Archives

The Mapmaker and the Ghost by Sarvenaz Tash

Nov1

Goldenrod Moram loves maps, and Meriweather Lewis (Lewis and Clark Expedition) is her hero. When she sets out on a summer adventure to map her entire town in detail, she gets more adventure than she bargained for. She meets a gang of teen delinquents, a strange old lady who sends her on a quest for a blue rose, and the titular ghost.

The ghostly and magical elements in this adventure/mystery novel seem to be inserted for sparkle rather than being an integral part of the plot. The basic plot reminds me of the mystery books I loved when I was a girl: Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Boxcar Children. But there’s a ghost and a magical blue rose.

I enjoyed reading The Mapmaker and the Ghost. I think I liked the mystery/historical fiction elements better than I did the fantasy elements. If you’re a fan of both contemporary mystery adventure stories and ghost stories, and if you like maps, The Mapmaker and the Ghost would be the perfect combination.

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection by Alexander McCall Smith

Jul30

As always, Mma Ramotswe and her family and friends were entertaining and relaxing to read about in this latest episode of Mr. McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. This particular installment has Mma Ramotswe meeting her long-time literary mentor, CLovis Andersen, author of that hallowed tome, The Principles of Private Detection, upon which Mma Ramotswe has based her own business of private detection in Botswana.

One theme of the book seems to be whether truth really matters, whether basic principles of detection or of life must be “True Truth” in order to be useful. Mma Ramotswe says not:

“[T]here were plenty of old Botswana sayings that did the same thing, that gave you little rules for getting through life, for coping with its disappointment and sorrows. And did it matter, she wondered, whether they were true or not? Words could hurt you,and hurt you every bit as badly as sticks and stones. So that saying was wrong but that was not the point. The point was that if it made you better, made you braver, then it was doing its work. The same thing was true, Mma Ramotswe thought, of believing in God. There were plenty of people who did not really believe in God, but who wanted to believe in him, and said that they did. Some people said that these people were foolish, that they hypocritical, but Mma Ramotswe was not so sure about that. If something, or somebody, could help you to get through life, to lead a life that was good and purposeful, did it matter all that much if that thing or that person did not exist? She thought it did not—not in the slightest bit.”

I think Mma Ramotswe is somewhat right and somewhat wrong. If you comfort a child with a truism that is not really True, eventually that child will see that you are not a person of wisdom, not trustworthy. However, since God really does exist, it can only be a good thing for a person to act as if he believed in the God of Christianity even when he doesn’t completely believe. But this acting as if is only good because God is, and His law is good, and He is good. If there really were no God, then how could it be worthwhile or meaningful to follow the commands of this imaginary God? One might as well make up one’s own code of conduct and be one’s own autonomous god.

Clovis Andersen’s book helped Mma Ramotswe to start and sustain her detective agency because it had within its pages true principles of detection that Mma Ramotswe was able to apply to specific cases using the wisdom and native common sense that she already had. Even if Mr. Andersen didn’t know it, what he wrote was truth, not exhaustive truth, but truth nevertheless. Had Mr. Andersen written a book that was untrue in its basic underlying principles, Mma Ramotswe would not have found it useful, no matter how much she believed in it or pretended to believe in it.

It is never foolish to follow Truth, whether you believe in what you are doing or not. It is always foolish to follow falsehood, even if it seems to work out in the short run. All Truth is God’s truth in the end.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers

Jun24

The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a book about teen rebellion and the end of the world, and it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. The London Daily Mail called it “a wonderful evocation of teenage confusion, passion, and idealism.” I was not impressed.

Ms. Rogers says in a note in the back of the book that her influences were American Pastoral, a novel by Philip Roth, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, The Chrysalids, a science fiction classic by John Wyndham, and The Diary of Anne Frank. Because of the basic premise, a world that is dying because humans have for some reason lost the ability to reproduce, the novel most reminded me of Children of Men by P.D. James. But Children of Men was a much better book, IMHO.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb really is a depiction of teen confusion and hubris, and I can see the Anne Frank influence. However, maybe because I’m firmly entrenched in the “older generation”, I found it difficult to sympathize with the narrator, sixteen year old Jessie, and her know-it-all teen egotism. Without giving away the plot of the story, I’ll say that Jessie is out to save the world by sacrificing herself, and her parents think she’s making a huge mistake. Her parents are right. Jessie’s a fool, and the book never makes it clear that she is not a heroine, but rather a mixed-up kid who’s living in a very mixed-up world.

