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The House in Paris
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A.S. BYATT
When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers' residence in Paris, little does she know what fascinating secrets the house itself contains. Henrietta finds that her visit coincides with that of Leopold, an intense child who has come to Paris to be introduced to the mother he has never known. In the course of a single day, the mystery surrounding Leopold, his parents, Henrietta's agitated hostess and the dying matriarch in bed upstairs, come to light slowly and tantalisingly.
226 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1935
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6534 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Bowen
208 books537 followersElizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, CBE was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 411 reviews
May 13, 2024
Children’s psychology… It surely differs from the psychology of grownups…
On her way south Henrietta is for a day in Paris… It isn’t like home at all… Everything looks strange… And there she meets a little boy Leopold…
The girl is eleven… The boy is nine… Children are sad and lonely…
And then we are immersed in the past… An outing into the complicated relationship of grownups… We get acquainted with the boy’s future mother…
However life hardly ever goes as planned… So all the events turn quite tragic…
When the dramatic past and the despondent present collide repercussions are unavoidable.
Today was to do much to disintegrate Henrietta’s character, which, built up by herself, for herself, out of admonitions and axioms (under the growing stress of: If I am Henrietta, then what is Henrietta?) was a mosaic of all possible kinds of prejudice. She was anxious to be someone, and no one having ever voiced a prejudice in her hearing without impressing her, had come to associate prejudice with identity. You could not be a someone without disliking things…
On her way south Henrietta is for a day in Paris… It isn’t like home at all… Everything looks strange… And there she meets a little boy Leopold…
He had a nervous manner, but was clearly too much taken up with himself to be frightened of anyone. She saw a dark-eyed, very slight little boy who looked either French or Jewish; his nose had a high, fine bridge and his hair grew up in a crest, then lay down again; he had the stately waxen impersonal air of a royal child in a picture centuries old.
The girl is eleven… The boy is nine… Children are sad and lonely…
And then we are immersed in the past… An outing into the complicated relationship of grownups… We get acquainted with the boy’s future mother…
She thought, young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them. Loving art better than life they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks.
However life hardly ever goes as planned… So all the events turn quite tragic…
His undeniable tears were more than his own, they seemed to be all the tears that ever had been denied, that dryness of body, age, ungreatness or anger ever had made impossible – for the man standing beside his own crashed plane, the woman tearing up somebody’s fatal letter and dropping pieces dryly into the grate, people watching their family house burn, the general giving his sword up – arrears of tears starting up at one moment’s unobscured view of grief.
When the dramatic past and the despondent present collide repercussions are unavoidable.
July 28, 2017
After I had devoured all Virginia Woolf’s books, Elizabeth Bowen was my next major crush as a teenager. I think it was her poetic evocation of place that thrilled me the most. It helped me get out of my narcissistic glass jar and connect more with my surroundings. I took more notice of the world and its detail. Bowen added a new depth and delight to my visual response of the external world. Many of her novels use the regency houses around Regent’s Park for a setting and the park acquired an almost magical dimension for me every time I went there. It still does now.
It’s as if throughout this novel Bowen’s sensibility is heightened to the pitch of a lonely woman in a big house who hears what sounds like an intruder downstairs in the middle of the night. Inanimate objects become animated and not only contribute to the tension of every passing moment but define it. The way light falls or dwindles becomes a coded text of prophecy. AS Byatt says in the introduction that she had initially dismissed this novel as too much a work of fine-drawn sensibility. But the novel hinges on a moment of barely plausible melodrama so the fine drawn sensibility is absolutely necessary to sustain not only its tension but its credibility.
Both houses in this novel are ruled by vampiric matriarchs, one, you might say, dressed in pink, the other in black. Interestingly you won’t find much feminism in EB’s novels. Women often maintain a tyrannical reign of emotional censorship in her novels. Husbands are reduced to the equivalent of head butlers, emasculated, never speaking out of turn. Karen, the heroine, has such a man lined up as her future husband. Her mother runs a regimented house where deep feeling is considered an affront to good manners. In such houses it’s a struggle for children to achieve identity. This is well dramatised in the first part of the novel where two children struggle to assert themselves in a house dominated by the overpowering Mme Fisher, aided and abetted by her subservient daughter, Naomi. Leopold is waiting for his mother to arrive. He has never knowingly seen his mother and knows little of her history.
