Book Beginning: Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. We share the first sentence (or so) of the book we are reading, along with our initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

It was, gentlemen, after a long absence - seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe - that I returned to my people. I learnt much and much passed me by - but that's another story. The important thing is that I returned with a great yearning for my people in that small village at he bend of the Nile.

 This book is another of my great finds in the clearance section of my local used bookstore. I had not heard of the author before, but the influential literary critic Edward W. Said proclaimed this novel to be "among the six finest novels to be written in modern Arabic literature". It also fits into my plan to read more translated literature. I'm looking forward to this short novel!

A Miniature Victorian Novel

The Young Visiters or, Mr. Salteena's Plan
Daisy Ashford
Academy Chicago Publishers, 1991
First published 1919
102 pages


Nine-year-old Daisy Ashford's novella is a lot of fun to read, childish errors of spelling and punctuation and all. It's both short and entertaining enough to be read in a single pass. And if you are at all attuned to novels or TV dramas about the English aristocracy of 100 years ago, it is also quite funny, akin to P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories.

Walter Kendrick. a professor of English at Fordham University who was an authority on Victorian literature, assures us in his introduction that this is not just a children's story, but "also a Victorian novel in miniature, a tidy précis of English fiction circa 1890". It even has a double plot, one about love, the other adventure.

As for Ashford's spelling and punctuation, he calls them "hilariously idiosyncratic". She may talk about the "sumpshous" bathroom, items wrapped in "tishu paper", and a room full of "searious people", but she knows what those words mean and tries her best to spell them phonetically. Hey, she's nine!

According to Wikipedia, "The Young Visiters" has been adapted as a musical, a play, a feature-length movie, and a BBC television production. Not bad for a first-time author!

The is my entry in the 20th Century Classic category for the 2020 Back to the Classics challenge.

Book Beginning: The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. We share the first sentence (or so) of the book we are reading, along with our initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The Young Visiters is the greatest novel ever written by a nine-year-old.

So, could you pass up a book with such an opening sentence in the introduction? No, neither could I. This is a novella written by a girl in England about 1890, but not published until 1919. Walter Kendrick. a professor of English at Fordham University who was an authority on Victorian literature, assures us in his introduction that this is not just a children's story, but "also a Victorian novel in miniature, a tidy précis of English fiction circa 1890".

Sounds like fun!

Rivers of Consciousness

Room Temperature
Nicholson Baker
Grove Press, 1990
116 pages


Maybe Nicholson Baker has to be experienced rather than summarized. First of all, there is no plot in the traditional sense. The narrator, Michael Beal, muses on life for 20 minutes as he gives his infant daughter, affectionately referred to as Bug, her afternoon bottle. The style is stream-of-consciousness, but here it's on overdrive. The stream relates not just things floating at the top of Michael's mind, but rather every little thought or fragment that occurs in his internal monologue. We get tales of Michael growing up, going to music school and college, dating, and as a young husband and father, mostly in snippets that weave in an out of the reverie.

And what a reverie it is! Michael is very learned, making allusions to literature, science, art, music, history, and culture. The NY Review of Books said of Baker: 

You didn’t read Baker for plot turns or the careful delineation of character, or even for ideas. You read him for sentences and similes that would take your breath away, for pages of description more exciting than any James Bond thriller. 

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/11/21/funny-serious-too/

Before this I read "The Mezzanine", his first book, which is a similar stream-of-consciousness story following an office worker on his lunch hour trip to buy shoelaces. Both of them are interesting and entertaining, especially if you admire the creative use of words. And it helps if you Google the various people and concepts that are new to you. They are also quite funny and quirky.

From various recent reviews, I understand that Baker's style has changed a lot in the 30 years since this early book was published. Now I want to check out more of his work to see where it has taken him.

This is part of my reading for the 2020 Mount TBR Challenge.

Book Beginning: Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

I was in the rocking chair giving our six-month-old Bug her late afternoon bottle.

 

I bought this novella because I had read Baker's first one, "The Mezzanine", which I liked. Wikipedia says that earlier book "created the genre of digressive, annotational metafiction for which Baker is best known". Basically he concentrates on the minute details of everyday life in a stream-of-consciousness style. I expect this book to be a fun, interesting read.

Black or White in 1920s America

Quicksand / Passing
Nella Larsen
Rutgers University Press, 1995  (first published 1928, 1929)
246 pages


I discover some of my very best reads from book blogger reviews, and this book is no exception. Of course I don't know who it was, but here's a general "Thank you!" to all who are avid readers and bloggers.

