Afbeelding auteur

Anthony Thorne (1904–1973)

Auteur van Fruit in Season

14+ Werken 49 Leden 3 Besprekingen

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Bevat de naam: Thorne Anthony

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Werken van Anthony Thorne

Fruit in Season (1938) 11 exemplaren
Delay in the Sun (1935) 9 exemplaren
I am a stranger here myself (1943) 7 exemplaren
Cabbage holiday (1948) 5 exemplaren
So Long at the Fair (1976) 4 exemplaren
Young man On a Dolphin (1959) 4 exemplaren
Rome and southern Italy (1972) 2 exemplaren
Vesuvio e corazzate 1 exemplaar
The Warm People (1953) 1 exemplaar
The Warm People 1 exemplaar
Cabbage Holiday 1 exemplaar

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Tagged

Algemene kennis

Geboortedatum
1904
Overlijdensdatum
1973
Geslacht
male
Nationaliteit
UK

Leden

Besprekingen

Okay, not great
 
Gemarkeerd
rmcdevitt4 | Jun 8, 2017 |
This book was a lot funnier and more substantial than I expected. Karen sent it to me in thanks for two science fiction books I sent her ( [book:Blood Music|340819] and [book:Traitor to the Living|722534]), which she thoroughly enjoyed read.

Here's what it looks like:




I love that note at the bottom assuring us this is the complete and unabridged version. Good to know, I guess, although it actually never would have occurred to me that Cabbage Holiday might just be a thumbnail sketch of a richer, more complex epic whose uncondensed form is too unwieldy for casual reading.

This is the first romance novel I’ve read, and I must admit: it is not what I expected.

Well, what did I expect? … I expected a chance meeting between a two eligible singles, followed by a dance of courtship with stolen glances, etc. Maybe some peripheral characters would try to either push them together, or perhaps obstruct their affair. A minor misunderstanding or circumstance might upset them along the way, but it would be overcome to achieve a successful romantic pairing in the final scene. I will admit: I thought this was the plot of every romance novel ever written, which made me wonder how anybody can read more than one or two before getting completely bored. Well, live and learn, because that’s not this book. Cabbage Holiday features a woman with two possible suitors, and neither one looks very good. You spend your time hoping she doesn’t end up with either one. And she doesn’t. The story shifts to our protagonist helping some other character find love. It’s kind of a bait-and-switch I guess, but I just enjoyed that it wasn’t predictable. I honestly didn’t see this ending coming. (TWSS) Rookie mistake? Danielle the Book Huntress and others are probably rolling their eyes at me right now, saying “Oh, he fell for that old one?” I did this time!

The setup is very quirky and captivating. Main character Madame Fifine Faquet is the widow of an uninsured circus acrobat (!!!) who was killed…. wait for it… when a car clipped him as he stood streetside, waiting for a bus. To support herself, Fifine becomes the madame of a Parisian brothel. Not a lot of detail on why she picked this career; just accept it. This seems like a daring choice for 1948, the mid 20th century works of Anaïs Nin and others notwithstanding. Fifine is quite successful, and has the leisure time to loll about the brothel, chatting up the working girls as they gossip in the staff lounge (the break room? whatever it’s called in a brothel) between clients. What do you think they talk about? That’s right: how much fun it would be to have chronically poor health. You see, then doctors would order you to the countryside, where you could enjoy the pastoral beauty of rural France, you could breathe fresh air all the time, and perhaps enjoy food much fresher and more tasteful than what is eaten in the city. Color me astounded! I would have never have guessed that prostitutes fantasize about the delights of poor health, but I suppose this is an excellent example of setting attainable goals for oneself. At any rate, the plot progresses when Fifine learns about an exciting new doctor in town… not the boring kind who just diagnoses common diseases everybody has heard of, but an exciting doctor, like the rich have: one who asks unusual questions and makes exotic diagnoses to astonish your friends with. Dr. Marmotte, we’re told, is “not the sort of man to remove your appendix, when you have already told all your friends you were to have your gallbladder out”. secret B&B… the widow (Mrs. Stillabotham) who runs it doesn’t want the town to know she runs it, so all the guests have to pretend they are distant relatives visiting. That’s deliciously bizarre, and I would have loved to have had this left unexplained, but eventually a reason is given. Stillabotham has run into money trouble; that’s why she rents out the rooms, but pride keeps her from wanting the town to know she needs the revenue. A secret B&B does not strike me as a viable long-term business model, but maybe in the 1940’s, you know… you could do it that way. It sounds like I made all that up, but I didn’t. It’s really in the book. The secrecy goes both ways, I ought to mention, because Fifine never discloses details of her life back in France to her English friends.