Part two tells us the story of how Leopold got to be born. Karen, engaged to be married, meets up with Naomi and her fiancé in London. Max is a protégé of Mme Fisher who Karen was in love with when she stayed with the Fishers as a young girl. She and Max begin an affair which has to be kept secret from her family. Only now does she realise how oppressive is the emotional regime of her home imposed by her mother. Bowen’s depiction of young love in this novel is brilliant because her lovers are intelligent and can see through to the other side of all the exalting adrenalin. They are not fooled by the joyful anarchy of their bodies. They know they are committing an aberration which will bring two houses down.
Each of the three parts of this novel gets better. The first part when the two children arrive at the spooky house in Paris is perhaps a little over-laboured. The second part, a flashback in time, is a fantastic dramatization of an illicit affair, and the third part when everything comes to a head is the best of all. Bowen doesn’t write naturalistic dialogue, often used as a criticism against her by readers perhaps used to reading a more commercial form of fiction. Her characters, even the children, are all as eloquent as Bowen herself and their speech patterns blend seamlessly into her mannered prose style. The marvel though is that her children are completely convincing as children.
4+ stars.
It’s as if throughout this novel Bowen’s sensibility is heightened to the pitch of a lonely woman in a big house who hears what sounds like an intruder downstairs in the middle of the night. Inanimate objects become animated and not only contribute to the tension of every passing moment but define it. The way light falls or dwindles becomes a coded text of prophecy. AS Byatt says in the introduction that she had initially dismissed this novel as too much a work of fine-drawn sensibility. But the novel hinges on a moment of barely plausible melodrama so the fine drawn sensibility is absolutely necessary to sustain not only its tension but its credibility.
Both houses in this novel are ruled by vampiric matriarchs, one, you might say, dressed in pink, the other in black. Interestingly you won’t find much feminism in EB’s novels. Women often maintain a tyrannical reign of emotional censorship in her novels. Husbands are reduced to the equivalent of head butlers, emasculated, never speaking out of turn. Karen, the heroine, has such a man lined up as her future husband. Her mother runs a regimented house where deep feeling is considered an affront to good manners. In such houses it’s a struggle for children to achieve identity. This is well dramatised in the first part of the novel where two children struggle to assert themselves in a house dominated by the overpowering Mme Fisher, aided and abetted by her subservient daughter, Naomi. Leopold is waiting for his mother to arrive. He has never knowingly seen his mother and knows little of her history.
Part two tells us the story of how Leopold got to be born. Karen, engaged to be married, meets up with Naomi and her fiancé in London. Max is a protégé of Mme Fisher who Karen was in love with when she stayed with the Fishers as a young girl. She and Max begin an affair which has to be kept secret from her family. Only now does she realise how oppressive is the emotional regime of her home imposed by her mother. Bowen’s depiction of young love in this novel is brilliant because her lovers are intelligent and can see through to the other side of all the exalting adrenalin. They are not fooled by the joyful anarchy of their bodies. They know they are committing an aberration which will bring two houses down.
Each of the three parts of this novel gets better. The first part when the two children arrive at the spooky house in Paris is perhaps a little over-laboured. The second part, a flashback in time, is a fantastic dramatization of an illicit affair, and the third part when everything comes to a head is the best of all. Bowen doesn’t write naturalistic dialogue, often used as a criticism against her by readers perhaps used to reading a more commercial form of fiction. Her characters, even the children, are all as eloquent as Bowen herself and their speech patterns blend seamlessly into her mannered prose style. The marvel though is that her children are completely convincing as children.
4+ stars.
June 1, 2020
"The station is sounding, resounding, full of steam caught on light and arches of dark air: a temple to the intention to go somewhere."
A temple to the intention...
... to go somewhere.
This novel is a temple to the intention to love ... someone. And like any journey, the journey of love contains strange adventures, unforeseen encounters, unasked for experiences, hidden effects and secret complications.
Travelling in time, the reader meets present and past, and acknowledges the deep emotions that result in Leopold.
Leopold himself travels from Italy to Paris to discover his English past, even though the journey does not lead to the encounter he expects. Thus the expectation remains the sole experience, and Leopold remains in charge of his imagination, as reality does not destroy it.
The reader also travels between children's and grown-ups' perspectives, and is able to discover the transition from one level of human understanding to another. Like a station, the adolescent mind of Henrietta, part of the story for a single day by a chance break on her journey, picks up fragments of lives and adds them to her own impression - while her travelling self adds to others' life log books as well.
A story of passion and heartbreak, of sexual power and destruction - without ever being voyeuristic, it is deeply erotic. Leopold is the living personification of passion spent and lost, and his future, standing at the station in the end, is just as open as his mother's was before her path was chosen.
Bravo, Bowen! This is life.
A temple to the intention...
... to go somewhere.