This book contains two novellas written by a woman who was an acclaimed novelist of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Appropriately (and accidentally) February is Black History Month.

In "Quicksand" the main character, Helga Crane, shares some biographical details with the author. Both are half Black and half Danish. Both grow up in Chicago with a White stepfather who doesn't like that they are half Black. Both lived in the deep South, Harlem, and Denmark. Larsen's life story is a bit sketchy, but it does not follow Helga's exactly. Their shared experiences, though, do mean that Larsen could easily draw her characters and their milieu realistically.

During the story, Helga moves from somewhere outside Atlanta to Chicago, then Harlem in New York, Denmark, and back to Harlem. She never feels she belongs anywhere, with Blacks or Whites. She seems rather aloof and has no close friends. She also doesn't know what she wants; a few years after she gains an objective and thinks she is finally happy, she become dissatisfied and restless again.

The plot thus far seems believable to me, but it then takes a dramatic turn which I found totally unconvincing. Helga has a sudden, intense religious conversion during a gathering she happens upon at a low point in her life. She makes another impulsive move, ending up in rural Alabama, impoverished, ill, unhappy again, and basically "barefoot and pregnant".

I can accept that she might have a deep religious conversion, but not the degradation she subjected herself to afterwards. She had always been so fastidious, cool and analytical, ambitious, a lover of nice things, semi-fluent in Dutch. Maybe I don't understand such a conversion because I've never experienced one.

The second story, "Passing" is much shorter but very interesting. Two Black women who were childhood friends meet accidentally in Chicago. One leads a conventional life, married to a Black doctor with two children. The other one is married with one child but is passing for White; even her White husband doesn't know the truth. And he is a rabid racist.

I enjoyed both novellas with their detailed descriptions of people and places, evoking life in the 1920s in America and Denmark. Both stories highlight the experiences of Black women in Black society and in White. The depiction of the characters' inner lives is captivating and vivid. On the back cover the publisher writes:

As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

I highly recommend reading both of these novellas, which are often published together in one volume.

The is my entry in the Classic by a Person of Color category for the 2020 Back to the Classics challenge and it's also part of my reading for the 2020 Mount TBR Challenge.



FURTHER READING

Nella Larsen
Black History Now: Black History Biographies from the Black Heritage Commemorative Society
http://blackhistorynow.com/nella-larsen/

Passing, in Moments: The uneasy existence of being black and passing for white.
Words by Mat Johnson
Topic Magazine
https://www.topic.com/passing-in-moments

HRH Takes a Break

The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
Alan Bennett
Picador, 2008
120 pp.


Mrs Queen Takes the Train
William Kuhn
Harper, 2012
374 pp.

For a lighter look at the British Monarchy, I recommend these two delightful books! Both have Queen Elizabeth II as the main character, although in highly imaginative tales with no basis in real life. In fact, HRH literally escapes that real life in each one.


In Bennett's novella, the Queen becomes "The Uncommon Reader" after she chases her runaway corgis around the back of Buckingham Palace and comes upon the travelling library or what we in the US call a bookmobile. Never having done much pleasure reading herself but wanting to be polite, she selects a book with a familiar author's name, Ivy Compton-Burnett. When the librarian tells her Ivy is not a popular author, she muses "Why, I wonder? I made her a dame."

The Queen also meets another travelling library patron, Norman, a young palace kitchen worker who loves reading. She makes him a page and then becomes an avid reader with Norman as her guide. In a series of funny events that are both political and literary satire, her reading upsets the Palace routines and her government. I won't spoil the fun of reading the book, but it is very charming.



The second book, "Mrs Queen Takes the Train", I read several years ago and thoroughly enjoyed. Reading "The Uncommon Reader" reminded me of it, however I can't really summarize the plot, so here's the publisher's blurb:

"An absolute delight of a debut novel by William Kuhn--author of Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books--Mrs Queen Takes the Train wittily imagines the kerfuffle that transpires when a bored Queen Elizabeth strolls out of the palace in search of a little fun, leaving behind a desperate team of courtiers who must find the missing Windsor before a national scandal erupts. Reminiscent of Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader, this lively, wonderfully inventive romp takes readers into the mind of the grand matriarch of Britain's Royal Family, bringing us an endearing runaway Queen Elizabeth on the town--and leading us behind the Buckingham Palace walls and into the upstairs/downstairs spaces of England's monarchy."