I’m just not a fan of teen rebellion, even though I sometimes live with it in my own house. (Oh, yes. It’s here, too.) And even though the adults in The Testament of Jessie Lamb are not much more mature or wise than Jessie is, I’m still on the side of the grown-ups. Poor Jessie could have used a few fully grown authority figures, or maybe a word from God, in her life to help her make decisions based on something besides misguided feelings and delusions of grandeur.

Ms. Rogers also says that Jessie is a sort of mirror image of the character from Greek mythology, Iphigenia, interesting because the name Iphigenia means “she who causes the birth of strong offspring,” and Iphigenia, of course, sacrifices her life for the good of her people. Wikipedia opines,

There are several possible reasons for Iphigenia’s decision. The first is that Iphigenia wants to please her father and protect the family name. Not only does Iphigenia want to please her father, but she also forgives him for making the decision to sacrifice her. The second reason is that Iphigenia sees this as a patriotic cause. Iphigenia realizes that if she dies, then the men can sail to Troy and win and protect their own women. If the men did not get to Troy to defeat the Trojans then all the Greek women would be raped and possibly killed. Thus, Iphigenia sees her death as saving hundreds of women. A third reason for Iphigenia’s choice could be a more selfish reason. Iphigenia wants to be remembered with honor through her self-sacrifice, unlike how Helen of Troy is viewed. While the concept of glory is mostly seen in the men who fight, here it is seen in Iphigenia. A final possible reason is that Iphigenia sees bad in her father and now has nothing to live for.

Almost all of Iphigenia’s possible motivations are brought up as motives for Jessie’s sacrifice, but none of them are really convincing. I came to the conclusion that Jessie was acting out of pure stubbornness, and that motivation didn’t endear her to me either.

So, my final analysis of this award-winning novel is that it’s thought-provoking but somehow lacking in warmth and appeal, with the kind of characters that made me wonder and want to be drawn in, but never really got me to snap at the bait.

The Summer of Katya by Trevanian

Jun21

A couple of weeks ago when we played Book Tag with the theme of Summer Setting, Summer Reading, Debbie at ExUrbanis recommended this novel, saying that is was “part mystery and part love story.” So I borrowed a copy from the library.

And it is part mystery and part love story with a bit of psychological thriller and a ghost thrown in for free. The setting is the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I in southern France, near Basque country. Our narrator is a middle-aged Basque doctor who is recalling, in 1938 on the eve of yet another war, the days of his youth before he went off to fight in the Great War.

Dr. Montjean is a faithful and trustworthy narrator, but he doesn’t really understand the events and people he chronicles. There are lots of twists and surprises here that I certainly didn’t see coming. And the dialogue and the descriptions were both quite well-written, enough so that I eschewed my usual bad habit of skimming over long narrative passages.

Trevanian, the author, lives in the French Basque mountains, so the setting should be true-to-life. The description of a traditional Basque festival, complete with dancing, drinking, fighting and semi-pagan ritual is worth the reading of all the events leading up to it. Then there’s the Freudian, early twentieth century atmosphere that makes this novel just the right medicine for a good summer read.

Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Jun18

“The alleys, the houses, the palaces and mosques and the people who live among them are evoked as vividly in [Mahfouz’s] work as the streets of London were conjured up by Dickens.” ~Newsweek

I was struggling through Mr. Mahfouz’s epic novel, the first part of a trilogy set in modern Cairo, Egypt, and in the middle I read the above blurb on the cover. The comparison helped. I still didn’t like the people in the book, especially the men, nor did I ever, ever while reading this novel have any desire to visit Egypt in the twentieth century or even now. However, there is a Dickensian connection—or maybe a nineteenthe century connection since Mr. Mahfouz cites his favorite authors as “Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and above all Proust.” I can see a little of all of those men’s influence in the novel. Notice that Mr. Mahfouz, who “lives in Cairo with his wife and two daughters,” does not name any female authors among his influences. Therein lies a tale.