This novel is a temple to the intention to love ... someone. And like any journey, the journey of love contains strange adventures, unforeseen encounters, unasked for experiences, hidden effects and secret complications.
Travelling in time, the reader meets present and past, and acknowledges the deep emotions that result in Leopold.
Leopold himself travels from Italy to Paris to discover his English past, even though the journey does not lead to the encounter he expects. Thus the expectation remains the sole experience, and Leopold remains in charge of his imagination, as reality does not destroy it.
The reader also travels between children's and grown-ups' perspectives, and is able to discover the transition from one level of human understanding to another. Like a station, the adolescent mind of Henrietta, part of the story for a single day by a chance break on her journey, picks up fragments of lives and adds them to her own impression - while her travelling self adds to others' life log books as well.
A story of passion and heartbreak, of sexual power and destruction - without ever being voyeuristic, it is deeply erotic. Leopold is the living personification of passion spent and lost, and his future, standing at the station in the end, is just as open as his mother's was before her path was chosen.
Bravo, Bowen! This is life.
Read
August 14, 2019Elizabeth Bowen is good with brackets. The opening scene of one of her books can sometimes seem unrelated to what follows but when you read on, an echo of the beginning often closes the story, and you finally understand how neatly she has tied the many wide-ranging episodes together.
In this book, there is not one but a series of bracketed episodes, each opening further sections of back story. Then she brings us back in stages to the beginning. So neat.
In this book, there is not one but a series of bracketed episodes, each opening further sections of back story. Then she brings us back in stages to the beginning. So neat.
June 28, 2024
To be quite oneself one must first waste a little time.
Reading Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris feels like walking through a house and exploring its interiors, full of paintings, objects and other details. When we look at a certain painting we discover there is a microcosmos which takes us into another time and space, another house and its interiors. Sometimes it is more of a station, a street or a landscape. We learn about an astonishing new detail. And then back again.
It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you know you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart.
The idea of interiors flows through the novel. And don’t get me wrong, usually I dislike lengthy descriptions of landscape or interiors, but here their amount feels just right and they are masterfully interwoven into the psychological interiors of the characters themselves. Unlike some of her characters, Bowen refuses well- lit explanations of people like photographs taken when the camera could not lie, there are no descriptions which would have stunned your imagination by being exact. Her characters and their relationships are complex and multilayered. The author’s observations on human nature are truly outstanding and insightful. Perspective matters, after all no object is mysterious, the mystery is your eye.
Reading this novel also reminds me of Henri Matisse’s unique paintings - there is something familiar about a slightly distorted perspective, framing inside framing, patterns and striking colours. But I know Matisse’s art only on a superficial level - in the process of reading I discovered that one of his paintings The Piano Lesson is already on the cover of the Anchor edition. Aren’t those Parisian balcony railings just so iconic?
On the other hand, The House in Paris can be read as a travel log gone slightly awry for some of the characters (although maybe not for the reader). Two children in transit meet in a new place discovering an incomprehensible world of adults. Some very complex issues are perceived through a child’s perspective. We travel between different points of view and perspectives. This novel occurs in a day, although time is not that simple - the present and the past are continuously intertwined.
After reading a few reviews on Bowen’s work, I presumed this would be a slow read, but I read the first half of the book in one sitting: I found it truly absorbing with a slow, but addictive pacing. Despite my enthusiasm, I can find some “imperfections”. There is a plot mechanism I found too dramatic. Children trying to act and speak like adults makes them even more convincing as children. Some dialogues and narrations may seem cryptic, but they reminded me of stream of consciousness and the soliloquies in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Bowen’s writing and my current state of mind just clicked. Once I came back from The House in Paris I considered something I haven’t done in a while - reading Bowen’s novels back to back. Right now it would be difficult to get hold of all her books and there are other authors and books demanding by attention. And yet, I’m already planning to pick up a book of hers soon. A fascinating mind.
4.5/5
Reading Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris feels like walking through a house and exploring its interiors, full of paintings, objects and other details. When we look at a certain painting we discover there is a microcosmos which takes us into another time and space, another house and its interiors. Sometimes it is more of a station, a street or a landscape. We learn about an astonishing new detail. And then back again.
It is a wary business, walking about a strange house you know you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. These new unsmiling lights, reflections and objects are to become your memories, riveted to you closer than friends or lovers, going with you, even, into the grave: worse, they may become dear and fasten like so many leeches on your heart.
The idea of interiors flows through the novel. And don’t get me wrong, usually I dislike lengthy descriptions of landscape or interiors, but here their amount feels just right and they are masterfully interwoven into the psychological interiors of the characters themselves. Unlike some of her characters, Bowen refuses well- lit explanations of people like photographs taken when the camera could not lie, there are no descriptions which would have stunned your imagination by being exact. Her characters and their relationships are complex and multilayered. The author’s observations on human nature are truly outstanding and insightful. Perspective matters, after all no object is mysterious, the mystery is your eye.
Reading this novel also reminds me of Henri Matisse’s unique paintings - there is something familiar about a slightly distorted perspective, framing inside framing, patterns and striking colours. But I know Matisse’s art only on a superficial level - in the process of reading I discovered that one of his paintings The Piano Lesson is already on the cover of the Anchor edition. Aren’t those Parisian balcony railings just so iconic?
On the other hand, The House in Paris can be read as a travel log gone slightly awry for some of the characters (although maybe not for the reader). Two children in transit meet in a new place discovering an incomprehensible world of adults. Some very complex issues are perceived through a child’s perspective. We travel between different points of view and perspectives. This novel occurs in a day, although time is not that simple - the present and the past are continuously intertwined.
After reading a few reviews on Bowen’s work, I presumed this would be a slow read, but I read the first half of the book in one sitting: I found it truly absorbing with a slow, but addictive pacing. Despite my enthusiasm, I can find some “imperfections”. There is a plot mechanism I found too dramatic. Children trying to act and speak like adults makes them even more convincing as children. Some dialogues and narrations may seem cryptic, but they reminded me of stream of consciousness and the soliloquies in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Bowen’s writing and my current state of mind just clicked. Once I came back from The House in Paris I considered something I haven’t done in a while - reading Bowen’s novels back to back. Right now it would be difficult to get hold of all her books and there are other authors and books demanding by attention. And yet, I’m already planning to pick up a book of hers soon. A fascinating mind.
4.5/5
May 25, 2025
"But for lovers or friends with no past in common, the historic past unfolds like a park. To talk of books is oppressed shut-in lovers, no way out of themselves”- The House in Paris
Elizabeth Bowen is a master in British Modernism and tradition, that even when reading novels by her that were published in the 1960s and 1970s, you cannot help but feel for her characters, the pangs of heartache, rejection of pain that is often tied to mental illness, sex, and codependency.
In most books I have read that she's written, she often has children or wayward young people presented as scapegoats by a hypocritical, wealthy community that shuns anyone different than they are.
In "The House in Paris", the two lonely children, Henrietta and Leopold are victims of adult cruelty, as Leopold tries to piece together the tempestuous relationship between his parents, Karen and Max as they try to decide whether or not it was best to have him at all in the past.
Overall, this was a psychologically astute and haunting read that contains Bowen’s motifs of the unwanted and actions of intentional cruelty.
Elizabeth Bowen is a master in British Modernism and tradition, that even when reading novels by her that were published in the 1960s and 1970s, you cannot help but feel for her characters, the pangs of heartache, rejection of pain that is often tied to mental illness, sex, and codependency.
In most books I have read that she's written, she often has children or wayward young people presented as scapegoats by a hypocritical, wealthy community that shuns anyone different than they are.
In "The House in Paris", the two lonely children, Henrietta and Leopold are victims of adult cruelty, as Leopold tries to piece together the tempestuous relationship between his parents, Karen and Max as they try to decide whether or not it was best to have him at all in the past.
Overall, this was a psychologically astute and haunting read that contains Bowen’s motifs of the unwanted and actions of intentional cruelty.
September 23, 2023
This book is my first book by Elizabeth Bowen. It was a very enjoyable read.
Henrietta travels to Paris to spend the summer with her grandmother. She arrives at the home of the Fishers. Here she meets a young boy named Leopold who has traveled from Italy to meet his birth mother for the first time. Leopold was adopted and never met his mother. He is very excited to meet her, but all does not go well.
Part II is the back story, what happened in the past. We meet Karen who is engaged to Ray and has an illicit affair with her friend Naomi’s finance’. We learn about Karen and Naomi, Ray and Max.
The children are delightful. Their characters are complex. The setting has a gothic feel as we meet the mysteriously ill mother of Naomi. Does she know more than she reveals? What is the mystery behind this house?
Henrietta and Leopold are very young are presented with adult decisions.
It is very melodramatic, filed with love and betrayal.
It is a beautifully written story. I would have liked to have known more about what happened in the end.
There is a wonderful intro written by A. S. Byatt.
Henrietta travels to Paris to spend the summer with her grandmother. She arrives at the home of the Fishers. Here she meets a young boy named Leopold who has traveled from Italy to meet his birth mother for the first time. Leopold was adopted and never met his mother. He is very excited to meet her, but all does not go well.