Both of these books are fun, light reading for a long winter day or even a day at the beach!

Book Beginning: A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

When the train stopped I stumbled out, nudging and kicking the kitbag before me. Back down the platform someone was calling despairingly, 'Oxgodby ... Oxgodby.'

I came across this small novel by chance in a $1 bin at a charity book sale. Seeing that it was nominated for the Booker Prize and won the 1980 Guardian Prize for Fiction, I bought it. It tells a story about a World War I veteran trying to sort himself out after the war.

 

Mrs. 'Arris Tackles America

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to New York
Paul Gallico
Drawings by Mircea Vasiliu
Doubleday, 1960
192 pages


In this second book of the series. our adventurous Mrs. 'Arris, a London char, sets out to right another wrong. Her neighbors are mistreating a little boy who was left in their care by his mom when she remarried and the new husband didn't want the child. In her innocent view of the world in the 1950s it must be a simple task to find little Henry's father, George Brown, in America. You just needed to take a ship over there and look him up.

As is usual with Mrs. 'Arris's plans, things do not go quite that smoothly. And as is also usual with Mrs. 'Arris, her friends, employers, and even new acquaintances are always eager to help her out of a jam. Thus she and her friend and fellow char, Mrs. Butterfield, find themselves on an ocean liner to New York courtesy of a client who desperately needs their help settling in to a large New York apartment. And her old friend from Paris, the Marquis Hypolite de Chassagne, the new French Ambassador to the US, happens to be on board, as well.

Mrs. 'Arris does indeed find a new forever family for little Henry in America, after an arduous search. With a little help from her friends. She is one of the most endearing characters ever to grace the pages of a book. Her stories are more like modern, feel-good fairy tales than novels. All of her exploits are worth reading. Alas, I have now read all four of the Mrs. 'Arris books and so cannot look forward to more. Rereads are in my future!


MY OTHER REVIEWS

"Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris"
https://booktapestry.blogspot.com/2018/12/mrs-arris-paris.html

"Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Moscow"
https://booktapestry.blogspot.com/2018/12/mrs-arris-paris.html

"Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Parliament"
https://booktapestry.blogspot.com/2019/08/mrs-arris-parliament.html


NOTES

The versions published in the UK have slightly different titles and don't use the abbreviated version of her last name. Actually in the books she is always called Mrs. Harris, but the US publishers saw fit to drop her Hs, as does Mrs. 'Arris herself in her cockney accent. She will forever be Mrs. 'Arris to me, too. Also note that British English does not use a period/full stop after "Mrs" or "Mr".

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris - Flowers for Mrs Harris
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to New York - Mrs Harris Goes to New York
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Parliament - Mrs Harris MP
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Moscow -  Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow

Book Beginning: Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless undulations.

Anther American Classic I haven't read and I am trying hard to read lots of them now. I have read two of Wharton's novels and enjoyed them, so this novella should be interesting, too. I understand it's a tragedy.

Book Beginning: Last Victim of the Monsoon Express by Vaseem Khan

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The death, when it came, happened late at night, a silent affair – certainly no one heard anything at the time – yet one that detonated so loudly in the cold light of day it almost brought two nations to the brink of war.

This is an e-novella from my favorite new cozy mystery series, the Baby Ganesh Agency crime novels set in today's Mumbai, India. Baby Ganesh is a baby elephant and the sidekick to Inspector Chopra, retd.

Cat Fights

A Cat, a Man, and Two Women
Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
Kodansha International, 1990, translation by Paul McCarthy
Japanese original "Neko to Shozo to futari no onna", and other stories
164 pages


Mr. Tanizaki is a new author to me, although the end flap biography says that most Japanese readers would name him as the best Japanese writer of the 20th century. Apparently the stories in this small volume are different from his novels, as they are playful and lighthearted.

The book contains 3 stories, a novella called "A Cat, a Man, and Two Women" (1936), and two short stories, "The Little Kingdom" (1918) and "Professor Rado" (1923, 1928). All three were first published in magazines in Japan and went untranslated until this book appeared in 1990.

In "The Cat" story, three female characters are vying for the attentions of the man, Shozo: ex-wife Shinako, current wife Fukuko, and a cat named Lily. Shozo is lazy, spoiled, and self-indulgent. His main passion seems to be for the cat. The two wives and his mother push him around all the time. Shozo just bumbles around and gets into arguments with all three women. They are all working class Japanese, just ordinary people.

