Reviews for The Bookshop

The average rating for The Bookshop based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-09 00:00:00 Brent Tripet The melancholy of defeat She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct. As gentleness is not (necessarily) kindness, courage, hard work and virtue is not invariably rewarded, I learned as a child listening to George Brassens’s song about the poor brave little white horse that never saw spring. Life is no bed of roses for the middle-aged widow Florence Green. When she decides to open a bookshop in the dozy coastal Suffolk town of Hardborough (Southwold), she will have to find out that a kind heart is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation. By purchasing the dilapidated, clammy ‘Old House’ for her bookshop, she almost parenthetically thwarts the plans of the local ‘first lady’ and patroness of all public activities in the town, Violet Gamart, who actually envisages the Old House not as a bookshop but as an art and music centre, worthy of competing with mighty Aldeburgh. Notwithstanding her innocuous kindness, in her optimist denial and determination, Florence refuses to give in to the lady’s wishes, and gossip, class and money issues, political and legal machinations and a poltergeist will sweep the small community in the battle of local loyalties, independency of spirit and authority. She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminates, with the former, at any given moment, predominating. Will-power is useless without a sense of direction. Hers was at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instructions for survival. Delightfully perceptive and witty, her prose parsed with gemlike bouts of irony and understatement, Fitzgerald deftly portrays the quirky characters populating this subtle tragicomedy, from the somewhat clumsy, quixotic, lonely outsider Florence to the crisis marking later middle age for the upper middle-class in East-Suffolk, ‘after which the majority became watercolourists, and painted landscapes’, the spiteful and scheming Violet and Florence’s bright and feisty shop assistant, the ten year old Christine Gipping. Particularly colourful and striking is Fitzgerald’s farcical depiction of the representatives of the legal profession, preposterous and not of any use to Florence (‘The solicitor explained that rights were in no way affected by the impossibility of putting them into practice’). Sketching slightly surreal, absurdist rules, she inventively illustrates how the law is ruthlessly turned into a cunning weapon, tailor-made by and for the ones in power to get their ways, incorporating raw institutional injustice. How words are able to destroy words, and lives. Much is left unsaid and left to the reader to imagine. Human nature, Fitzgerald seems to tell us, is cruel, and if not intentionally causing harm out of malevolence, such often happens out of stupidity, conceit, selfishness. A brilliantly dark and spiky tale that touched me to the core and a marvellous first acquaintance with a fascinating author I will definitely read more of and about (I enjoyed reading the insightful essay of Julian Barnes in Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story on what he calls her ‘deceptiveness’ as a writer a lot).

Review # 2 was written on 2018-05-22 00:00:00 Diana F Orhun Sjusamillabakka There is strength and beauty in the margins, where we easily, maybe deliberately, fail to look. While I was reading this, I came across an archaic Shetland fishermen’s taboo word, sjusamillabakka, for the shifting, liminal space betwixt land and sea. Sjusamillabakka is perfect for this book: • Geographically: set in a small, remote coastal town, on an island between sea and river. • Connectedly: every fifty years or so “it had lost, as though careless or indifferent to such things, another means of communication” (river navigability, bridge, railway, and tidal wall). • Chronologically: between the starchy 50s and the swinging 60s. • Socially: a town with clear class boundaries - except for Florence. Like a governess, a bookseller is too educated to be lower class, but payment means she’s NQOTD (Not Quite Our Type, Dear). • Supernaturally: the ebb and flow of rappers (poltergeists, not Eminem or Jay Z!), mirrors Florence’s situation. But this is not a ghost story. They’re an occasional metaphor. “A heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel… The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape... The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much.” Don’t judge “‘Are you talking about culture?’ the [bank] manager said, in a voice half way between pity and respect.” Few want to admit to class-based snobbery, but is cultural or literary snobbery any different? I was reading this in a small amphitheatre. The acoustics mean that you sometimes catch snippets of conversations quite far away. Two men in their early 20s, roughly dressed and rougher spoken, were chatting. I was trying to focus on this novel, but I learned that both had been in prison, one was a recovering alcoholic, and the other had mental health issues. Fights, drugs, and gangs were mentioned. And gaming. I pictured a shoot-em-up. But no, Lord of the Rings. They went on to compare the games with the films - and the book. At that point, I couldn’t read mine: their passion for books, not just LotR, could not be ignored. Should not be ignored. I silently bowed my head in shame. Redemption is possible. LotR is about doggedly keeping going, clinging to hope however slippery it is, rather than surrendering to the deceptively welcoming arms of despair. Books can be a pathway through that valley of shadows, to a brighter future beyond. Books Florence has faith in the power of books to improve individuals and the community, but less faith in herself. She’s stoical and sometimes assertive. But she’s usually reactive, rather than proactive; she’s not a natural businesswoman. And she doesn’t trust her own judgement of literary merit, so we never learn much about her own tastes. Books matter, but this is at least as much a portrait of a community. People judge and are judged by who reads what. The