Cornflower Books

Cornflower Book Group - The Fountain Overflows

 

    What to make of Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows? A portrait of the Aubrey family in the early years of the twentieth century; a semi-autobiographical, episodic account of life in an impoverished, eccentric household with a brilliant but quite unreliable father, a highly-strung, worn out mother whose own considerable gifts are now directed at bringing out her daughters' talents; a picture of the complicated intersection of innate talent, ambition, self-awareness and hard work; a melodrama, and a commentary on the times. That's a lot for a book to contain, both in terms of volume and of the demands of the material, and Rebecca West is generous and expansive in her handling of it, but it worked for me in its comfortably discursive, soothingly repetitive way, its mix of the everyday and the bizarre (take the almost music hall character of Aunt Lily - and note the reference to the Kent case, subject of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher which came up the other day -  and the poltergeist episode, for example) contributing to its particular charm.

    I say 'particular charm' because I find it hard to put my finger on what exactly it is that makes this book work. It, or perhaps I mean Rose, the narrator, is earnest, serious, deep-thinking and large-hearted but at times priggish. The story is a flattish spiral in shape, people and events evolving (mostly) slowly as it goes on, but then the characters are not 'flat' at all but rather intriguing, if contradictory at times. I found it romantic and unique in its view of things and way of expressing that view, clear-sighted and quaint, engaging and frustrating, and I enjoyed it very much indeed.

    What did you make of it? Were you urging the senior Aubreys to get a grip? Is its charm down to its 'child's eye view', Rose's attempts to understand a seemingly baffling adult world but with a wisdom beyond her years? Did you find the stress on preparing for a musical career a perfectly reasonable response to the girls' background, upbringing and precarious financial situation, or an almost Tiger Mother-like devotion to duty? As a piece of social history it's fascinating - but was that aspect more compelling than the plot? Have you already gone on to read the other parts of the trilogy, This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund? Do tell us what you think.

Later: 'Books and cakes' for The Fountain Overflows is here.

Cornflower Book Group - March 2012

 

    "The fascination of [Dorothy L. Sayers's] books is not only in the solving of bizarre crimes in out-of-the-ordinary locations (an advertising agency, an Oxford women's college, an East Anglian belfry), but also in the character of her detective, the super-sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. He is a languid, monocled aristocrat, whose foppish manner conceals the fact that he has a first-class Oxford degree, was in army intelligence during the First World War, collects rare books, plays the piano like Rubinstein, dances like Astaire and seems to have swallowed a substantial dictionary of quotations. He is aided and abetted by his manservant Bunter, a suave charmer adept at extracting confidences from the cooks, taxi-drivers, waitresses, barbers and vergers who would collapse in forelock-tugging silence if Wimsey himself ever deigned to speak to them. Several of the novels describe the unfolding relationship between Wimsey and the crime novelist Harriet Vane. Seldom have detective stories been so preposterous or so unputdownable."

    So says the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide in its entry on Dorothy L. Sayers, and that prompted me to choose one of her works for the Cornflower Book Group's March book. Bearing in mind - again according to the Guide - that some readers prefer the stories which don't feature Harriet Vane, I've chosen what is said to be one of the best of the other novels, The Nine Tailors, published in 1934.

    "When his sexton finds a corpse in the wrong grave, the rector of Fenchurch St. Paul asks Lord Peter Wimsey to find out who the dead man was and how he came to be there.

    The lore of bell-ringing and a brilliantly evoked village in the remote fens of East Anglia are the unforgettable background to a story of an unsolved crime and its violent unravelling twenty years later."

    That's enough for me to want to pick it up and read forthwith - and test that 'unputdownable' claim above - and I hope that this choice will find favour with lots of people. If you haven't read along with the group before perhaps you'll feel like doing so now; we're not scary or intimidating, I hope, we just like to share our thoughts on the book in question, and while opinions often diverge, any debate is friendly and respectful.

    Surely every library will have a copy of this book in their system (those whose catalogues I've checked do), and for those who want their own, shops and internet retailers will supply it easily: I see that The Book Depository are currently charging slightly more than Amazon but they offer free international delivery; Amazon US has it, too. There are also plenty of used copies available, there is a Kindle version, and for fans of audiobooks, a BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatisation.

