dual personalities

Lately I have had a hard time finding something good to read. I have started several novels, but never gotten too far with any of them.

Then someone at work handed me a copy of The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald. It is really good!

The novel, set mainly in 1959, centers around Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in the small fictional town of Hardborough, Suffolk. The characters are expertly wrought with few wasted words.

“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. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost altogether. Adaptability and curiosity, he had found, did just as well.”

Penelope Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 – 28 April 2000) was a Booker Prize-winning English novelist, poet, essayist and biographer. I had read Fitzgerald’s highly-touted final novel, The Blue Flower, published in 1995, which centers on the 18th century German poet and philosopher Novalis. I liked it, but I didn’t go on a Penelope Fitzgerald binge like I sometimes do with a newly discovered author.

I can relate.

She launched her literary career in 1975, at the age of 58, when she published a biography of Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898). This was followed two years later by The Knox Brothers, a biography of her well-known father and uncles. Later, in 1977, she published her first novel, The Golden Child, a comic murder mystery with a museum setting inspired by the Tutankhamun mania earlier in the decade. Clearly a girl after my own heart.

I love a late-bloomer, don’t you? It gives one hope.

What are you reading?