Shinako is vindictive; she's been divorced and thrown out so he could marry a younger woman who has a bit of money. That younger woman, Fukuko, is rather flighty and runs home to daddy for days at a time to get more money and spend it. Meanwhile the fight over who gets the cat is sort of a proxy battle for Shozo.

The tone is a gentle comedy, and the author has great sympathy for these common people, and for the cat. The preface by the translator mentions that Tanizaki was a great cat-lover, and the depiction of Lily bears witness to that love. It was a fun story, although the people are rather pathetic in the end.

"The Little Kingdom" concerns a provincial school teacher and his family, suffering from poverty and illness. The main plot revolves around a power struggle between the teacher and one of his young pupils.

"Professor Rado" is a very odd tale about a journalist who pursues a pompous professor named Rado, relentlessly asking him questions to which the main answers are merely grunts. At the end, the journalist uncovers the professor's secret obsessions, which are a bit kinky.

I enjoyed these stories a lot, especially the one about Lily, the cat. It's one of those books I must have read about somewhere online, requested from the library, and then wonder how I ended up with such an odd little book. The power of the book bloggers, I guess!

This is my entry for the Back to the Classics 2019 Challenge, in the Classic From Africa, Asia, or Oceania category.

Mrs. 'Arris: Live and Let Live!

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Parliament
Drawings by Gioia Fiammenghi
Paul Gallico
Garden City, 1965
152 pages


I am continuing my reading of the Mrs. 'Arris series with this, the third of the four books. This time the story is a bit different as our intrepid London char does not visit a foreign country. Her other exploits were in Paris, New York, and Moscow. Instead she gets elected as a Member of Parliament with the help of a coterie of London chauffeurs, some influential friends from the first two books, and a lot of backroom politicking that misfires.

Parliament is a tougher nut to crack than her former adversaries, however.

Flypaper, that's what politics was, Mrs. Harris thought. You'd hardly got one foot clear when the other one was stuck.

Most of the story concerns the politics of a 1950s British parliamentary election. Parts of it were a bit confusing to this American; the titles and committee names and procedures were very different from what we're used to here. But I got the gist of the political machinations. I don't think it's giving away any surprises to say that she does not manage to right the world of 1950s London. But there is a very nice ending as her friends rally to her support.

Once again this is a charming and sweet book where the plot is not particularly realistic, but the characters are wonderful. I love Mrs. 'Arris for her principles, her devotion to her friends, and her belief that she can make things better in the world. A good read for when the world is too much with us.



NOTES

The versions published in the UK have slightly different titles and don't use the abbreviated version of her last name. Actually in the books she is always called Mrs. Harris, but the US publishers saw fit to drop her Hs, as does Mrs. 'Arris herself in her cockney accent. She will forever be Mrs. 'Arris to me, too. Also note that British English does not use a period/full stop after "Mrs" or "Mr".

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris - Flowers for Mrs Harris
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to New York - Mrs Harris Goes to New York
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Parliament - Mrs Harris MP
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Moscow -  Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow


My OTHER REVIEWS

"Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris"
 https://booktapestry.blogspot.com/2018/12/mrs-arris-paris.html

"Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Moscow"
 https://booktapestry.blogspot.com/2019/01/mrs-arris-moscow.html

Book Beginning: The Lady Who Liked Clean Restrooms by JP Donleavy

I'm either a few days late or a few days early, but here goes. Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

With everyone reacting to and following trends and fashions you never know what's going to happen next in around New York and especially in suburban climes like Scarsdale. But what worried her more than anything was that she might sink down so deep into the doldrums that back up out of them she might never again get.

This is a funny but rather strange little novella. It reads like your best friend is telling you her recent life story, breathlessly pouring it all out. There are no chapters, although it does have paragraphs and normal punctuation. The Washington Times called it a "marvelously sophisticated, scatological, acerbic, and entertaining novella."

In a Blue Haze

Adrift on the Nile
Naguib Mahfouz
Anchor, 1994
Arabic original pub. 1966
176 pages


I picked up this slight book for only $1 at a used book sale somewhere. Mahfouz is a Nobel Prize winner and I've wanted to read some of his work, so it seemed like a perfect chance to dip a toe into modern Egyptian fiction. And at least one reviewer wrote that it was a good introduction to Mahfouz.