    We'll be talking about Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows from the 25th. of February, so let's begin our discussion of The Nine Tailors four weeks after that on Saturday, 24th, March. Please join us.

Cornflower Book Group - Lady Audley's Secret

 

    I'm not surprised that Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon has been in print since publication in 1862, when it was an immediate success, and that it became one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century, for it's a cracking tale!

    Yes, its prose is at times florid and over-written and its authorial voice is often quite 'chummy' in its commentary, and of course we know from early on what it is that the eponymous Lady Audley is keeping secret, but it's the very gradual dénouement which makes the reader turn the pages as Robert Audley "learns the business of life" by acting detective and discovering what really happened to his friend George Talboys who disappeared on a visit to Audley Court.

    There are some very convenient clues to keep the plot moving, and although "whatever the mystery may be it grows darker and thicker at every step", events do slot into place rather neatly; but I think that's part of the book's charm, so that while Robert is dashing about the place, jumping on and off trains, and feeling that "a hand that is stronger than my own is beckoning me onward upon the dark road", we have grown to trust the author to give us the ending we want - and so she does.

  As to the calculating, manipulative Lady Audley, the woman who has fashioned a new identity and plays the part she has written for herself, her step-daughter Alicia's appraisal of her is spot on:

"'She is a vain, frivolous, heartless little coquette,' said Alicia, addressing herself to her Newfoundland dog, Caesar, who was the sole recipient of the young lady's confidences; 'she is a practised and consummate flirt, Caesar; and not contented with setting her yellow ringlets and her silly giggle at half the men in Essex, she must needs make that stupid cousin of mine dance attendance upon her. I haven't common patience with her.'" Caesar, it must be said, shared this opinion, showing he had more sense than George and Sir Michael! (The picture is Lion: A Newfoundland Dog by Landseer, by the way).  

    What did you think of the book? Was it just a little too pat for you, or were you comfortable in it, and glad to be along for the ride? After a slowish start, did you like the ending which "leaves the good people all happy and at peace"?; a deliberately popular move on the part of the author, I should think. Are you now inclined to read more by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, for example The Doctor's Wife, her version of Madame Bovary?! I certainly am.

                                            ~~~~~

    The cake to go with this book is here.

Cornflower Book Group - February 2012

 

    "Extraordinary and enchanting", Hilary Spurling.

    "... absolutely magical", Harriet Devine.

    " .... [a] terrific novel", Vintage Reads.

    Those remarks - and Amanda Craig's comment - are good enough for me, and I hope they will make you want to get hold of a copy of The Fountain Overflows, Rebecca West's semi-autobiographical novel, set in the Edwardian period and first published in 1957, which I've chosen as the Cornflower Book Group's February book:-

    "Rose observes her musical, bohemian family with a child's wisdom - sometimes with innocence and occasionally with cruelty. There is her twin Mary, whose nature chimes perfectly with her own; beautiful, obtuse Cordelia, pitied for not being musically gifted; her adored little brother Richard Quin; and her charming, unprincipled father Piers, whose streak of folly ever threatens to bring his family to financial and social ruin. It is their mother Clare, beleaguered, kind and quixotically eccentric, who emerges as the family's true strength."

    "It is improbable that even the most scrupulous reader could name a more poignantly and lovingly told tale, a more beautiful piece of writing" - so said the New York Times, so let's read this story of an artistic family on the verge of financial ruin and social disgrace and see whether we agree.

    As to availability, shops should stock it or be able to get it easily, libraries ought to have it, and of online sources, The Book Depository is offering it at a competitive price, and there is a Kindle version; US Amazon carries it, as does the UK site.

    We'll be talking about Lady Audley's Secret on the 21st. of this month, so let's reconvene to discuss The Fountain Overflows on Saturday, 25th. February; I hope there will be a lot of interest in this one as it promises much, I think.

