Offshore, Human Voices, the Beginning of Spring: Introduction by John Bayley (Everyman's Library) - Hardcover

Fitzgerald, Penelope

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400041252 ISBN 13: 9781400041251

Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) went on to become one of the most remarkable and highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world.

 

The Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore limns the marginal existence of an eccentric assortment of barge dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain’s heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. In The Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution.

 

Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. She began her writing career in 1975 at the age of fifty-nine, and over the next two decades she published three biographies, nine novels, and a collection of short stories.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) went on to become one of the most remarkable and highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world.
The Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore" limns the marginal existance of an eccentric assortment of barge-dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain's heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. In The Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution. Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

It is rare indeed to begin a literary career after the age of sixty, and then to achieve reputation and fame as a novelist during the next decade. But Penelope Fitzgerald was a highly unusual and original sort of writer. Before she turned to writing she had married and raised a family, worked during the war at the BBC (the setting of her fourth novel, Human Voices), run a bookshop (an experience that also provided a novel), and taught school, including a school for theatre and drama training.

Her first book was a study of the Victorian artist Edward Burne-Jones. She followed this with The Knox Brothers, a biography of her father Edmund Knox, the gifted and remarkable editor of Punch, and her equally talented set of uncles. That might well have been enough for most writers at her age, but it turned out to be in the nature of a prologue to her real career as a novelist.

In a cool modest way Fitzgerald was an experimenter, never repeating the same kind of novel twice. Her first, The Golden Child, plays engagingly with the forms of the mystery and detective story, but its real charm lies in the field of comedy: in this case the quirks and personalities of the staff who run the big museum which is housing a prize exhibit. This was followed by the lively and delightful story of The Bookshop, the prelude, as it might be said, to Offshore, her first assured masterpiece, nouvelle and almost miniature as in a sense it is. All her books have the quality, and the impact, that goes with a particular sort of brevity: their simplicity and their author's finely individual line of vision, unique in each particular case, makes them seem longer than they really are.

Offshore, which won the prestigious Booker Prize, to the surprise of some of the judges, and, indeed, to the amazement if not the chagrin of other, more heavyweight contenders, has a deceptive simplicity about it. It needs to be read at least twice before the reader grasps how subtle and how eventually rewarding are its method and effect.

As with Penelope Fitzgerald's other novels, a close analogy suggests itself with what happens to us when we meet new aquaintances in ordinary daily life. In such a situation we may soon realize that we know very little: our first impressions (to borrow the original title of Jane Austen's first novel) are probably not true, or even just, but in life itself we hardly have the opportunity, and seldom indeed the inclination, to enquire or to wonder much further. We are in that situation as we continue to encounter Nenna, the wife whose husband has left her, and who ' in a muddled way, distracted as she is by everyday cares and problems ' wishes he hadn't. The wholly disconcerting effect that the young can have, even ' or perhaps indeed especially ' on their parents, is suggested by a sentence about them so quietly laconic and unobtrusive that it seems almost absent-minded: 'the crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha."

Martha and her sister Tilda are, in their unflamboyant way, a disconcerting pair, but readers have, as it were, too much to do with other people and other matters, with the boats and the personalities of their owners, with the absorbing nature of the odd and yet perfectly normal world they find themselves in, to worry much about the nature of the children. They are so obviously not worried themselves: and very little attention is paid to them by anybody. As their creator so economically remarks ' and the uninsistent humour of the moment is typical of all Penelope Fitzgerald's fiction ' children do indeed discover, or at least receive the impression, that ' in the words of a wise old priest ' there are no true adults in the world, and that they themselves are as old as they are ever likely to be. There is a kind of insecurity about the Fitzgerald world which makes it, as every page turns, so increasingly fascinating and challenging. She never attempts to analyse or to possess her characters in the way, for instance, that Henry James, another master of the nouvelle form, finds it too strong a temptation not to do.

And this odd fact may indeed give the clue to the way in which readers finds themselves hooked. Some mystery, some secret will surely emerge; and yet it does not. Her readers are no wiser about what the people they have been reading about are like at the end of the novel than they were at the beginning. That is not, as it were, the point of the exercise, as it would be, say, in a nouvelle by Henry James or a novel by George Eliot.

The same applies to story or plot. Penelope Fitzgerald's novels don't have plots, but they give a wonderful illusion of having them, by keeping the reader glued to the page, in anticipation of what's to come. In a sense nothing much is, because nothing much happens to the characters, but the last thing the reader feels is disappointment. (Offshore has indeed an astonishing climax and conclusion, but it gives us the pure pleasure of accomplished art, rather than the mere surprise of an unexpected ending.)

Although always unobtrusive, the moments of drama in the novel are, in their own way, devastating. No one has ever described a husband'wife 'quarrel' with such appallingly accurate charity as Fitzgerald gives us in the scene between Nenna, longing to have her husband back, and Edward, longing to be taken back, but finding himself, as men do, in an impasse of perverse pride and muddled vehemence. All she can say is 'please give' and when he angrily demands 'what', she can only say 'anything'. But she has managed, as he has not, to say that she wants him every moment and to remember that one of his few accomplishments is the ability to fold up a map properly, something she herself can never do.

Although the author never says so, it is clear that the boat itself, the Grace (meaningfully incongruous name), and the way of life on the river, have really come between them. The little girls love their life and everything about the Thames ' the mud, and the mess, and the chances of finding even quite valuable broken tiles on the muddy foreshore. Again the author makes us see, without stating the fact, how and why they love it, and yet how impossible it has become as a life for their elders.

Offshore is in some ways a sad book as well as a searching one, although sadness, like so many other things in the novel, is mingled with a kind of accepting gaiety. In Human Voices, Fitzgerald takes up again her own style and form of comedy. It is a most amazing book and, like all her books, a charitable one, although it may have made a few faces blush at the BBC. As the river is the essential background of Offshore, so London in wartime is presided over by the sound of those cultivated voices mediating the war to the British public. It is tempting to wonder whether there is a sly reference in the title to the
concluding lines of T. S. Eliot's 'the Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock':

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Penelope Fitzgerald had been a sea-girl herself, so to speak, in the offices of the Cporation; and she loved a subtle or oblique joke as much as anybody. As a critic pointed out when Human Voices was published, although the temptation is to read fast because the novel is so delightfully readable, it is better to go slowly so as not to miss the jokes. There are plenty of them below that demure surface.

The Beginning of Spring has all the fascination of its predecessors and much more beside. "Open the doors," runs a Russian proverb, quoted by Penelope Fitzgerald, 'here comes trouble.' It is a very Russian proverb, for Russians are convinced that since...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Everyman's Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1400041252
• ISBN 13: 9781400041251
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 440
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar