Revisiting ...

   

     ... Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Bookshop.

    As it's on special offer (99p) for Kindle today I thought I'd repost the following from our Book Group* read in 2011:

Florence Green decides "to take a step forward in middle age" and opens a bookshop in the small seaside town of Hardborough. She has to contend with undue influence and local hierearchies, petty rivalries and jealousies, a supernatural presence, and a clientele whose tastes run more to the Life of Queen Mary (it is 1959**) than to the modern novel, but then her decision to stock Nabokov's Lolita proves to be both a money-spinner and a further cause of her undoing.

    Wryly funny with moments of pure comedy - but also others of resigned regret, and exquisitely written with not a superfluous word nor an ill-chosen one, even the most slight of scenes and characters are beautifully drawn, and there are lines a-plenty worth quoting. From Milo North whose "fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it could settle down to its own advantage" to Violet Gamart who "from long habit .. rejected the idea that her husband might be necessary for anything", the "Mixed Infant", and the bookshop stock - "... a pile of novels which had the air, in their slightly worn jackets, of women on whom no one had ever made any demand", everything is just so, testament to how fine a writer Penelope Fitzgerald was.

    The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978 when Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea won, though Penelope Fitzgerald did go on to win in 1979 with Offshore, but for me it's a miniature piece of perfection which goes straight on to my 'books of the year' longlist.

**Too early for Prince Charles's taste for cherry brandy, to which Florence and Mrs. Gipping refer, to have been made public, surely, but maybe the Hardborough ladies are gifted with prescience or have a friend  - Mrs. Gamart's nephew? - at court!

 

    *Click here to see what everyone else had to say about it.

Comments

[Claire]

I'd like to see the recently released film but think I may have missed it in the cinema and will have to wait for the DVD.

Loved the book.

[Fran]

One of my early Penelope Fitzgerald reads and possibly my favourite. All her novels worth revisiting I think, this one in particular.

[Cornflower]

I'd like to see the film, too, although reviews seem lukewarm.

[Cornflower]

I think that's my favourite of those I've read.