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Dodie Smith "I Capture The Castle" (Virago Classics)
When I finished reading this novel last night, after many interruptions with other books i have read along the way, I couldn't get it out of my head. The characters came to life in the 1930s of the English countryside. I must admit, that when i bought this book in a charity shop covert visit last year, i would have enjoyed it as much as i did, being the subject matter of a female teenager and her family.
The narrator is a precocious 14-year-old. Cassandra Mortmain narrates her family's travails in her notebook and keeps a journal to chronicle the eccentric activities of her father, the essential paper tiger. A one-hit-wonder with an obfuscating literary book published many years ago, Cassandra's father fails as a breadwinner and the females in the family conspire to generate household income. Their best option is marrying off Cassandra's older sister to the new rich American neighbor.
This premise doesn't reveal the surprise and ambiguous ending to the tale, and it is all about the means towards a better end that makes it a fun and light summer read. What lingers long after the reading is the way Dodie Smith wrote about the confusions of first loves and how one loves another who doesn't return the affection and how another loves you and you can't reciprocate. Confusing? She captures that female whirl-spinning sensation remarkably and it seems so timeless.
The male characters are three-dimensional and Cassandra's younger brother Stephen wins my heart. So too the young male servant orphaned into their family; Cassandra is not taken with his godlike beauty and finds him a bit daft.
The father character is so fantastic that I won't give much away. He is a portrait of so many tortured writers who will never be authors. A widower, once accused of threatening to kill his wife with a butter knife and sent to prison, he remarried an aesthetic muse in Topaz, a beauty whose images adorned the walls of museums. But he hasn't written a second book. He doesn't do anything but read cheap detective novels all day long. Now a penniless country bumpkin instead of a London diva, Topaz cannot arouse him to write. It is the American widow who arrives and intellectually stimulates him to change his behavioral oddities and replace them with other peculiarities.
The skill required to convey the gender and age and human frailties of these men is impressive for any writer. Each character has a distinctive voice and personality.
Cassandra and her brother conspire with insights derived from the new fangled theory proposed by Freud to make their father work. Cassandra can't help but want to free her sister from a loveless marriage to support the family because she has fallen in love with her sister's fiancee. If only her father would make a living!
It's Parent-Trap meets Petticoat Junction on a Monty Python set. Hilarious.
When I finished reading this novel last night, after many interruptions with other books i have read along the way, I couldn't get it out of my head. The characters came to life in the 1930s of the English countryside. I must admit, that when i bought this book in a charity shop covert visit last year, i would have enjoyed it as much as i did, being the subject matter of a female teenager and her family.
The narrator is a precocious 14-year-old. Cassandra Mortmain narrates her family's travails in her notebook and keeps a journal to chronicle the eccentric activities of her father, the essential paper tiger. A one-hit-wonder with an obfuscating literary book published many years ago, Cassandra's father fails as a breadwinner and the females in the family conspire to generate household income. Their best option is marrying off Cassandra's older sister to the new rich American neighbor.
This premise doesn't reveal the surprise and ambiguous ending to the tale, and it is all about the means towards a better end that makes it a fun and light summer read. What lingers long after the reading is the way Dodie Smith wrote about the confusions of first loves and how one loves another who doesn't return the affection and how another loves you and you can't reciprocate. Confusing? She captures that female whirl-spinning sensation remarkably and it seems so timeless.
The male characters are three-dimensional and Cassandra's younger brother Stephen wins my heart. So too the young male servant orphaned into their family; Cassandra is not taken with his godlike beauty and finds him a bit daft.
The father character is so fantastic that I won't give much away. He is a portrait of so many tortured writers who will never be authors. A widower, once accused of threatening to kill his wife with a butter knife and sent to prison, he remarried an aesthetic muse in Topaz, a beauty whose images adorned the walls of museums. But he hasn't written a second book. He doesn't do anything but read cheap detective novels all day long. Now a penniless country bumpkin instead of a London diva, Topaz cannot arouse him to write. It is the American widow who arrives and intellectually stimulates him to change his behavioral oddities and replace them with other peculiarities.
The skill required to convey the gender and age and human frailties of these men is impressive for any writer. Each character has a distinctive voice and personality.
Cassandra and her brother conspire with insights derived from the new fangled theory proposed by Freud to make their father work. Cassandra can't help but want to free her sister from a loveless marriage to support the family because she has fallen in love with her sister's fiancee. If only her father would make a living!
It's Parent-Trap meets Petticoat Junction on a Monty Python set. Hilarious.
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