Part II is the back story, what happened in the past. We meet Karen who is engaged to Ray and has an illicit affair with her friend Naomi’s finance’. We learn about Karen and Naomi, Ray and Max.
The children are delightful. Their characters are complex. The setting has a gothic feel as we meet the mysteriously ill mother of Naomi. Does she know more than she reveals? What is the mystery behind this house?
Henrietta and Leopold are very young are presented with adult decisions.
It is very melodramatic, filed with love and betrayal.
It is a beautifully written story. I would have liked to have known more about what happened in the end.
There is a wonderful intro written by A. S. Byatt.
March 26, 2020
... What?! I just... what?! Honestly I felt like I hardly understood a word of this gibberish. Not more than a few together, anyway. I did love The Last September and Death of the Heart but what even do the words in the order they are written here mean?!
Part One is overwritten nonsense where children sound like haunted adults and far far too much describing and analyzing of delicate, complicated gestures goes on not only for believability, but interest. I assure you at first I assumed this was my fault and I was missing something. But reader: I was not. I dutifully re-read metaphors multiple times in case this was a Virginia Woolf crack the ice situation. I could not figure it out.
Part Two got better. Thank goodness. The part with Karen and Naomi and mom and the aunt and uncle, I got it. Still overwritten, but we were all on the same plane of comprehension. Even some iotas of brilliance that made me remember “Oh right this lady wrote The Last September!”. But then the central “mystery” came back on screen and things got awful again quickly.
I persisted until page 185, willing it to get better. Instead, it got worse. I have no idea what on earth she thought Karen or Max were saying half the time. And when I did, it was far too much effort to parse through for far too little meaning.
I can’t! I just can’t with this one, I’m sorry! And I am definitely the target audience for this- I eat up repressed gazes and interwar melodrama on a regular basis.
Just one of those life’s too short to read bad books situations. Disappointing, especially since other reviewers I generally trust loved this one, but moving on.
Part One is overwritten nonsense where children sound like haunted adults and far far too much describing and analyzing of delicate, complicated gestures goes on not only for believability, but interest. I assure you at first I assumed this was my fault and I was missing something. But reader: I was not. I dutifully re-read metaphors multiple times in case this was a Virginia Woolf crack the ice situation. I could not figure it out.
Part Two got better. Thank goodness. The part with Karen and Naomi and mom and the aunt and uncle, I got it. Still overwritten, but we were all on the same plane of comprehension. Even some iotas of brilliance that made me remember “Oh right this lady wrote The Last September!”. But then the central “mystery” came back on screen and things got awful again quickly.
I persisted until page 185, willing it to get better. Instead, it got worse. I have no idea what on earth she thought Karen or Max were saying half the time. And when I did, it was far too much effort to parse through for far too little meaning.
I can’t! I just can’t with this one, I’m sorry! And I am definitely the target audience for this- I eat up repressed gazes and interwar melodrama on a regular basis.
Just one of those life’s too short to read bad books situations. Disappointing, especially since other reviewers I generally trust loved this one, but moving on.
December 24, 2024
More than story, Elizabeth Bowen writes atmosphere. There is weight and heft to the air in an Elizabeth Bowen novel. I keep wanting to step outside and feel some cool breeze blowing on my neck, because the undercurrent of stale air inside the House in Paris is stifling. And that is what her characters experience, pressure that is either a building storm or the stagnant mood after one.
Eleven year old Henrietta is passing through Paris on her way to join her grandmother and is spending the day in the care of her grandmother’s friend, Miss Fisher, while awaiting her evening train. Also present at Miss Fisher’s house is a nine year old boy, Leopold, who is in Miss Fisher’s care while awaiting the arrival of his mother, whom he has never met. That there is a mystery to unravel is evident from the beginning, and Leopold is obviously at the heart of it.
At some point, Henrietta is summoned into a darkened bedroom where she meets Naomi Fisher’s dying mother. Her curious questions are met with evasive answers from both the adults, but she is told that Leopold’s father is dead. Leopold tells Henrietta that he has never met his mother and that it is “Because no one knows I’m born.”
From this intriguing beginning, full of innuendo, Bowen takes us immediately into the past and the story that produces Leopold begins to unfold. It is a more complicated tale than just the obvious one of seduction and consequence. It is psychologically dark and brooding and leaves the reader pondering the motivations of each of the individuals involved. Hanging over the story as it unravels is our knowledge that there is Leopold in the end and his future is dependent upon what has happened in the past and what will be done going forward.
