But time given to wishing for what can't be is not only spent, but wasted, and for that waste we should be accountable. -- Penelope Fitzgerald
New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2014. 488 pages.
Nonfiction and Biography
Penelope Fitzgerald once observed, On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings you think are sadly mistaken.... Clearly, biographer Hermione Lee agrees with this opinion: admiration and respect for her subject are writ large across the almost five hundred pages of this critical biography interweaving analysis of Fitzgerald's fine work with the fateful twists and full turns of her happy and sad and humorous and heartrending and workaday and extraordinary life story. Intrigued, I read on....
Mariner Books, 2015 (1978). 192 pages.
Fiction Favorites
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.... In 1959, Florence Green, an affable, middle-aged widow with a modest bankroll, aspires to open a bookshop smack-dab in the middle of a windswept coastal village. Bookshop and village are fictionalized renditions of a real-life bookshop where Fitzgerald worked and the remote seaside town in which she lived in Suffolk, England, in the late 1950s. Despite evidence that Florence's dampish, dumpish bookshop is haunted by a resident poltergeist, and in defiance of subtle-to-not-so-subtle sabotage efforts by locals, Florence's venture enjoys a fleeting period of success before falling on trouble and travail after the window display of newly-published Lolita. Short-listed for the United Kingdom's coveted Booker Prize, The Bookshop is a subtle treasure-- a bittersweet paean to books and bibliophiles, and a finely drawn satire of provincial mores and prevailing human behavior. It encourages me on my page-turning way....
Mariner Books, 2014 (1979). 181 pages.
Fiction Favorites
There isn't one kind of happiness, there's all kinds.... Inspired by an arduous period of real life when she really-truly found herself living on a ramshackle barge on the Thames, Fitzgerald concerns herself here with all manner of restlessness-- physical, emotional, spiritual-- in a community of houseboat dwellers at Battersea Reach, in 1961 London. Nenna-- emotionally adrift and estranged from her husband-- has moved with her two resilient daughters aboard the barely-afloat Grace. It's a strange life along the muddy shoreline, homes rising and falling with the tide, days and nights passed neither fully on dry land nor fully afloat. Many, including the author, were surprised when this slender novel sailed off with the Booker Prize, leaving hefty offerings from established writers in its wake. But after reading it, I get it. Page after page, layer after layer, passage after luminous passage, I'm drawn further into the precarious, in-between world she invokes, and I'm further invested in the quirky characters who inhabit that world. Fitzgerald's sense of time and place are exquisite-- partly because she lived it, and partly she possesses a rare literary gift.
Mariner Books, 2015 (1980). 224 pages.
Fiction Favorites
Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or any war, that is, telling the truth... We're in London, 1940, following the fictionalized experiences of BBC employees at Broadcasting House as they struggle through the Blitz-- as they work to share the truth of war while staving off public panic and nationwide despair. There are, of course, personal travails playing out against the broader historical backdrop of nightly blackouts and Luftwaffe air assaults. We meet two rival program directors-- one emotionally needy and incredibly self-centered, one intensely pragmatic and understandably world-weary. We meet a bevy of mostly bright-eyed young female assistants and a cast of simultaneously heroic-and-human characters bustling through the halls and passing restless nights in a concert hall inhabiting the bustling halls and spending restless nights in a concert hall-cum-makeshift shelter. There are frayed nerves, stiff upper lips, power struggles, and political maneuvering. There is unrequited love. Taking inspiration from wartime work as a features producer for the BBC, Fitzgerald writes with self-assurance about the time and the place because she was there. Her words ring with authenticity because she lived it. She shares the story with wry humor and genuine humanity because that's what she does. At many turns, Human Voices seems a nostalgic tribute-- a literary gesture of admiration and affection-- to a younger self and to long-ago acquaintances who lived and loved through turbulent times.
Mariner Books, 2015 (1990). 240 pages.
Fiction Favorites
She knew all prayers are answered. You just have to make the best you can of the answer.... In 1912, Fred Fairly, son-of-a-minister Junior Fellow at the fictional, all-male St. Angelicus College of non-fictional Cambridge University, is immersed in the study of physics and preoccupied with logic, reason, and questions of quantum theory. Cycling at dusk on a rural road, Fred is involved in a crash with an unlit farmer's cart and another cyclist. When he regains consciousness, he is in a professor's house, in a nursery, in bed with a stranger, a pretty young woman. In a wonderful plot-propelling twist, the professor's wife, noticing a wedding band on the stranger's finger, incorrectly assumes that the injured cyclists are husband and wife. This stranger turns out to be good-natured, working-class nurse Daisy Saunders and-- not surprisingly-- Fred falls quickly, completely, and hopelessly in love with his serendipitous bedmate. Also not surprisingly, complications of the head and heart ensue, and we follow along in a perfectly balanced push-me-pull-you between science and intuition, the corporeal and the spiritual, the seen and the unseen, the spoken and the unspoken, It's a pleasure to read the lines and between the lines in this often humorous historical love story and to stumble upon one of Fitzgerald's most touching, hopeful endings.
