THE BOOKSHOP

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She had a kind heart, though that is not much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation" 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. And yet Florence Green stood tall until the last moment, only leaving Hardborough when her very last farthing is needed to buy her way out of the morass that her impertinent refusal to bow before the quality has landed her in.

La librería no es un libro autobiográfico, pero sí bebe de la vida de la autora. Y es que ella estuvo viviendo en un pueblo costero. Llegó un momento en el que debido a numerosas deudas, tuvo que vender y los habitantes del pueblo que en un primer momento fueron amigos, le dieron la espalda. Qué casualidad, como a Florence. Y encima, la autora también era viuda. Me negué a creer que el libro sería aburrido. Y mientras lo leía, solo podía pensar “están pasando demasiadas cosas a la vez”. Sí, todo está metido en un ritmo muy lento, el libro es muy pausado pero al mismo tiempo están pasando mogollón de cosas (o al menos, así lo percibí yo): la apertura de la librería, las sonrisas falsas, la hipocresía, la presión social, los abogados incompetentes, el sobrino de la señora Gamart, Milo, la increíble Christine (y su hermosa relación con Florence), la inesperada amistad del señor Brundish, la expropiación de Old House… Y todo eso ocurre en menos de 200 páginas. Incluso la muerte pulula entre esas páginas. She ought to go down to the beach. It was Thursday, early closing, and it seemed ungrateful to live so close to the sea and never look at it for weeks on end. I found this slight novel to be a pure delight to read. Turns out Penelope Fitzgerald herself managed a bookstore in, and she knew her subject matter well. She had once seen a heron flying across the estuary and trying, while it was on the wing, to swallow an eel which it had caught. The eel, in turn, was struggling to escape from the gullet of the heron and appeared a quarter, a half, or occasionally three-quarters of the way out. The indecision expressed by both creatures was pitiable. They had taken on too much. My Review: Florence Green is my current idol of Resistance. She has lived quietly and unassumingly in Hardborough, a small East Anglian seaside town, and realized that her life was simply passing and not being lived. So she took her small inheritance and opened a bookshop.The Bookshop is set in 1959 in a fictional seaside (i.e., North Sea) town in East Anglia, Hardborough. Florence Green decides the town could do with a bookshop, and the novel concerns her running it with some help from a smartass 10-year old, Christine, who says very funny things throughout the book. For that matter other characters in the book say very funny things whether they mean to or not. Although Florence was of the mind that the town needed a bookshop the question was whether the town decided they need a bookshop. But apart from kindness, Florence also has tenacity, and the ending reflects this; rather than give in to despair, as a lesser person might have done, Florence moves on gracefully, though not without feelings of pain and disappointment.

The Bookshop catches Fitzgerald coming into top form" said Peter Wolfe in Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald (2004). [5] Wolfe held the book to be a fully realized work of fiction that confirms the author's hold on actuality and the cogency of her satire. [6] In an introduction to a 2010 reprint, Frank Kermode wrote that the novel had won Fitzgerald "the respectful attention of reviewers and the admiration of a larger public". [7] Hermione Lee, Fitzgerald's biographer, considered the novel to be "a joyous exercise in precise, eloquent detail"; [8] a novel that "uses its small-scale comic plot for a serious moral argument". [9] 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.

There's nothing going for the book. I wasn't interested in the story despite trying with best efforts, the end was a let down, the beginning slow, the middle without direction. There is no climax either. It's seriously just 'suddenly there'. There's really no point to the novel - it's not even a book about failed dreams or anything really, or life lessons learned, it's just a depressing turnout that's not fair and not fair to read about. Even the assistant who the heroine cares for...well, I don't see what's so great about the 11 year old. She seems rude and distasteful to me.