I love Bowen crisp but somehow opulent prose. She deals in nuance, but one never doubts what she is saying or what her characters are feeling. This is my fourth Bowen and I am happy to know I have twice that many yet to choose from. It is interesting to me that her most famous novel, The Heat of the Day, garnered the lowest rating from me. I wonder if I read it today would it fare better. I do think her style and subtlety grow on you with exposure and it was my first.
Eleven year old Henrietta is passing through Paris on her way to join her grandmother and is spending the day in the care of her grandmother’s friend, Miss Fisher, while awaiting her evening train. Also present at Miss Fisher’s house is a nine year old boy, Leopold, who is in Miss Fisher’s care while awaiting the arrival of his mother, whom he has never met. That there is a mystery to unravel is evident from the beginning, and Leopold is obviously at the heart of it.
At some point, Henrietta is summoned into a darkened bedroom where she meets Naomi Fisher’s dying mother. Her curious questions are met with evasive answers from both the adults, but she is told that Leopold’s father is dead. Leopold tells Henrietta that he has never met his mother and that it is “Because no one knows I’m born.”
From this intriguing beginning, full of innuendo, Bowen takes us immediately into the past and the story that produces Leopold begins to unfold. It is a more complicated tale than just the obvious one of seduction and consequence. It is psychologically dark and brooding and leaves the reader pondering the motivations of each of the individuals involved. Hanging over the story as it unravels is our knowledge that there is Leopold in the end and his future is dependent upon what has happened in the past and what will be done going forward.
I love Bowen crisp but somehow opulent prose. She deals in nuance, but one never doubts what she is saying or what her characters are feeling. This is my fourth Bowen and I am happy to know I have twice that many yet to choose from. It is interesting to me that her most famous novel, The Heat of the Day, garnered the lowest rating from me. I wonder if I read it today would it fare better. I do think her style and subtlety grow on you with exposure and it was my first.
August 20, 2023
I expected a story about fractured families and their impact on uprooted, orphaned children, on one level that’s exactly what this is, but it’s so much more - impressively complex and quietly devastating. Like Sybille Bedford in A Legacy or Forster in Howard’s End, Elizabeth Bowen uses her individual characters to explore wider social and cultural rifts. First published in 1936, Elizabeth Bowen presents a particularly damning portrait of post-WW1 Europe: blighted by rigid social hierarchies; fierce generational divides; and immense prejudice. Intricate and, in typical Bowen style, often deliberately slippery and opaque, it’s set in a present shaped by fallout from the past. The bulk of the action unfolds over one day, primarily focused on young, Jewish boy Leopold – sparking associations with Joyce’s earlier Ulysses. Leopold’s been sent to a house in Paris from Italy, where he lives with the Americans who adopted him. He’s there to finally meet his birth mother Karen, his father’s long dead. Waiting with him is another child, Henrietta whose parents are also absent, she’s travelling to her grandmother’s elsewhere in France. The house belongs to the enigmatic Mme Fisher but it’s run by her weirdly, self-effacing daughter Naomi. Sandwiched between two present-day episodes is a section flashing back to Karen and the circumstances that led to Leopold’s conception.
Bowen was Anglo-Irish, originally an art student, that part of her background’s highlighted here. There’s a strong visual, almost painterly quality running throughout – Bowen once called herself a writer who wrote from the eye. In some ways Karen mirrors Bowen, also Anglo-Irish, also trained in art. But Karen’s stuck, caught between the expectations of her solidly, middle-class family with its solidly, middle-class values, and more radical possibilities glimpsed through art school. This conflict leads to a brief fling with Max, who’s Jewish and lives in a France where anti-Semitism is as rife as it was during the Dreyfus era. The characters of Max, Karen and Leopold read like Bowen’s response to wider events in 1930s Europe: the first Jewish refugees from Germany reached England in 1933, in both countries fascism coupled with anti-Jewish racism was a growing force. Bowen’s narrative makes it clear just how deep-rooted anti-Semitism was in Western Europe, even Karen’s outwardly pleasant, well-heeled mother is exposed as unthinkingly but undeniably anti-Jewish. In the 1930s, Jews were commonly perceived as a race and a race apart, emphatically "not white," something Bowen underlines through Karen’s thoughts on her “interracial” affair. Leopold’s everyday existence is overshadowed by his “dubious” origins, renamed and essentially forced into a form of “passing” by his adoptive parents. He’s under constant surveillance for possible signs of instability – made more acute by the nature of his father’s death.