Mariner Books, 2014 (1995). 320 pages.
Fiction Favorites
What is the meaning of the blue flower? I approach this, Fitzgerald's final novel, with some trepidation. It sounds a bit idiosyncratic. It's advertised as an inspired historical-fictional treatment of the early life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a brilliant poet-author-mystic-philosopher who, under the marvelously pseudonymous pen name Novalis, became one of the pre-eminent practitioners of late eighteenth-century German Romanticism. Oh my. Unacquainted with Friedrich von Hardenberg, woefully under-versed in late eighteenth-century German Romanticism, and sort of unmotivated to familiarize myself with a moody, possibly idiosyncratic intellectual movement during this long winter, I nevertheless put my faith in Penelope's pen and plunge into what turns out to be a tragi-comic tour de force on the vagaries of life, the wonderful irrationality of love, and the elevation of the commonplace into something rare and remarkable. The central love story-- Hardenberg's somewhat inexplicable attachment to sweet and sickly twelve-year-old Sophie von Kuhn-- is indeed moody and idiosyncratic, but entirely in keeping, it would seem, with late eighteenth-century German Romanticism. What, then, is the meaning of the titular blue flower? Hardenberg writes that it lies incessantly at his heart, so that he can imagine and think about nothing else. That's lovely, and provocative, and of little help to us. He puts the question to others in the novel but receives no satisfactory response. It seems to be something elusive, something precious, something of inestimable worth. Art? Love? Nature? Life itself? I don't know, and I don't expect to know. But I'm glad I pass some winter days wandering and wondering through the pages of Fitzgerald's last literary gift.
Mariner Books, 2015 (1988). 246 pages.
Fiction Favorites
Life makes its own corrections.... This one, Fitzgerald's seventh novel, serves as the conclusion to my winter binge-reading. Knowing this, I find myself lingering over passages, loitering on pages, generally engaging in literary lollygagging. I want to stay with this story, with this author, a little bit longer. We're in Moscow, 1913. The city, hovering on the brink of Bolshevik revolt and revolution, is cold, corrupt, careworn-- offering only sporadic glimpses of its golden, glorious past. Frank Reid, born in this city, educated in England, owns and operates a moderately successful print shop. When his English wife Nellie abandons the family with nary a warning word, Frank scrambles to procure temporary care for his three young children. Dolly, Ben, and Annushka are-- like all of Fitzgerald's children-- preternaturally articulate, intellectually curious, and utterly endearing. Just in time, just as the situation seems hopeless, Lisa Ivanova, a young, attractive, largely inscrutable shopgirl arrives at the house on Lipka Street. Employment is proffered; attachments are formed; temptations arise; a charming, touching tale unfolds....
And will you let me say that you would reach a conclusion more quickly... if you thought, as each solution presented itself-- who will be wounded by this? and whose heart will be made lighter? --Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring
Fitzgerald once stated that in order to begin writing, she needed a title, an opening paragraph, and a closing sentence. All requisite, of course, and all highly recommended to produce a respectable novel. I discover, however, that what Fitzgerald places between first paragraph and final line is what has made binge-reading her books through this long winter satisfying, therapeutic even. Much is said, and much remains unsaid. Fitzgerald opens a door, a window, and invites us into the world she's written, invites us to join in the wonder and work of the lives we're all living. I've learned some things from this literary late bloomer; she has reinforced notions that occurred to me over the course of this past most difficult year. I've learned to appreciate a quiet voice, a patient admonition, to embrace empathy, humor, humanity, broad spirituality. I've learned to get comfortable with perhaps... to inhabit a space where there are many perspectives and more than one true thing. Indeed, we walk through a world where so much that we value and cherish seems fleeting, finite, a world fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty, filled with disappointment and inevitable sorrow. But it's also a world where, in the best moments, we call upon abundant stores of love, measureless memory, and fresh possibility with each day we draw breath... like the abounding promise and ineffable beauty of a just-opened book.