Book group favourites

    The Cornflower Book Group has read ten books this year and they range - to my mind, at least - from the sublime (Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop) to the ridiculous (that wretched Good Soldier). If you've read some or all, perhaps you'd like to name a favourite or two, and if you need to refresh your memory, just click on the authors' names below to go to the posts on those books. I enjoyed them all except for the purgatorial Ford Madox Ford, but my very best ones would be, as I've said, The Bookshop and The Secret History. How about you?

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

South Riding by Winifred Holtby

A Morbid Taste For Bones by Ellis Peters

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

The Extremely Irritating Soldier* by Ford Madox Ford

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

    Oh, and by the way, don't forget that our January book (for discussion beginning on the 21st.) is Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (introductory post on it here) so do please join us for that, and just to whet your appetite for future group reads, I have something good in mind for February - details soon.

*Edited to add: please see my reply to Sandy's comment (below).

Cornflower Book Group - January 2012

 

    Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novel Lady Audley's Secret has never been out of print since its publication in 1862 and has been described by the critic John Sutherland as "the most sensationally successful of all the sensation novels". 

    Thanks to Oxford University Press I have an advance copy of their new edition which will be out in early January, and from which the blurb is as follows:

"When beautiful young Lucy Graham accepts the hand of Sir Michael Audley, her fortune and her future look secure. But Lady Audley's past is shrouded in mystery, and to Sir Michael's nephew Robert, she is not all that she seems [shades of My Cousin Rachel?]. When his good friend George Talboys suddenly disappears, Robert is determined to find him, and to unearth the truth. His quest reveals a tangled story of lies and deception, crime and intrigue, whose sensational twists turn the conventional picture of Victorian womanhood on its head. Can Robert's darkest suspicions really be true?"

    I thought this book sounded just the thing for a leisurely read by the fireside over Christmas and into the New Year, and to get us into the spirit of it straightaway I've posted the opening passage here. Being a classic which is available in many editions, copies should be easily obtainable in libraries, shops and online (including through Amazon US and with free international delivery from The Book Depository), while the e-book version is free. If I set the discussion date as Saturday, 21st. January, that will give us more than eight weeks to get hold of it and take our time over it it, so please do join in with the group read, whether you're a first-timer or a regular, as the more, the merrier!

Cornflower Book Group - The Secret History

 

    Donna Tartt's The Secret History is the Cornflower Book Group's 46th. book, and for me, one of the best. It's a first novel, but so accomplished that it could easily be taken for the work of an experienced practitioner; that said, I felt it could have done with pruning (there were too many scenes which were spiral-repeats of earlier ones, I thought) and I wasn't convinced that a good enough case was made for the first death - the reliance on absence of sentience and a sufficiently altered mental state due to Dionysiac ritual seemed underdeveloped and thus weak - or for the all-pervading influence and significance of the benevolent, cultivated Julian Morrow, facts which were stated but not illlustrated as such. But then, read the book in the light of its two epigraphs (lines from Nietzsche and Plato), allow yourself to be drawn in, and quibbles apart, it does a fine job of interpreting those themes in fictional form and carrying the reader through to the end.

    I found much to admire in the novel. The setting, the relatively closed community of Hampden College and within that the small group of students, set apart by their manner, their subject of study, their whole modus vivendi. Richard is the outsider, the balancing force; he admires the others, and displaced as he is, craves membership of their élite clique - he wants to belong. For their part, the others find Richard refreshing, though that stems from an affected curiosity, and a staged ignorance of the world outside their own, but then he becomes useful to them. I found the individual characters well drawn and their complexity original and strangely compelling; their whole milieu and the academic discipline to which they were dedicated gave a richness to the book which was powerful in both a structural and a more superficial sense. The narrative drive was strong, the pull of the plot in the "hermetic, overheated atmosphere", the external drama and the internal struggles of conscience over self-preservation, too, and all this made for a dark, clever book, one of flair and real technical skill.

    For those who had read the book before and were re-reading it for the group, how did you find it second time round? If you were coming to it, as I was, for the first time, what did you make of it? Did you find the characters' amorality (and snobbery) off-putting, or was their predicament so well-constructed that, in the spirit of the book's events, there was no other plausible way for them to act? Was Richard's absorption by the group probable or likely? Have you read Donna Tartt's second book The Little Friend, and if so, how does it compare to her first, and if you haven't read it, would you be inclined to do so now? (I certainly would).         

Edited to add: The Secret History cake is here.       

                                           ~~~~~

By the way, and on a purely personal note, this is Cornflower Books' 1,000th. post. Thankyou for sticking with me thus far.

Cornflower Book Group - Ella Minnow Pea

 

    What a remarkably original, ingenious book this is! Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn's epistolary novel with a difference, is quite mad but very brilliantly done.

    I don't need to go into the plot as such, I think, but suffice to say that through the gradual contraction of their alphabet, that is the ever-diminishing number of letters which the Nollop islanders may use in terms of their ruling council's edicts, so the locals resort to a marvellously extensive and inventive vocabulary with synonyms and neologisms expanding the habitual lexicon: a case of limited 'raw materials' giving rise to enriched language and creative usage.

     

    As the book progresses, more and more letters are proscribed, and the description of the fight for the restoration of language on the island becomes almost a three-dimensional game of Scrabble. There are many quaint and charming touches along the way - I liked Mittie Purcy's withering dismissal of the artist woman Georgeanne Towgate:  "this Mary Cassatt aspirant", for example - while the more serious message of the book concerns censorship and dictatorship.

    Entertaining, funny, clever, sweet - I thought it was terrific; how about you?

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 10

 

    I hope we'll have lots of people joining in with our November read because this book sounds like something we can really get our teeth into. Donna Tartt's 1992 bestseller The Secret History has been dubbed 'a modern classic': "compelling and elegant, dramatic and playful". This story of a group of classics students at an elite New England college is "a highly readable murder mystery; a romantic dream of doomed youth and a disquisition on ancient and modern mores"; praise has been heaped on it and it has sold in millions. 

    A thriller, a comedy of manners - so accomplished "it takes my breath away", says Ruth Rendell - while Vanity Fair describes it as " a huge, mesmerizing, galloping read ... gorgeously written, relentlessly erudite."

    I'm glad to hear it's "galloping" as it's quite a long book, over 600 pages in the Penguin paperback shown here, but we're not daunted by long books, are we? Remember South Riding! However, let's give ourselves plenty of time to read it, and set our discussion date for Saturday, 26th. November. There doesn't appear to be an e-book version of the novel, but in paper form it should be widely available in libraries, shops and online retailers, so get your copies now, and let's hope for a cracking good read!

Cornflower Book Group - A Wizard of Earthsea

 

    A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin is the first work of fantasy that the CBG has read, and the first one I have picked up in quite a long time. That I rarely choose that genre is not down to deliberate omission or a dislike for it, though, and after a slowish start I found I was soon wrapped up in the Earthsea world and glad to return to it each day - it was welcome escapism for me.

    I loved the book's setting; a vast archipelago, each island physically different and distinct in nature, its people likewise, and the maritime elements, the boats (have we identified Ged's craft Lookfar?), the weather's influence, all this made a strong impression. Then there was the central theme, Sparrowhawk/Ged's journey along "the way of magery" which seemed at first "a broad, bright road", but then "as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do ...".

    Ged learns a powerful lesson as he first runs from and then hunts the shadow he inadvertently summoned in a moment of over-reaching pride and hatred - the evil he loosed as a result of his arrogance and ignorance. His quest is a rite of passage, and clearly the foundation for his fate in the rest of The Earthsea Quartet, but I was also taken with Ursula Le Guin's stress on the importance of language and the naming of things, likewise on "Equilibrium" and "the Pattern", and on how "a wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world"; the wisdom of it appealed to me.

    Having now read this first volume of the series, would I read more? Certainly.

    How about you?

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 9

 

    Part of the aim of our Cornflower Book Group choices is to take us somewhere we might not otherwise have gone - not too far off the beaten track, perhaps, but down interesting-looking paths nonetheless. Here's a book that's an unknown quantity for me at least, but one which has been on the list of reader-recommendations since way back; time, then, to make the acquaintance of an epistolary novel, but one which is subtitled "a novel without letters", for our October book is Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea.