It’s a difficult book to talk about without giving away the entire plot, it’s also incredibly multi-layered with strands variously dealing with time, memory, exile and displacement - people in Bowen’s novel seem to be constantly moving around, between countries, or on trains or boats. The influence of writers from Henry James to Charlotte Bronte to Lewis Carroll surfaces at various points: James is particularly evident in Bowen’s portrayal of Henrietta and Leopold,: there’s an unsettling, gothic, Bronte-like feel to her depiction of the claustrophobic house in Paris; and the mysterious, manipulative Mme Fisher whose actions are oddly vague yet crucial to major developments. I was intrigued by the queer elements introduced via the relationship between Naomi and Karen. I also liked Bowen’s representation of gender and inequalities that might result in the exercise of insidious forms of power. It’s a richly-textured, compelling piece overall and Bowen’s perspective on anti-Semitism and its circulation through European society is striking. But Bowen’s use of Max bothered me too. I could see that his “otherness” was intended to counter stereotypes but sometimes it seemed to reproduce them in ways that verged on exploitative.
Bowen was Anglo-Irish, originally an art student, that part of her background’s highlighted here. There’s a strong visual, almost painterly quality running throughout – Bowen once called herself a writer who wrote from the eye. In some ways Karen mirrors Bowen, also Anglo-Irish, also trained in art. But Karen’s stuck, caught between the expectations of her solidly, middle-class family with its solidly, middle-class values, and more radical possibilities glimpsed through art school. This conflict leads to a brief fling with Max, who’s Jewish and lives in a France where anti-Semitism is as rife as it was during the Dreyfus era. The characters of Max, Karen and Leopold read like Bowen’s response to wider events in 1930s Europe: the first Jewish refugees from Germany reached England in 1933, in both countries fascism coupled with anti-Jewish racism was a growing force. Bowen’s narrative makes it clear just how deep-rooted anti-Semitism was in Western Europe, even Karen’s outwardly pleasant, well-heeled mother is exposed as unthinkingly but undeniably anti-Jewish. In the 1930s, Jews were commonly perceived as a race and a race apart, emphatically "not white," something Bowen underlines through Karen’s thoughts on her “interracial” affair. Leopold’s everyday existence is overshadowed by his “dubious” origins, renamed and essentially forced into a form of “passing” by his adoptive parents. He’s under constant surveillance for possible signs of instability – made more acute by the nature of his father’s death.
It’s a difficult book to talk about without giving away the entire plot, it’s also incredibly multi-layered with strands variously dealing with time, memory, exile and displacement - people in Bowen’s novel seem to be constantly moving around, between countries, or on trains or boats. The influence of writers from Henry James to Charlotte Bronte to Lewis Carroll surfaces at various points: James is particularly evident in Bowen’s portrayal of Henrietta and Leopold,: there’s an unsettling, gothic, Bronte-like feel to her depiction of the claustrophobic house in Paris; and the mysterious, manipulative Mme Fisher whose actions are oddly vague yet crucial to major developments. I was intrigued by the queer elements introduced via the relationship between Naomi and Karen. I also liked Bowen’s representation of gender and inequalities that might result in the exercise of insidious forms of power. It’s a richly-textured, compelling piece overall and Bowen’s perspective on anti-Semitism and its circulation through European society is striking. But Bowen’s use of Max bothered me too. I could see that his “otherness” was intended to counter stereotypes but sometimes it seemed to reproduce them in ways that verged on exploitative.
July 29, 2007
I tried, man, I really tried to get through this fucking thing. Got about 3/4 and my friend asked what it was about. I told her, and she said, "That sounds really good." So I slammed it closed and said "Take it."
February 8, 2021
There were some elements of the book that I liked. So, 3 stars for me.
The book was broken into three parts—
• The Present, in which we’re introduced to 11-year-old Henrietta…9-year-old Leopold…a woman I think in her 30s, Naomi Fisher who is unmarried…and Mme. Fisher, mother of Naomi, who is bedridden. Leopold is waiting for a visit from his mother whom he has not seen since he was born (and so he would not remember her, eh?). A couple in Italy adopted him when he was very young. She is supposed to come to Mme. and Naomi Fisher’s house. Why in God’s name did she give Leopold up? And where is his father? Well, you have to read the book—I shan’t tell you. 🙃
• The Past, in which we are introduced to the father, Max, and the mother, Karen, and how they both know Naomi, and let us not forget Mme. Fisher who was not bedridden at the time. The old bitch. There, I said it!!! 😮
• The Present, in which things are wrapped up for the reader. Not 100% perfectly but then life is not perfect.
Once again, I found Elizabeth Bowen going on too long about things. 😑
Having said that, Elizabeth Bowen did make me believe in the characters, and at times I enjoyed being transported to England and France and the upper crust in the early twentieth century in between WW1 and II. La-dee-da. Pass the scones dear.