Very little actually happens until the closing chapters. The bulk of the book consists of a group of thirtysomething friends in Cairo sitting around a water pipe smoking a mixture of tobacco and kif (marijuana). The friends have long conversations, some coherent some not, about politics, the meaning of life, the absurd, and their lives in 1960s Egypt.

The main character is Anis, who rents the houseboat on the Nile where they convene every night for their smoking, talking, flirting, and philosophizing. He is always under the influence of the kif, even at his boring government office job, and we see a lot of the story through his narcotic daze. It's a stream-of-consciousness or rather stream-of-stoned-consciousness style that can get confusing because the narration switches from that back to the omniscient narrator. Much of his internal dialogue drops hints that he is well-read in classical literature and mythology. He even hallucinates a whale, which might be Moby Dick. At the end an incident happens which leads to the breakup of the group. As the book ends, Anis is drifting off into his own hazy world once again.

I was quite surprised by this book. I wasn't expecting something so absurdist and full of druggies talking nonsense. It sort of gave me a flashback to the late 60s in the US; I knew people who did the identical thing in college, minus the water pipe and the houseboat. Reading it got a bit tedious after a while; luckily it's short. But it was enlightening that people so far away were simultaneously having the same sort of reactions to the world as college students in the US. Since so much of the book is dialogue, I could see this staged as a play, with soliloquies on the side by Anis, ala Shakespeare.

One surprising fact I learned: they have evergreen trees in Cairo! I guess I thought they only had palm trees.

Mahfouz has written in many different styles and formats, with much of it translated into English. Will I read more Mahfouz? Yes. I also scored a book of his short stories for $1, and I plan on reading that one.  As for his many novels, I will have to do some research in the reviews and find one that sounds appealing.

I enjoy reading books in translation because you usually get different perspectives on things. Although sometimes you are surprised and find more similarities than you imagined. This is my entry for the Back to the Classics 2019 Challenge, in the Classic Novella category.

One Night in a Thousand

Aladdin: A New Translation
Yasmine Seale
Liveright Publishing, 2019
118 pages


Most of us probably think that we know the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp, which has long been a staple of children's storybooks. Had I seen "Aladdin" propped up on a shelf at a bookstore or my library, I'd have thought "oh, that charming story from my childhood" and passed right on by. But luckily I read a Publishers Weekly interview with Yasmine Seale, the woman who has newly translated the story, and was intrigued.

"Aladdin" is a short fairytale novella, readable as a long winter afternoon's escape. There is more to the tale than I recalled, and it's set in China not the Middle East. Good things happen and bad, there's a poor boy named Aladdin, an evil magician, a magic lamp with a jinni, and a beautiful princess who cleverly saves the day. The translation's prose flows nicely and I enjoyed reading "Aladdin".

There is a fascinating introduction by Paulo Lemos Horta, a scholar of world literature and cross-cultural collaborations. How the story of Aladdin was included in the original French collection "The Arabian Nights" is nearly as interesting as the story itself. "Aladdin" is a fun read and I recommend it for the fairytale lover in each of us!


Further Reading

Yasmine Seale Has Retranslated "Aladdin"
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/78382-yasmin-seale-has-retranslated-aladdin.html

A Rainy Day to See the Queen

Coronation
Paul Gallico
Doubleday, 1962
138 pages

This is quite simply a charming book, little more than a long short story, and readable all in one afternoon. Gallico, author of the Mrs. 'Arris novels, just has a way with story telling that is calm and gracious, as well as gentle with his characters. He's not sarcastic or mean or patronizing towards them.

"Coronation" is the tale of a working class family, the Claggs from northern England, and their day trip to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. By family vote Will and Violet, their young children Gwendoline and Johnny, and Granny Bonner all agreed to forgo their annual two-week seaside holiday and spend the money on this once-in-a-lifetime event. And it cost 2 month's salary for Will!

Almost everything goes disastrously wrong during the long, rainy day in London. Each of the Claggs sees their fondest wish for the day collapse, while Granny, the crotchety pessimist, sees hers fulfilled. Of course this is a gentle story and towards the very end dreams are salvaged and good memories made.

I like the way Gallico paints his characters for us. We don't know everything about them but we do understand their viewpoints and longings on this day. And thus all their reactions to the troubles are believable and made me quite sad. Their attitude towards the new queen are also interesting for those of us across the pond. After a long war and the continuing days of rationing, she was hope and a new beginning.