    "Original, clever, extraordinarily inventive and quite exceptional ... a fable of stunning imaginative power," said The Bookseller; "A stylish and witty gem of a novel ...", according to the Glasgow Herald, this is "the story of a battle against tyranny, written with an ever-shrinking alphabet, at once a moving love story, a brilliant political allegory and an unforgettable celebration of language" - and all that in a slim little volume of 200 pages.

 

    Here is the gist: "As Ella Minnow Pea writes to her cousin with the latest news on the small quiet island of Nollop, little does she imagine the crisis ahead. The letter z has fallen from the statue of Nevin Nollop, revered author of the sentence 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog', and the island's rulers interpret this as a sign of divine displeasure and ban its use in any form. In a novel composed of correspondence, the loss of z is inconvenient; but far worse is to come as more letters fall and more are banned, until only l, m, n, o, p remain."

    Different, certainly, and I wonder what we shall all make of it. We'll be gathering here on the 24th. of September to discuss A Wizard of Earthsea, so let's then get together on the 22nd. of October to talk about Ella Minnow Pea. As to availability, it should be easy enough to find copies, both in libraries and through shops (The Book Depository will send it anywhere in the world post-free, should you have trouble getting it locally), and in addition to the paperback there is a Kindle edition. Anyone who would like to join us in reading this - or the Ursula Le Guin, as there's still time for that one - would be very welcome, of course.

Cornflower Book Group - The Good Soldier

   

     Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion is the 43rd. book the Cornflower Book Group has read and it has the 'distinction' of being the only one I've contemplated stopping reading half way through. I didn't give up, I carried on to the end, but I hope you all made more of it than I did, and I hope someone will point out what I've obviously missed, because apart from wanting to shake all the characters and tell them to get a grip, I was otherwise quite nonplussed.

    Need we go into the plot? I think not, and I'd be hard pressed to set it down here, anyway. The style is impressionistic, and so digressional and discursive it reminded me of a children's song, the chorus of which was "We're going this way and that way, forwards and backwards, over the Irish Sea", quite apt considering that John Dowell, the narrator, describes the group comprising himself and his wife and their friends the Ashburnhams as "[...] one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest [...]". Forwards and backwards it goes, a detail or contradiction thrown in here to complicate the story originally told there, an unreliable narrator, a fixation with the date the 4th. of August, everyone in the end apparently mad or dead or both - "It is all a darkness," says Dowell at one juncture, and how right he is!

    Granted there are some very fine points and sure touches, but one almost misses them in the effort of trying to tie in the various unravelled narrative strands and finding one's way through what Dowell admits is "a sort of maze". Would a second reading prove more enlightening? I'm not particularly inclined to find out. So, onwards and upwards, Floreant Centaureae and all that, and here's to books which make an impression for more positive reasons. But what did you think of this one?

PS. The Good Soldier's 'cake' is here.

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 8

 

    Right then, I've taken your advice and decided to give the book group a break in August, so after we've talked about The Good Soldier this coming Saturday (30th. July), we can relax a bit and have an unhurried and what looks to be a rather less perplexing read(!) for our September title. B.R. Wombat suggested Ursula Le Guin's 1968 classic of fantasy literature A Wizard of Earthsea, so let's read it - it will certainly be something new for me.

    "The island of Gont is a land famous for wizards. Of these, some say the greatest - and surely the greatest voyager - is the man called Sparrowhawk. As a reckless, awkward boy, he discovered the great power that was in him - with terrifying consequences. Tempted by pride to try spells beyond his means, Sparrowhawk lets loose an evil shadow-beast in his land. Only he can destroy it, and the quest leads him to the farthest corner of Earthsea."

    Likened to Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis's Narnia, the award-winning Earthsea novels depict an imaginary world which draws the reader in. I'm particularly interested in the fact that, apparently, "Le Guin challenges her readers to think about the power of language, how in the act of naming the world around us we actually create that world"; I'll look out for that aspect.

    I hope that even if you're not in the habit of reading this type of book you'll be willing to give it a try. I should think it will be available in shops and libraries everywhere (as far as I can see there isn't an e-book edition, though), and for those who want to go the whole hog, there is the omnibus The Earthsea Quartet. In the event you can't lay hands on a copy, The Book Depository will, as always, send it anywhere post free.

