All but one store in the Book Warehouse chain closed. Ardea Books, which had hoped to fill the Duthie void, closed within a year.
Here in Vancouver, Duthie Books, which had grown into a local chain, closed its last store after more than fifty years in business. Thirty-five years ago when The Bookshop was first published, Fitzgerald couldn’t have foreseen how commonplace the shame she describes would become. On top of that, there is the sting of prescience. Here we have the sadness of a sad ending, as well as the general melancholy we feel when we turn the last page of any book we’ve loved. Rereading The Bookshop, I knew, of course, that Florence’s shop would close, but I was not prepared for that forgotten last line:Īs the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town she had lived in for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop. I remember my husband, accustomed by then to my frequent tears, coming into the room where I was both nursing the baby and saturating him as I sobbed.
Postpartum is an emotional time the endings of Fitzgerald’s delicate, astonishing books moved me particularly during those months. Despite help from Nabokov (well, Lolita) and her hard-boiled ten-year-old paid assistant, Christine, Florence fails. Widowed, middle-aged Florence Green opens the only bookshop in a small English town, braving opposition that includes a politically connected socialite and an adamant poltergeist. Like all of Fitzgerald’s writing, The Bookshop is a triumph of style over plot. Recently I decided to reread them, starting for no reason with The Bookshop, a semi-autobiographical novel set in 1959. Short they may be, yet their range is broad-Italy, Germany, Russia, England the eighteenth century to the 1960s. Each book is so short it can be easily held in one hand, the pages turned with the thumb, perfect for breastfeeding. I first read Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels in 1999 when my son was a newborn.
0 kommentar(er)