Of all the books I have ever read, this one is the most likely to turn me into a flaming feminist. The men in the novel, as in Islamic culture?, are self-centered, egotistical, hypocritical tyrants. If I had to choose between living in World War I-era Egypt, where Palace Walk takes place, and Victorian England, the home of those notorious tyrants Mr. Murdstone, Bill Sikes, and Wackford Squeers, I’d take my chances in jolly old England. At least in England I’d be able to leave the house on occasion.

The mother of the family in Palace Walk, Amina, leaves her home three or four times during the course of the novel, a time period of three or four years. She attends the weddings of her daughters, and she dares to go to a religious shrine once while her husband is out of town–with predictably disastrous consequences. Otherwise, Amina and her daughters are not allowed to even look out the window, lest they be seen by a man and become “fallen women.”

So the women in Palace Walk are firmly controlled, tyrannized, and abused by the central character of the novel (surely not the Hero), the father, al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad. This patriarch has a split personality: he is friendly, amiable, good-humored, and popular with his drinking buddies and paramours, of whom he has many, but at home he is a stern, grim, autocrat who rules his family with invective and fear. Oh, but they all love and respect him. Al-Sayyid Ahmad is a god in his own home, ruling over a collection of cloistered, intimidated women and three sons who are molding themselves in his image–when they are not cowering in his shadow.

The story also deals with the way the outside world impinges on the lives of the al-Sayyid (or al-Jawad?) family. As the novel begins it’s 1917, and the British are ruling Egypt although the occupation force seems to be mostly Australian. As World War I comes to a close, one of the sons, Fahmy, becomes involved in the anti-British independence movement. However, even when dealing with political and religious changes outside the home, the novel never loses its claustrophobic feel, always circling back to the home and the sense of imprisonment that each of the family members feels, even the men. After a while, it made me want to break out, screaming.

I’m glad to have read Palace Walk. I might, in a year or two, want to read the next book in Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, Palace of Desire, in which novel I am told some women actually get to go to school! The main problem I had with this first novel is that I could find nothing attractive about the characters or the culture in this story, nothing with which to identify. I wanted the British “oppressors” to win and reform the country and let the women and servants out of their slavery. But none of the women in this novel would have had the spine or or imagination to take advantage of such a liberation, and the British didn’t seem to be headed in that direction anyway.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

May25

“[S]he had forgotten that it is the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the hedge should find in all time one possibility for contempt . . .”

I’m not sure what that statement means, to guard someone else’s dignity before God and man(?), but it is interesting to think about, as is this little story by Rebecca West, her first novel, published just as the First World War was ending in 1918. In 1914, The Soldier, Captain Christopher Baldry, is a sort of a hero, returning from the war, but the book is really about the women that Captain Baldry left behind: his cousin Jenny, his wife, Kitty, and his first love, Margaret.

The Return of the Soldier is another amnesia story, but it has an atmosphere and a poignancy that some of the other stories in the genre lack. Chris Baldry comes back from the war having lost his memory of the past fifteen years. The story is narrated by Jenny, Chris’s cousin, who grew up with Chris and who lives in his house as a companion to his wife, Kitty.

There are lot of questions raised in the story and left to be answered by the reader:

Is Jenny a reliable narrator? Are the thoughts and motivations of the other characters really as Jenny describes them or are we being told a tale that is only true in part from Jenny’s perspective? And who is Jenny? Why is she there, and why is she so interested in telling this story? I tried to read the story carefully, but I was never sure about Jenny’s personality and motivations.

What kind of person is Chris? Was he really happy in his marriage and his home before the war? Would he want to return to the war and “do his duty”, or is his amnesia not only an illness but also a subconscious running away from the horrors of the battlefield?

Who really loves Chris Baldry, the soldier? I would say that the woman who sacrifices herself for him is the one who really loves him. Who is that? Well, you tell me after you’ve read the book.