    Let's set the discussion date for Saturday, 24th. September, and do please all join in - the more, the merrier!

Saturday miscellany

    - The Telegraph magazine is always my Saturday breakfast reading, and one of its highlights is Mary Portas's shop review column. Today she casts her critical eye over Daunt Books, specifically the Marylebone High Street branch, and you can read what she has to say here. I've never been to Daunt's so I can't comment on her impressions, but I find it very interesting that one of the key areas in which they can compete with online retailers and other shops which sell books at large discounts is service, and that's exactly were Mary marks them down.

    - For anyone who missed Wednesday's post, I've postponed our CBG discussion of The Good Soldier by a week to Saturday 30th. July. Meanwhile, I've got our next book - or possibly even next two - in hand, so more news on those very soon.

    - If you glance over to the arrivals list on the right there you'll see at the top a new novel by the excellent Sally Gardner (her brilliant I, Coriander was a favourite of mine a few years ago, and The Red Necklace was equally impressive and imaginative). The Double Shadow is a book for older teenage readers, due out in early November. I read the opening chapter yesterday and I had to force myself to put it down - I'm reading too many books just now to add another one to the mix - but it was compelling and promises much. Here's the gist:

"In a bluebell wood stands a picture palace. Arnold Rubens built it to house an invention of his that could change the war torn world forever. It is to be given to his daughter, Amaryllis, on her seventeenth birthday. But it's a present she doesn't want, and in it is a past she has to come to terms with ... Who knows what her past has been, or what the future might hold for Amaryllis, lost as she is in this place with no time?

Against the tense backdrop of the second World War, Sally Gardner explores families and what binds them, fathers and daughters, past histories, passions and cruelty, love and devastation in a novel rich in character and beautifully crafted."

Books, books and more books

    Apologies to any authors, publishers and publicists who have written to me recently offering books; I've got a large email backlog (and a spam problem) so I'm being terribly slow in replying. I've also gone way beyond tipping point as far as the books in/books read balance is concerned as I'm managing to get through a mere 40% of what I'm sent, so because of sheer volume (no pun intended), good books will inevitably be overlooked, and I'm hesitating over inviting more in to join the mountains already here.

    I fret endlessly about this, and I know I've raised it here before, but I wish I could come up with a solution that was workable and fair to everyone. If I say yes to the offer of a book (and I certainly don't accept everything, either because a title doesn't look as though it would sit well with the site or because I occasionally try to stem the flow for a while) I am genuinely interested in reading it and hope that I shall get to it soon, so my heart's in the right place, even if my head isn't - I delude myself by imagining that I can somehow fit more reading hours into the day. A lot of books arrive out of the blue, with no prefatory "would you like ...?" message; some will be of great interest, others less so, but while still welcome, they all just have to join the waiting piles and take their chance in the queue, being opened if they happen to fit my mood and inclination.

    Although this is a situation which I'd like to be handling better, I do realise how fortunate I am - it's a nice problem to have - but to get back to my original point, I may have to tweak my system somehow, especially as I rarely manage to get to read anything I buy for myself (apart from the CBG titles), being driven by my perceived obligation to the publishers and authors who have sent me books to always read theirs as soon as possible.

    I know this is all a bit of a self-indulgent, 'thinking aloud' post, but please allow me that as sometimes these things have to be aired.

                                            ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Related to the above, I am reluctantly going to have to postpone the CBG discussion on The Good Soldier as I haven't read the book yet and a recent bout of nasty eye-strain headaches (caused by reading too much) means I must give myself a bit longer to do so. I hope this won't inconvenience anyone, but let's move the date to Saturday, 30th. July, and if you're not around that day, the comments do of course remain open so that you can contribute your thoughts and impressions at any time. Meanwhile, I'll choose our August book, and if you've any suggestions for that - it must be something that's easily obtainable everywhere, in shops, libraries and online - please do leave a comment here. I was wondering about E.M. Forster, in the light of this post, but what do you think? Perhaps after the Ford Madox Ford we should have a marked change of period, country, genre, even?  

