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Sto caricando le informazioni... Summer Will Show (Penguin Modern Classics) (originale 1936; edizione 2021)di Sylvia Townsend Warner (Autore)
Informazioni sull'operaSummer Will Show di Sylvia Townsend Warner (1936) Sto caricando le informazioni...
Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. [a:Sylvia Townsend Warner|32349|Sylvia Townsend Warner|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1329513169p2/32349.jpg] has written a beautifully crafted tale of a 19th C wealthy, landed and slightly smug Englishwoman who spurns her adulterer husband, loses her children from smallpox and flees to France. There she finds herself stretching her feminist inklings to forge a new life with her husband's ex-mistress and embraces the revolution of 1848 happening around her. As Minna, her new companion, says "Though you may think you have chosen me..or chosen happiness,it is the revolution you have chosen." My commonplace book at the ready, there were abundant quotations to jot down, some outright humorous, but mainly the clear thinking and revolutionary story of a woman's transformation which propel the reader along. Townsend Warner was a contemporary of Woolf and Mansfield and equal to them in her writing. We read this book for a book club and the conversation flowed hither and yon. ( ) There was a lot to love in this story but it fell off the rails too often. The first part taking place in England is marvelous - one can feel the frustration and disappointment. It is when the action shifts to Paris that it all becomes too much. The unlikely passion is hard to believe in. The change in social and political outlook is very interesting but again, just a bit difficult to take seriously. I will look for other works by this author as I think she could be a wonderful story-teller. I love Warner, but boy, I struggled with this one. I liked the first part very much, where she does what she does best: explore the ambivalence of women trapped in their era's expectations and circumstances, how they cope (or don't), and how they struggle to break free. In the mid 1930s, it was probably fairly risky to write a story about a comfortable, handsome, intelligent woman - Sophia Willoughby - in 1848 who has separated herself from a selfish, feckless husband, and borne him two children - who then die horribly of smallpox. Sophia herself occasioned their exposure, by taking them to a lime-kiln to breathe the fumes to improve their health. Once they are dead, she finds she feels almost relieved. This is all more subtle and interesting than it sounds. Then she sets off to Paris, to come to an arrangement with her husband - and suddenly falls in love with his mistress. It happens abruptly, and inexplicably. Minna Lemuel seems to have almost nothing to recommend her: she is frequently described as shabby, homely, amoral, shiftless, and exploitive, not to mention some uncomfortable Jewish stereotyping. I found it extremely difficult to understand what on earth attracted Sophia to Minna and Minna's talky, thinky, polemical friends. It devolves into far too much descriptive, perseverating, philosophical meandering. All necessary, to some extent, as Warner plonks this all down into the onset of the 1848 revolution in Paris. Now, if you are going to set yourself up to do a historical novel set there, you might do well to remember who and what you are up against: Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Warner is good, but she isn't that good, and her politics and her art just sit uncomfortably, with various stock characters spouting tediously as Sophia transmutes into a happy, hungry street singer. The subplot involving Sophia's treatment of an illegitimate biracial half-cousin is ugly and comes to a horrific end - but somehow doesn't convince the reader that Warner is seriously bothered by it. The final setpiece on the barricades, Minna's death, and Sophia's plunge into violence is fairly rousing and dramatic, but... well, there's still Hugo looming forever bigger, warmer, better. Warner herself ended up a committed Communist, and the weird ending with Sophia suddenly absorbed by proto-Communist pamphlets is almost laughable. Well-intentioned, still showing streaks of the insight and emotional sympathy that can engage, but... nope. I'd skip this one. It took me longer than I expected to finish this novel, although I liked it all the way through. In the first half, we see Sophia as a competent, energetic landowner, but the death of her frail children and final breach with her husband leaves her at a loss: what to do now. She sets out to Paris to meet her husband, but ends up drawn to and living with his former mistress, Minna, and witness the 1848 unrest first hand.
Warner has long remained a secret, perhaps because her experimental impulses were never exuberant enough to grab the attention of the Modernists' most adventurous readers. The recent republication of Summer Will Show is her best chance, after all these years, of emerging from the fog of near-oblivion, as thick as it is unfair. the most skilful, most surefooted, sensitive, witty piece of prose yet to have been colored by left-wing ideology ... È contenuto in
Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband’s sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, “magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering,” leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades. Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)823.912Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1901-1945Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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