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea, which I didn't entirely love when I read it years ago, seems like a worthy winner; it took those parochial English elements and made them into something archetypal, something mythic and strange and genuinely literary.

That said, there is loads to like about most of the choices and this brief study in disillusion and small-town rivalries is no exception. Fitzgerald teeters on the edge of tweeness but her writing is unsentimental enough and her characters believable enough to cope with it. My favourite moments came in the unexpected flashes of local landscape and custom – the marshman filing a horse's teeth, the uninhabited housing development slowly falling off the cliffs, the matter-of-fact Suffolk poltergeist inhabiting the bookshop.

I was left impressed with Fitzgerald's steely refusal to sugar-coat her narrative's decline and fall – even if, for me, it was hard not to wish she'd found a way to sublimate it all into something a bit more transcendent at the end. But Britain in 1978 was clearly about as untranscendent as you can get.

What a fantastic book - even the terrible, TERRIBLE ending!!! Oh, so sad....

Bah, small towns. But boy, Florence made a run at it. Love the wry (perfect word, Elizabeth!) humour throughout, and the letters between Florence and her good-for-nothing lawyer, hah!

So I guess this would be equal parts dry comedy, farce, ghost story and town-and-country vignette, with a dash of satire. Lolita was a nice touch. Nods to Dickens throughout, too.

Lovely. Even tho' the ending was TERRIBLE, did I say? ;-)

I have a good friend who is a passionate lover of Fitzgerald's work and I was drawn to this book because of her -- and because of the title! What could be more alluring to a book lover? Fitzgerald's reputation as careful, subtle stylist puts her in the same category as Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym for me. Her novels tend to describe a particular sort of middle-class, mid-20th century England -- a narrow range, a world already disappeared. This will either be appealing or an incredible bore. For me, it is definitely appealing . . . but then I've always had a taste for the old-fashioned and the quiet, circumscribed life.

The protagonist of the book is Florence Green, described as "small, wispy and wiry, somewhat insignificant from the front view, and totally so from the back." She has lived in the small Suffolk town of Hardborough for a number of years, but still not long enough to be considered a true insider. Hardborough is slow, cut-off and also insignificant; it is also described as being gradually eaten away by the sea. When Florence decides to open a small bookshop in a rather decrepit (and haunted) old house, long abandoned, it hardly seems a revolutionary or rebellious act. Indeed, an outsider might even think that a bookstore could only contribute to the meagre entertainments and social opportunities to be found in Hardborough. However, Florence's modest little bookshop knocks the reigning social matriarch's nose out of joint -- and what follows is such a quiet tug-of-war that Florence doesn't totally realise that war has been declared until it is all over. Like the book itself, Florence is self-contained and controlled, but there is still a strangely affecting emotional wallop to its ending. Fitzgerald is a genius at description, and has a sly sense of humour, but this book is comic in only the wryest sense. Really, it's a kind of tragedy -- although it seems overblown to describe it as such. Hermione Lee, her biographer, writes in a preface that Fitzgerald had a view of the world as divided into 'exterminators' and 'exterminatees.' This is language lifted directly from this book. The words seem uncharacteristically and excessively violent, but certainly Florence -- a gentle person who tries to be good -- suffers from callous and pitiless treatment.

Повна нудятіна.

If you believe that people are fundamentally somewhat selfish and unkind, this is the book for you.

Bonus points for book representation.

I don't really think that, because if I did I would be forced to give into a lifetime of sorrow and cynicism and suffering and other alliterative negativity, but I do think a lot of people are.

And I do hate capitalism.

And I do like books.

So this wasn't bad.

Add to it the fact that I've had exercise routines longer than this book (which may not sound insane, but consider that working out is, for me, an undertaking I embark on approximately once every three years and get sick of nearly immediately and you'll get it), and there's a lot to like.

Not enough to make this a truly pleasurable reading experience. But a good amount.

Bottom line: Apparently not every book about a bookstore is destined to be my favorite thing ever! Who knew.

------------------

give me all the books about books

clear ur shit prompt 5: your shortest book
follow my progress here

I had The Bookshop sitting on my currently reading shelf for longer than I can remember. I started it and got distracted by other reads. I am so glad I finally picked it up on a cloudy rainy day. This book and the current mood created by perfect aesthetic-charming and quaint.

This is a story of a strong-willed widow, Florence Green who is courageous enough to open a bookshop against the odds of politics and elitist rhetoric in a small seaside town in England, 1959. Florence buys an abandoned historical building that she converts into a book shop and her home. Along the way she meets beautiful and loving supporters of her bookshop. However, she comes across complex and burdening naysayers bent upon closing down her shop for "the betterment of the town".

The conservative town is turned upside down when Florence introduces a new book bound to create a reaction: Lolita by Nabokov. I felt so much pride for Florence, willing enough to take a chance when all the odds were against her.

The Bookshop is a short, witty, endearing novel with characters that display profound and memorable dimension. For instance, her assistant at the shop is 10-year-old Christine. Amazingly brilliant and wise for her age. Then there is Mr. Brandish, who does the unthinkable for Florence and tries to change the tide of the town.

Penelope Fitzgerald writes gorgeous prose about loneliness and fulfillment in a book that doesn't have a happy ending, yet satisfies.

I can't pinpoint exactly what drew me to this book; maybe it was the backdrop, maybe thinking of my own widowed mother, or maybe the characters who knew how to love. It was a beautifully done, short book.

5/5 stars.

Florence Green entra con forza nel novero delle nomination per la miglior protagonista femminile tra i romanzi letti nel 2021. Che personaggio stupendo. Una che affronta tutto quello che c'è da affrontare, dai fantasmi dispettosi ai piccoli potentati di periferia, dall'umidità del Suffolk alla falsità e all'opportunismo della mentalità da villaggio, senza scomporsi. Non sbraita, però controbatte puntualmente, e senza risultare mai offensiva. Non è una che vede tutto rosa, affatto, è una iperrealista con i piedi ben piantati a terra, tenace ma pure pronta a ritirarsi quando viene raggiunto il livello di donchisciottismo più esasperato. Ci vuole coraggio a prendere la parte dei più deboli anche quando essi hanno colpa, questo è ciò che più mi è piaciuto di lei. Scrittrice talentuosa, la Fitzgerald (della quale ignoravo totalmente l'esistenza!), ordisce con semplicità e precisione una trama in cui si percepisce presto quella che Florence definisce la "allarmante sensazione della prosperità", ma ormai ci siamo affezionati a questa piccola donna inglese e siamo pronti a capitolare con lei, costi quel che costi.

What a disappointment! A middle-aged widow buys an old decrepit house and turns it into a book shop. Right off the bat she finds herself up against a scheming socialite who wants to use the house as an arts centre. Against great odds she finds herself making the book shop a success. But there are constant obstacles placed in her path, all subtly arranged by the scheming socialite. Florence earns the respect of many of the villagers for her courage to go on, especially the patriarch of an ancient family, who also happens to be the only person scheming socialite, Violet Gamart, has any respect for. But in the end, Violet wins! She brings Florence so far down that she walks away from the town with absolutely nothing. In fact, it turns out that most of the townspeople she considered her friends turned out to have betrayed her. This was just a horrible, spiteful town. So, after all this emphasis on Florence's courage and brazenness, in the end she leaves the town "with her head bowed down in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop." (the last line of the book--awful!)