I recommend that you read this one slowly and carefully, paying attention to the details of time, setting, characterization, and plot. I wonder if watching the 1982 movie version of this novel, starring Alan Bates, Julie Christie, Ian Holm, Glenda Jackson, and Ann-Margret, would help at all in answering any of the questions, at least from the perspective of the screenwriters, the director, and the actors who made the movie.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

May15

Mr. Eugenides, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Middlesex, has given us a novel about the demise of the novel. It’s also a story that’s mostly about sex and its various permutations, but not really much about marriage, and equally about religion and its sundry incarnations, but not much about God. And I think the emphasis on sex and religion rather than on the core spiritual relationships of man and woman (marriage) and God and man (the core of religion) is an emphasis that is intended to say something about our culture and what we’ve lost in the twentieth century. Perhaps the idea is that we’ve reduced marriage to sexual attraction and sexual athletics, and we’ve reduced knowing God to going through the forms and expressions of religion and being good. Or maybe that’s just what I saw in the book.

Madeleine is an English major at Brown University in the 1980’s (Eugenides attended Brown), and as the story begins she’s about to graduate, has just broken up with her boyfriend, and has a massive hangover. The story moves back and forth in time a lot, beginning each section with a crisis moment and then going back in time to show us how the characters got to that crisis. However, this narrative technique isn’t confusing at all, and I rather liked it for some reason. Maybe it helped to hold my interest when the major characters weren’t terribly sympathetic or likable.

So, after having been introduced to Madeleine and the culmination of her last semester in college, we go back in time to see how she met, mated, and lost the boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead, how she came to major in English with an emphasis on the Victorian authors, and how she got the hangover. At a certain point, charismatic loner Leonard becomes the focus of the novel with his sparkling wit and intelligence, his brooding good looks, and his secret backstory that no one at Brown knows, not even Madeleine.

However, there is a third character who makes up the final point of this attempt at a modern, 21st century love triangle story, Mitchell Grammaticus. Mitchell, who’s been in love (or has he?) with Madeleine since their freshman year at Brown, is geeky, intelligent, and religious. He’s graduating with a major in Religious Studies, but he’s not sure what religion he believes in or where he’s going after college. So, he and his friend Larry decide to travel to India via Paris and Athens to see the world and wait for the economy to improve and inspiration to strike. Or maybe Mitchell is really waiting for Madeleine to realize that Leo Bankhead is a loser and that he, Mitchell, is the man she should marry.

The book is a mixture. There are some lovely and thought-provoking scenes in the novel that made it worth the investment of time, energy and slogging through (mostly sexual) sludge that it took to read the book. In one scene Mitchell encounters an evangelical Christian in the American Express office in Greece. The Christian girl witnesses to Mitchell in a rather formulaic, but sincere, way and tells him that if he accepts Christ as his Saviour, he can ask the Holy Spirit to give him the gift of tongues and he’ll be changed, completed. Mitchell tries it out, praying on the Acropolis, but nothing happens. “He was aware inside himself of an infinite sadness. . . He felt ridiculous for having tried to speak in tongues and, at the same time, disappointed for not having been able to.”

Another scene has Leonard trying to explain the experience of clinical depression to Madeleine who wants him to just try to pretend to want to be healthy.

“What’s the matter with me? What do you think? I’m depressed, Madeleine. I’m suffering from depression. . . .”
“I understand you’re depressed, Leonard. But you’re taking medication for that. Other people take medication and they’re fine.”
“So you’re saying I’m dysfunctional even for a manic-depressive.”
“I’m saying that it almost seems like you like being depressed sometimes. Like if you weren’t depressed you might not get all the attention. I’m saying that just because you’re depressed doesn’t mean you can yell at me for asking if you had a good time!”

Whatever you think about depression and its manifestations, isn’t this conversation just exactly the kind of conversation couple might have in this situation, coming at the problem from totally opposed viewpoints, trying to understand, but failing?

I’m tempted to recommend this book, in spite of all the sludge, in spite of the ending, which I hated, just because I’ve been thinking about it and mulling over the characters and their motivations and their mental pathologies all week long. I want someone to explain the entire book to me, wrap it up in a nice bow, but I don’t think this is a book that’s meant to gift-wrapped. Alternatively, I want to explain some things to Mitchell and to Madeleine and to Leonard, but I’m not sure I’d know where to start. I’m afraid I’d come across like Christian-girl-in-Greece, saying “Jesus is the answer!” in a way that sounds trite and essentially useless. Mitchell’s search for Truth, especially, is so frustrating to me as a Christian, yet so very typical of the people I see, searching but not really searching, for a god of their own imagining, instead of looking at Jesus, God in the flesh and trusting in Him.

