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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
Saturday, November 27, 2021
The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen - ongoing review
My gestalt real-time review will be conducted in the comment stream below:
One response to “The Hotel”
1. QUARREL
“It had been a Moment, not a succession of moments,…”
This is an exquisitely subtle and psychologically ornamental chapter that does not disappoint someone who has just read all 108 stories of its author. In fact, it even builds on that experience, although incredibly it must have been written before a good deal of those stories.
“Her wait prolonged itself, the minutes seemed interminable; now and then she glanced at the lounge clock.”
We see Miss Pym following the endlessness after that Moment of Quarrel with Miss Fitzgerald, and, then, via the ping of balls at some tennis courts within this Mediterranean hotel’s grounds, we expect at least one mention of an elbow to go with the tennis, but here we are disappointed! Yet, as recompense, there are the protocols of parasols on arms…
And a possible ‘John Milton’ arriving as a future guest at the hotel to fulfil this name’s mention being in textual contiguity with a “jigsaw puzzle” that may indeed be this novel’s latent plot.
I gradually get to know Miss Pym and Miss Fitzgerald and their ‘truth’ of such ladies’ girlish talk imputed as potential ‘nonsense’ about stoicism versus hedonism
And a subsuming Mrs Kerr and her Sydney Warren, the latter possibly being a young lady continuously expected to be drawn into Mrs Kerr’s “Limbo”?Not forgetting the first appearance of a wraith, whether it be as more ‘nonsense’ or ‘truth’, I do not yet know. This attached to Miss Fitzgerald, I infer, in the post-Moment’s aftermath…
“Everything that, abroad, an English lady takes out with her swung from her arm and bumped as she fled: the coloured straw satchel, the native umbrella, the golf-jersey, the net bag supplementing the satchel. There streamed from them, to Miss Pym’s perception, a pitiful wraith.”
Thursday, November 25, 2021
The Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (19)
AS CONTINUED FROM THE EIGHTEENTH PART OF THIS REVIEW OF ALL ELIZABETH BOWEN’S STORIES HERE: https://expenscusil.wordpress.com/elizabeth-bowen-stories-18/
My reviews of EB stories so far, in alphabetical order: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/31260-2/
My previous reviews of general older, classic books: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/ — particularly the multi-reviews of William Trevor, Robert Aickman, Katherine Mansfield and Vladimir Nabokov.
“She never had had illusions: the illusion was all.” — EB in Green Holly
SEE BELOW FOR MY ONGOING REVIEWS OF BOWEN’S STORIES
9 thoughts on “My Huge Review of Elizabeth Bowen Stories (19)”
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MADRE DE DIOS by Rosalie Parker
The disarming sixty pages of a luxurious hardback book whereby one needs to jump alternate pages, depending on which language version of the story you are reading, English or Portuguese. As if the all too knowing and ominously hooting monkeys in the canopy and understorey of the trees knew they had to keep some of the trees intact, even if the paper for half the pages needed such trees felled. Leap-frogging alternate pages as if the monkeys inversely symbolised the fitful, later druggy, waking and sleeping that Luke eventually suffers after travelling from Manchester to the fell Hell of the Amazonian forest in Peru, to make illicit money from a gold prospecting venture, Luke having travelled along the eponymous river to the trees that the prospectors needed to fell, he being the group’s chemist concerned with mercury and its health and safety. Whether or not the letters he sent his girl friend back home (telling in real-time this very story as gestalt) got through to her in the end, I do see that this book was published in South America!
Certainly a compelling read, a fact which might tell you something…
THE HOUSE ON WINDMILL LANE by R.B. Russell
As to the book itself, please read what I wrote about the previous book above as they are fundamentally similar as well as both being numbered 35/50, except this book has around 40 pages but contains probably a similar length story as it has smaller print. The two books make a perfect whole of two halves if one removes the language versions you did not read. ……except I had an uncanny second sense that the version of the Russell I did not read (indeed could not read because of my lack of Portuguese) told a different version of the story from the one I could read. Perhaps a different ending? Whatever the case, and the fact that I had such suspicions, made this even more uncanny and haunting than it might otherwise have been. You will know what I mean, should you be lucky enough to read this published version of the story. The story of a sixteen year old boy, who worked a holiday job for what he saw as a celebrity couple, she an actress, he a record producer, an alternate-paged parental world to aspire to as compared to his own dreary Radio 2 parents and he becomes besotted with this couple and their house with eaves that scowled and their fresh squeezed orange juice in its back kitchen. But what happened at the front of the house, did that faithfully reflect what happened at the back? And vice versa. It was after all the same house. And was the aeroplane the couple later took the same one as the gold prospecting chemist took back home after being rescued in the other book, a rescue left untold because it happened after writing his last letter in the other book? As I say, two halves that make the perfect whole.
The Russell story, meanwhile, as a stand-alone is genuinely touching and haunting — and I shall think about it again and again, should God give me enough future to think with.
I’ll keep on with the garden path work, whatever.
end