Further Reading

My reviews of 2 of the 4 Mrs. 'Arris books by Paul Gallico:

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris
https://booktapestry.blogspot.com/2018/12/mrs-arris-paris.html

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Moscow
https://booktapestry.blogspot.com/2019/01/mrs-arris-moscow.html

The Inimitable Mrs. 'Arris

Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris
Paul Gallico
Drawings by Gioia Fiammenghi
Doubleday, 1958
157 pages


What fun to return to an old favorite and find that it's still a favorite! I have fond memories of Mrs. 'Arris from my first reading when I was in high school, and it has charmed me anew some 50 years later. Mrs. 'Arris is an ordinary char (cleaning woman) in 1950s London, who glimpses a client's Dior dress, falls in love with its beauty, and is determined to own one like it. She needs to possess that beauty, even though she would never wear such a dress.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid me eyes on and I mean to ’ave it.

She gives up every little thing she can do without in order to save for her 450-British-pound dream. Of course when she gets to Dior's shop in Paris there are complications she hadn't foreseen, not being a worldly woman. One doesn't simply buy a Dior off a rack and fly home that evening! During her stay in the City of Light she makes friends with some of the staff and clientele, who are quite taken with this small, determined British woman. She even performs a bit of match-making in that short week.

There's a 1992 made-for-TV movie of the book, staring Angela Lansbury, and I was shocked when I saw it because the movie ended after she got her Dior and went home, all smiles. The actual book has a more bittersweet ending, one that saves the tale from being too fluffy and sentimental. I won't spoil it here, but I wanted to point out the changed ending of the movie version.

This little novella is rather like an adult fairytale about the human desire for beauty, about determination and the kindness of strangers. With a bit of a twist at the end to give it a wider meaning.

Paul Gallico was a prolific writer, most famous for "The Poseidon Adventure", which was made into a movie, and "The Snow Goose", which won the O. Henry Award for short stories in 1941. There are three more Mrs. 'Arris books, which I have only recently discovered exist and need to read: "Mrs. 'Arris Goes to New York", "Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Parliament", and "Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Moscow".

This is my selection for Re-read A Favorite Classic in the 2018 Back to the Classics Challenge.

Just Say No to Pap

The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Harbrace, 1943 translation by Katherine Woods
French original "Le Petit Prince" 1943
113 pp.


My first Classics Club Spin book was "The Little Prince", scheduled to be read during August and reported on soon after. I am awfully late and it's not only my move that stopped me. I have dreaded writing this review and dragged my feet because... I hated this book. There, I've written it. What a relief.

And it seems that I am not alone. There is a thread at Goodreads entitled "Am I the only one who hates this book?"

Oh, it does have those cute, whimsical drawings that weren't too cloying, I suppose. And it was short, thankfully. But beyond that, there was nothing that I liked even a little. To me it reeked of heavy-handed moralizing and it was wimpy to boot. Maybe it was better in the world of 1943 when it was written, and World War II was in full swing. I only finished it because it was my Club Spin book.

I'm sure that saying such things will gain me criticism along the line that I just don't understand because I am grown up, like the book says. Alas, I fear trying to answer this charge is like answering the old question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" There is no answer. However, in my defense I will just say that I love all things AA Milne, "Olivia", "Little House on the Prairie", and the children's poems in "Silver Pennies".

Onward and upward to far, far better books! "Tale of Two Cities" anyone?

Short Reads Short Reviews #2: The Bookshop

The Bookshop
Penelope Fitzgerald
Houghton Mifflin, 1997 (originally published 1978)
117 pages


This novella may be short, but it paints a clear picture of the main character, Florence Green, and the little seaside town of Hardborough, England, where she lives. A widow, Florence decides to open a bookshop in that depressing backwater, which in 1959 has no fish and chips shop, no launderette, and films are shown only once a fortnight. The place seems full of dour people living dour lives. Early in the book, Mr. Raven the marshman* talks to her about the people of Hardborough, saying "They've lost the wish for anything of a rarity."

Excellent vignettes show life in a small town, as applicable to small towns everywhere as to those in England. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing at all times. Gossip is rampant, and often malicious. And the moneyed class always gets their way.

I thoroughly enjoyed this little book and its quirky characters, who acted in unexpected ways and said odd things. It has a gentle self-deprecating humor running through it, a gentleness and humor shared by Florence herself. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978, edged out by Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea".


* marshman: Employed by landowners to tend marshland and the animals grazing there