Anyway, it’s a very contemporary un-love story that shows modern youth culture in all its befuddlement. The ending is meant to be hopeful, but it wasn’t for me because it wasn’t grounded in anything. I’d be curious to know what you thought about the book and the ending, if you’ve read The Marriage Plot.

Other reviews: Books and Culture, Caribousmom, Farm Lane Books, Bibliophile by the Sea, Book Addiction, Walk with a Book, Amy’s Book Obsession, At Home With Books.

Oh, by the way, I loved all the literary allusions and references to popular books and classics, everything from Born Again by Chuck Colson to Madeleine by Ludwig Bemelmans to The Cloud of Unknowing. All three of the protagonists of this novel are people who read, a lot, which was the main thing I actually liked about them.

Advanced Reading Survey: Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac

May14

I’ve decided that on Mondays I’m going to revisit the books I read for a course in college called Advanced Reading Survey, taught by the eminent scholar and lovable professor, Dr. Huff. I’m not going to re-read all the books and poems I read for that course, probably more than fifty, but I am going to post to Semicolon the entries in the reading journal that I was required to keep for that class because I think that my entries on these works of literature may be of interest to readers here and because I’m afraid that the thirty year old spiral notebook in which I wrote these entries may fall apart ere long. I may offer my more mature perspective on the books, too, if I remember enough about them to do so.

Author Note:
Honore de Balzac, son of an officer in Napoleon’s army, was greatly influenced and impressed by the great emperor’s career. He once wrote, under a picture of Napoleon, “What Napoleon could not do with the sword, I will accomplish with the pen.”
Balzac wrote at an incredible pace throughout his life, and although much of his work was of negligible value, stuff written solely to support himself and pay his creditors, he did manage to turn out a few masterpieces, including Eugenie Grandet and Le Pere Goriot. Balzac died in Paris in 1850 at the age of 51, possibly weakened by his intense writing schedule and his incessant coffee drinking.

Gustave Flaubert on Balzac: “What a man he would have been had he known how to write!”
Victor Hugo: “Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest among the best.”
Henry James: “Large as Balzac is, he is all of one piece and he hangs perfectly together.”
Marxist Freidrich Engels: “I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together.”

Plot Summary:
Eugenie Grandet falls in love with her cousin, Charles, but her father is a miser who refuses to allow her to marry a penniless man. Eventually, Eugenie becomes wealthy and miserly herself, following in her father’s footsteps.

Characters:
Monsieur Felix Grandet: an old miser
Madame Grandet: His wife
Eugenie Grandet: the daughter
Nanon: the family’s only servant
Charles Grandet: Eugenie’s cousin

Quotations:
“Innocence alone can dare to be so bold. Once enlightened, virtue makes her calculations as well as vice.”

“Flattery never emanates from noble souls; it is the gift of little minds who thus still further belittle themselves to worm their way into the vital being of persons around whom they crawl. Flattery means self-interest.”

Other reviews:
Beyond Assumptions: “As it turns out Balzac has penchant for good story-telling and a fine eye for writing interesting and humorous characters.”

Wuthering Expectations: “Eugénie Grandet has some of Balzac’s best descriptive passages, and three or four really fine characters, and a snappy story. But it’s the combination of the characters, and the structure, and the details of the house and town that amaze me.”

Constance Reader: “every character in this novel is fully fleshed out and fully-realized, including secondary characters like the family housemaid and even tertiary characters like the village butcher, whom we only see once. The result is that you get a perfect idea of what life in a little town was like, at that time, from the top to the very bottom.”

The Music Man:
Maud: I shouldn’t tell you this but she advocates dirty books.
Harold: Dirty books?!
Alma: Chaucer
Ethel: Rabelais
Eulalie: Balzac!

Joy for Beginners by Erica Bauermeister

May10

“At an intimate, festive dinner party in Seattle, six women gather to celebrate their friend Kate’s recovery from breast cancer. Wineglass in hand, Kate strikes a bargain with them: to celebrate her new lease on life, she’ll do the one thing that’s always terrified her whitewater rafting down the Grand Canyon. But if she goes, each of them must promise to do one thing in the next year that is new or difficult or scary—and Kate get to choose their challenges.”