Cornflower Book Group - Babette's Feast

 

    A fable, calm and clear, the story-teller's voice gently commanding attention, Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) is a delightful tale and one very much worth reading.

    Martine and Philippa, elderly ladies now, live in the small, almost toy town-like Berlevaag in a Norwegian fjord - you can imagine a naïf painting of the colourful wooden houses at the foot of the mountains. Daughters of a respected Lutheran Dean, their life is one of piety and asceticism amid the dwindling band of their father's remaining followers, but unusually they have a French maid-of-all-work, Babette, a refugee from Paris taken in by the sisters some twelve years earlier. Despite the household's simple life, Babette manages to work her magic in the kitchen, and the fare she produces, especially that for the poor and sick of the parish, "acquired a new, mysterious power to stimulate and strengthen".

    When the time comes to mark the centenary of the Dean's birth, Babette asks permission to cook a celebratory dinner, far beyond the plain food the sisters were in the habit of offering their guests, and furthermore she wishes to pay for it for she has won the lottery, and Babette is now a woman of means. Her preparations involve a sea voyage, the arrival of a turtle, a cook's boy and a barrow-load of fine wine, and at the lavish dinner itself, tongues are loosened, past wrongs righted, and hitherto unspoken affection expressed. Then to their consternation the sisters discover that the dinner has cost Babette - who was formerly the chef at a famous Parisian restaurant, it turns out - all her newly acquired funds and she is penniless again, but in her words she will never be poor for she is a great artist, one who "has something of which other people know nothing", and given leave to do her utmost, she is happy.

    So, a touching story of love and destiny, the balance sheet of one's life, of making peace with the past, and of coming into one's own; I was very taken by it - how about you? 

(The 'books and cakes' post for Babette's Feast is now up, and the CBG July book is here).

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 7

 

    This coming Saturday, the Cornflower Book Group (which is open to all, so please join us, if you'd like to, by reading along) will be discussing Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen. For our July book I've chosen The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford. First published in 1915, its opening line is a memorable one!

    Here's what the back cover of my copy says: "... The Good Soldier tells of the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness of the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian façade. It is the attitude of Dowell, his puzzlement and uncertainty, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration that make the book so powerful and mysterious. Ford called it 'the only novel of mine that I considered ... at all to count' and it has perplexed and delighted commentators since its publication. The novel has many comic moments, despite its catalogue of death, insanity and despair, and has been read as both a comedy and a tragedy. It has inspired the works of many later, distinguished writers, including Graham Greene."

    The Good Soldier should be readily available from libraries and shops, but if you can't find it locally, Amazon UK (link above) and US have it, The Book Depository carries the Oxford World's Classics edition shown here and the cheaper Wordsworth Classics one (with free worldwide delivery), and it also comes as an e-book. Let's say we'll start our discussion on the book on Saturday, 23rd. July, but of course comments remain open indefinitely so you can have your say at any time after that date.   

Cornflower Book Group 2011: Volume 6

 

    Apologies for being later than usual in posting the next CBG book, but it is a very short one so we should still have plenty of time to read it within the month.

    I've chosen Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), one of her Anecdotes of Destiny, a mere 54 pages in the Penguin Mini Modern Classics edition. Here's the blurb:

"Babette's Feast is a sublime celebration of eating and drinking and sensual pleasure. In [this] life-affirming story, two elderly sisters living in a remote, god-fearing Norwegian community take in a mysterious refugee from Paris one night - and are rewarded for their kindness with the most decadent, luxurious feast of a lifetime."

   

    What drew me to it was reading the chapter on Karen Blixen and her house at Rungstedlung in Denmark in the lovely Writers' Houses book (post on it here), and specifically the passage on her love of flowers and her pleasure in entertaining:

"On days when she received guests, she rose at five in the morning to go out and gather flowers while they were still moist with dew. Composing bouquets became her passion, an activity from which she derived as much pleasure as painting. Karen loved to elaborate on her gift for entertaining, which required that parquets be polished to a glistening finish, that a fire be crackling in the hearth, that flowers perfume rooms that she had had repainted in different warm and subtle colours. The dinners were delicious: 'That woman is in the process of transforming a dinner at the Café Anglais into a sort of love affair,' says Colonel Galliffet in Babette's Feast."

