Despite evidence that Florence's dampish, dumpish bookshop is haunted by a resident poltergeist, and in defiance of subtle-to-not-so-subtle sabotage efforts by locals, Florence's venture enjoys a fleeting period of success before falling on trouble and travail after the window display of newly-published Lolita.
Bookshop and village are fictionalized renditions of a real-life bookshop where Fitzgerald worked and the remote seaside town in which she lived in Suffolk, England, in the late 1950s. and so the binge-reading begins:Ī good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity. In 1959, Florence Green, an affable, middle-aged widow with a modest bankroll, aspires to open a bookshop smack-dab in the middle of a windswept coastal village. Creative productivity and renewed purpose as a sexagenarian, a septuagenarian, an octogenarian? This sounds appealing, promising, perfect for right now. Penelope Fitzgerald, a British writer- Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist, and biographer- was a literary late bloomer, living a long life before publishing her first novel when she was nearly sixty. In this season of introspection and healing, I've looked to a previously unexplored but long-beckoning space on the bookshelf. A Means of Enrichment and a Measure of Solace, Perhaps. I've not, then, been seeking The Means of Escape (ironically, the title of a Penelope Fitzgerald short story collection) but something more challenging. And while I thought I might, I have not gravitated toward light, fluffy, instantly gratifying, but highly forgettable fiction. I've eschewed self-help books, lifestyle how-to manuals, and discourses on navigating bereavement.
Through this long winter, I've grown selective, finicky even, in my reading. Today, on this first day of March, winter on its heels, I'm thinking about and blogging about the page-turning part. I'm determined to devote as many days as possible to digging in the dirt, walking/hiking around surveying the natural world, and turning pages in the noble act of reading. In retirement and with the perspective of Ben's story, I've renewed my resolve to be accountable for how I spend my allotted time.
0 kommentar(er)