Ninety pages in and still no romance! The mid-portion of the book contrasts Stillabotham and Faquet, with a lot of highlights on the differences between French and British culture. Some of this may be social commentary I didn’t grasp. More characters are introduced:
Robin and Rosamund Stillabotham- Mrs. Stillabotham’s mischievous 20 year old twins, who are both living at home, with no real direction in life, and rightly depressed about this fact.
Vicar John Windrush- A widower, and obvious potential love interest. He’s kindhearted enough, but he mostly speaks in pat, unimaginative platitudes (e.g. “Every cloud has a silver lining”) which Madame Faquet, due to her limited knowledge of English, doesn’t recognize as such. She thinks these are his own original musings, and that his is a deeply poetic soul. Windrush appears interested in the Madame.
Major Edward Hornblow- I know, I know; these names. Here is a fellow of very few words, and it isn’t clear for a long while whether he’s shy or an idiot. Could this character in 1940 be a commentary on militarism and the erupting war on the Continent? He always seems to be at a loss for words, and when he isn't he tends to state the painfully obvious. Team Hornblow is probably a very small club.

At this point, the story kind of departs from thoughts of romance. Madame enjoys her leisurely medical vacation poking around the village of Tupper, befriending the locals and making unintentionally insightful observations about why they are generally unhappy. She dispenses inadvertantly sage advice which completely changes some peoples' lives for the better. This part is cute and delivered well, but I should probably issue a warning here that the book contains some very non-PC ideas, in the way you might expect a book written in 1940 to. On the other hand, there are moments where it seems downright progressive. In one scene, Stillabotham and Faquet go to a fundraising event for a - I don’t know what you call it, but a place where expectant unwed mothers stay until they deliver and give up their kids for adoption. Stillabotham and her high society pals mean well, but treat the “houseguests” (as they are called) in a very condescending and unsympathetic way. Faquet, on the other hand, gives them some dignity and explores some of the class issues of the situation in a way that was impressive, given the era this book came from.

The Vicar and the Major compete for Fifine’s affections. Her poor comprehension of English leads to further misunderstandings which cause her to believe both men are much brighter and more accomplished than they really are. Again, this part was cute, and the joke is not overplayed. Something about it reminds me of a Neil Simon play (don’t judge; I think Seems Like Old Times was adorable). So, to turn the romance stereotype on its head, the reader is hoping the protagonist won’t find love with either one of these dolts. The big finale comes at a community celebration welcoming a local bon vivant back home after a tour of Europe in which he broke some aeronautical speed record. The buzz of the town is he found himself some foreign wife while abroad. That’s always trouble. Madame finally meets the fiancé, to discover it is one of her girls from the brothel back home!

You know what? I’ve spoiled enough. The ending is cute, and I’m not going to give it away. You know why? Just to show that a romance novel can maybe be a little less predictable than I thought.

I wonder what Bernice thought of this book.


A few other fun elements I wanted to mention, but which were making the review too long:

1) Some bizarre descriptions: Petite Fleur (“Little Flower”, one of Madame’s girls at the brothel) is described as an attractive woman with a “face like a little Pekinese puppy dog!” Um... Hubba?... hubba?
2) Liberal use of unnecessary quotation marks. I’m not sure what that’s all about, but it comes up in a few places, to great unintended comic effect. Marmotte “shows” Madame a book of poetry. Andy the delivery boy “carries” the groceries into Mrs. Stillabotham’s kitchen. Am I missing something??? Did he not carry the groceries in? What did he do instead?
3) A recurring fixation on the post office. It’s got to mean something. Both in France and England, Fife discovers a stamp-collector is stealing her discarded envelopes from the garbage. Occasionally, when some object is described, the narrator takes time to note that it is heavy, and would be expensive to send in the mail, or is oddly-shaped, and would be difficult to wrap for shipping… even though sending the object is not part of the story.
4) What to make of Mrs. Stillabotham’s odd theory that when Columbus crossed the Atlantic to discover America, there must have been a similar expedition of Native American explorers bound for England, but (she opines) their boat must have encountered a storm and sunk, explaining why no historic record of their journey exists.
5) Text from the back cover:
======================================
Recipe for a CABBAGE HOLIDAY

Guaranteed to stimulate the jaded appetite, awaken the salivary sense, and gratify the gourmet.

-Mix a Madame and a Missus
-Add two tempestuous twenty-year olds
-Stir up an English Lady with a French fille
-Toss in a virile Vicar full of beautiful bromides
-Simmer slowly to keep all affairs at the boiling point
-Spice with spinster gossip and season with heady hothouse flowers
-SERVE HOT
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
BirdBrian | Apr 7, 2013 |
This is a wistful little novel about the passing of a way of life, and the demise of a country house. It's well-constructed and readable, but ends on a strange, melancholy note, perhaps influenced by the time of its writing, 1938, although the imminent war is no more than hinted at. Its interest now is mainly as a middlebrow novel of the period, I think, rather than any great literary merit, though at its reissue in 1951 it had a poignancy in its depiction of a world that the Second World War had finally pretty much swept away.… (meer)
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Gemarkeerd
GeraniumCat | Mar 14, 2011 |

Misschien vindt je deze ook leuk

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Statistieken

Werken
14
Ook door
2
Leden
49
Populariteit
#320,875
Waardering
3.0
Besprekingen
3
ISBNs
5