    I wouldn't anticipate any difficulty getting hold of a copy of the book, but if you want to buy it online, The Book Depository (who also offer free worldwide delivery) have it slightly cheaper than Amazon - when I checked prices just now - and you can get a further 10% off all books there if you enter the code 'May11' at the checkout*.

    I hope this little book will appeal (apart from its literary merit I trust it will yield considerable material on which to base the Books and Cakes post!), and how about we put Saturday, 25th. June in the diary as discussion date?    

*NB If you read this post yesterday you'll have seen that the 'further 10% off everything' offer was originally open until the end of May, well The Book Depository have now extended it until Sunday, 5th. June, but the coupon code is still 'May11'.

Also, BR Wombat has kindly pointed out that the book is available in a Kindle edition.

Cornflower Book Group - Decline and Fall

 

    It's been years since I read any Waugh and I wasn't sure how Decline and Fall would suit me now, but I did find it very funny indeed and surprisingly interesting in terms of its themes and the way in which it prefigures his later work (says she as if she were currently up to speed with all that). I wonder how well the very black and very British humour travels - do readers abroad 'get' Waugh? He's certainly not politically correct, and I lost count of the number of ethnic or racial groups which were insulted along the way, but then he's quick to lampoon his own class and milieu as well, and generally ridicule the fashions of the period.

    The book is an attractive mix of farce and satire, social commentary and the absurd, the whole thing revolving round the slightly sketchy person of Paul Pennyfeather to whom 'things happen'. This passive/submissive figure, so unremarkable that later "a heavy moustache and his natural diffidence formed a complete disguise", is seemingly subject to the will of others and swept along by events, and is thus a means by which Waugh can give a sort of free-wheeling propulsion to the plot, and expound on so many subjects from modernism (the bizarre house, King's Thursday, and its architect Prof. Silenus) to public schools and prisons, a static/dynamic classification of people and even T.S. Eliot's 'still point of the turning world', before bringing Paul neatly full circle.

    At the time it was first published it must have been quite a debut; so many years later I still thoroughly enjoyed its madness and would like to revisit more of Waugh now. What did you think of it?  

 

    (The cake to go with Decline and Fall is here).

Cornflower Book Group - The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

    If you didn't know that Oscar Wilde was a playwright you could certainly guess it was so on the basis of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. There are many declamatory passages, 'stage-y' scenes, melodramatic, 'back of the hand to the forehead' moments, and enough epigrams, aphorisms and sharp, barbed wit to keep an audience engaged throughout three acts.

    If it were a play, the sets and costumes would be beautiful (see, for example, the description of the little library in Lord Henry's Mayfair house at the beginning of chapter IV, and Sibyl's clothes as Rosalind in ch. VI), and noticeably, given so many exquisite details of dress, objets and decor, there is rather a lack of food - again, is this the dramatist's mind dwelling on what is most effective on stage and eliminating that which can't be easily done? Just by the way but on the subject of things, I was amused at Dorian Gray's interest in what I suppose was an early form of aromatherapy and crystal therapy in chapter XI!

    Those are the externals, while the internals - the aestheticism, the faustian pact, the corruption and immorality, make the familiar story, one set in a world in which everything is deceptively simple: "The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming." Everything leads back to that, it seems.

    Throughout the book there is a disconnection between narrative and reader, in the sense that as with a play in a conventional theatre, the reader watches and listens from a certain distance in the stalls and the circle - there's that proscenium divide, and thus none of the immediacy and close involvement that an apron stage or viewing in the round would provide. This is Wilde's natural habitat, both professionally and personally, and every word, every detail is arranged just so, to attract and retain the reader's attention. This artifice is almost like looking at the most beautifully dressed shop window - the passer-by may have no interest in the merchandise on show, but the display itself is arresting.

    I'm glad I've read the book, although at times doing so was a bit like sipping a particularly potent and somewhat bitter liqueur - enough was quite enough. What did you think of it?

(Edited to add: this book's cake is here).