Caroline: “The bookstore where Caroline worked was a perfect example, designed as a place to linger as much as shop–incorporating a bakery and a cafe, a fireplace surrounded by oversized chairs for colder days and a patio outside for summer ones. It could have felt chaotic, a party full of strangers unable to introduce themselves, but instead was more like a genial conversation–the metallic clink of silverware set against the contented sigh of a book being slid from its shelf, the murmured comments of the knitting group seated at a round table in the three sided alcove that held . . the house/garden/cooking books.”
I wish I could own and operate a bookstore like the one where Caroline works.

Daria: “What was considered odd in elementary and junior high school became an asset on the dating circuit later in life. Men always loved the hummingbirds, weightless and colorful, so quick you could never catch them even if you wanted to. And her affinity for mud had turned into a profession in clay.”
Daria was hard to relate to: a hummingbird, yes, but also guarded and afraid to commit.

Sara: “Adults need to have fun so children will want to grow up.”
Isn’t that a lovely quote? I need to have more fun so that my children will want to grow up.

Hadley: “Hadley didn’t mind the unruly nature of her garden. She was safe; there wasn’t a car in the world that could blast through that wall of green. She could feel the garden reaching out its arms to protect her.”
That one reminds me of The Secret Garden, but Hadley’s garden is a hiding place where she avoids the world in fear instead of a sanctuary from which she emerges to engage with the world.

Marion: On tattoos: “Irreversible decisions are good for the soul, word lady.”
Really? If you got a tattoo, what would it be? I remember when I was a teenager, and we were painting the wall of the youth room at our church. Lots of the kids wanted to put all sorts of trendy, cool catch-phrases and symbols on the wall, but our youth minister insisted we go to the Bible and paint something that was based on Scripture, something that would be of lasting significance. If a person gets a tattoo, it should surely be a word or symbol of lasting significance, something profound and meaningful. Mermaids are not meaningful.

Ava: “The new Ava swam in her rediscovered sense of smell with relief and joy, and it was all Kate could do to stop her from accosting people on the street and offering suggestions on how to improve their olfactory reality.”
What would be exciting enough for you to stop strangers on the street to tell them about it?

Kate: “She had been a river . . . the one they all told things to. Caroline, Daria, Marion, Sara, Hadley, Ava—it seemed that when they were around someone who might or might not be there the next year, they said things they wouldn’t otherwise, let out parts of themselves they might normally keep hidden. . . . She had been a river, the thing that took them close to death, made them suddenly, courageously, honest.”

This chic-lit novel told a good story, although a little bit too pyscho-babblish at times. Mostly I enjoyed getting to know Caroline, Daria, Marion, Sara, Hadley and Ava and getting to witness their life epiphanies.

Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym

May9

Readalikes:
P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope, Angela Thirkell, D.E. Stevenson, Jane Austen, Jan Karon.

Setting:
Oxford. Crampton Hodnet is a Bunbury-ish place that Mr. Lattimer pretends to have visited when he is embarrassed to admit that he has been out for a walk with the spinster, Jessie Morrow.

Plot:
The elderly Miss Doggett sees herself as a mentor and advisor to young male students whom she entertains once a term at her house in Oxford.

Miss Doggett’s cousin, a married, middle-aged tutor (professor) at Oxford, Francis Cleveland, falls for a female student, Barbara, who has a crush on him in return.

An unmarried curate, Mr. Lattimer, proposes with confidence to the rather homely and lonely lady’s companion, Jessie Morrow, but his proposal is rejected.

The book is a mild sort of comedy of manners, and I enjoyed it in a mild but delighted sort of way. The characters and their thought processes are the focus of the book, and I thought Barbara Pym was quite insightful as she sketched out in words a flighty and flattered young co-ed, a professor in mid-life crisis, an over-confident suitor, a wise single woman, and an absent-minded wife who rather neglects her husband and takes him for granted. These are all types that I have seen, maybe even types that I have been in some cases, and yet each character stands out as an individual with his or her own quirks and distinctions.

If you enjoy the above listed authors, Barbara Pym should earn a place on your To Be Read list.