books themselves play along: when new stock arrives, they “fell into their own social hierarchy”, the cheap paperbacks being “brightly democratic” and in “well-disciplined ranks”. Few titles are mentioned, with a major exception, Lolita (see my review HERE). “It’s a good book and therefore you should try to sell it… They won’t understand it, but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.” That’s back to snobbery. Don’t read this for plot In many ways, nothing much Happens, and what does, is mostly offstage, and sometimes of uncertain agency to those affected. But it’s not frustrating or incomplete. In a small coastal village in Suffolk, a childless, middle-aged, lower middle class widow decides to open a bookshop. She’s a relative newcomer (having lived there for less than ten years), and although 1959 was the cusp of great social and economic change, Hardborough lags (no fish and chip shop, no launderette, and cinema only two Saturdays per month). More significantly, not everyone is keen on her converting the Old House into a bookshop, and some actively want to stop her. That’s it. And not. Small town political machinations. Even selling the scandalous Lolita is a bit of a damp squib. Maybe don’t read it for the ending Understated, unexpected, and gut-wrenching. Utterly plausible, though. But DO read it “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.” There's more depth, strength, and occasional waspishness than appears at first glance - in the book and in Florence herself, even though she’s not really the driving force. And when you’ve read and loved this, pick up Offshore (see my review HERE). Like this, it draws on elements of Fitzgerald’s own life, and is set in another self-contained community of people who are not quite sailors, nor landlubbers. The tone and appeal of the two are very similar. “Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have.” Although it seems effortlessly natural, I assume Fitzgerald gave everything she had. She certainly succeeded in creating a fascinating and believable community I care about. Real characters My mother still lives in the village where I grew up: a somewhat insular community, with its own strict, but unwritten hierarchy, where everyone knows about everyone else, and power is held by venerable families and institutions. Although this is set before I was born, I recognise most of the characters: affectionate portraits that never quite descend to caricature. There is true precision in such writing. Every summer and Easter, we holidayed in another village, a seaside one. A home away from home. We felt like honorary locals, but I doubt the villagers thought of us that way. Fitzgerald describes people from there, too. Before I started primary school, most of the UK stopped selecting pupils for either academic or vocational secondary education, and went comprehensive. But the 11+ exam (much mentioned in these pages) is still used where we live, and our child went through it. I have seen its effects for good and ill, “nothing more painful or decisive”. One aim was social mobility, but it can entrench privilege. A girl who doesn’t pass “will be pegging out her own washing until the day she dies”. At the other end of the social scale, General Gamart’s “hovering experimentally” at his wife’s party could almost be because he was becalmed beyond the familiar waters of Wodehouse. “From long habit, Mrs Gamart rejected the idea that her husband might be necessary for anything.” There’s another person who would be at home in an Iris Murdoch novel: tentacles extending far outside the community, with indirect ability to affect the lives of all, while maintaining the veneer of vague disinterest and occasional philanthropy. That person is balanced by the quiet, mostly unseen goodness of another, who also has “unseen roots” of information and possibly influence. They recognise each other’s power, but who will prevail? Quotes “Rooks circled in the warring currents of the air.” • “She… had recently come to wonder whether she hadn’t a duty to make it clear to herself and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.” • “Her winter coat, which was of the kind that might just be made to last another year.” • “She drank some of the champagne, and the smaller worries of the day seemed to stream upwards as tiny pinpricks through the golden mouthfuls and to break harmlessly and vanish.” • “The hall… breathed the deep warmth of a house that has never been cold.” • “The light struck the sluggish glass of a large venetian mirror.” • “His fluid personality tested and stole into the weak places of others until it found it could settle down to its own advantage.” • “One can have a very satisfactory party all by oneself” if in the right frame of mind! • “Looking critically round the hall, as though it were an outlying province of his territory which he rarely visited” - Reclusive Mr Brundish at home. • “A brilliant, successful and stupid young man.” He’s an MP! • "[He] went through life with singularly little effort... What seemed delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started." • “Shabby, hardly presentable, he was not the sort of figure who could ever lose dignity.” • “At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done.” • “Though her visitor might be conducting the conversation according to some kind of rules, they were not the ones she knew.” • “Defeat is less unwelcome when you are tired.” Possible Alternative Real-Life Ending A man won a (profitable) bookshop in a raffle, and then decided to run it with an Icelandic friend he only known online (maybe from GR, who knows?): Film Adaptation of 2017 I've only just seen the film. It looks pretty, there's a good cast, having Christine as narrator is fine, and the revised ending was apt. But there were too many things that did not transfer well to screen, and thus served as a distraction: inconsistent and incorrect accents, scenery that clearly wasn't Norfolk, the village looking far too small for the number of a controversial book Florence stocks, the love angle being exaggerated, and the vendetta seeming less plausible than on the page. Details on imdb here.