I know from GR friends there is probably one more book I should read by her at the very least and I have it: The Death of the Heart. But I also have The Last September.
I did not know she wrote so many collections of short stories…I count at least 11! Maybe I should read a collection. Does anyone want to recommend one of them to me?
The version I had had an interesting Introduction by A. S. Byatt. Funny, Byatt’s father gave this book to her when she was 10 or 11 with him thinking it was about history and such by a historical writer Marjorie Bowen. Wrong-o…. you got the last name right, but the first name wrong. You introduced your impressionable young daughter to sex outside of marriage I hope you know! It sure impacted on her…. from the Introduction— “There were powerful phrases which lodged in my mind and have stayed there”:
• Years before sex had power to touch his feelings it had forced itself into view as an awkward tangle of motives.
• The mystery about sex comes from confusion and terror: to a mind on which these have not yet settled there is nothing you cannot tell.
Sex…sex…sex…I wonder if she told her father he had made a mistake. 🤨
Reviews:
• From a blogsite: https://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/...
• You can read the back cover of the first edition of the book with this review, very nice!: https://leavesandpages.com/2018/01/14...
• https://www.citizen-times.com/story/l...
The book was broken into three parts—
• The Present, in which we’re introduced to 11-year-old Henrietta…9-year-old Leopold…a woman I think in her 30s, Naomi Fisher who is unmarried…and Mme. Fisher, mother of Naomi, who is bedridden. Leopold is waiting for a visit from his mother whom he has not seen since he was born (and so he would not remember her, eh?). A couple in Italy adopted him when he was very young. She is supposed to come to Mme. and Naomi Fisher’s house. Why in God’s name did she give Leopold up? And where is his father? Well, you have to read the book—I shan’t tell you. 🙃
• The Past, in which we are introduced to the father, Max, and the mother, Karen, and how they both know Naomi, and let us not forget Mme. Fisher who was not bedridden at the time. The old bitch. There, I said it!!! 😮
• The Present, in which things are wrapped up for the reader. Not 100% perfectly but then life is not perfect.
Once again, I found Elizabeth Bowen going on too long about things. 😑
Having said that, Elizabeth Bowen did make me believe in the characters, and at times I enjoyed being transported to England and France and the upper crust in the early twentieth century in between WW1 and II. La-dee-da. Pass the scones dear.
I know from GR friends there is probably one more book I should read by her at the very least and I have it: The Death of the Heart. But I also have The Last September.
I did not know she wrote so many collections of short stories…I count at least 11! Maybe I should read a collection. Does anyone want to recommend one of them to me?
The version I had had an interesting Introduction by A. S. Byatt. Funny, Byatt’s father gave this book to her when she was 10 or 11 with him thinking it was about history and such by a historical writer Marjorie Bowen. Wrong-o…. you got the last name right, but the first name wrong. You introduced your impressionable young daughter to sex outside of marriage I hope you know! It sure impacted on her…. from the Introduction— “There were powerful phrases which lodged in my mind and have stayed there”:
• Years before sex had power to touch his feelings it had forced itself into view as an awkward tangle of motives.
• The mystery about sex comes from confusion and terror: to a mind on which these have not yet settled there is nothing you cannot tell.
Sex…sex…sex…I wonder if she told her father he had made a mistake. 🤨
Reviews:
• From a blogsite: https://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/...
• You can read the back cover of the first edition of the book with this review, very nice!: https://leavesandpages.com/2018/01/14...
• https://www.citizen-times.com/story/l...
August 17, 2012
I bought the 1940's penguin edition of this book which is really appealing in its simplicity. No gimmicks, bells or whistles. It has a minimalist post war cover and the most animated looking penguin logo ever. In hindsight perhaps the austerity was a nod to the emotional austerity shielded between the cover. Slightly less appealing is the back page with the author photograph. While I have no doubt that Elizabeth Bowen was probably a delightful woman, the photographer has managed to catch her in a pose which has left her looking like Aunt Sally from the Wurzel Gummidge TV series which was probably not the look she was going for (I like to think she was aiming for worldly and erudite but falling wide of the mark).
I chose the House in Paris from the 1001 books list based on the name alone, as I knew nothing of the plot and being incredibly lazy did not bother to investigate prior to purchase. About Paris? hmmm, sounds lovely. It's not a lively book, nor is it particularly romantic or evocative of any kind of Parisian joie de vivre, and for the majority of the time I was reading I kept imagining all the characters with those impossibly clipped BBC accents that were so prevalent in the 40's and 50's amongst the upper middle classes ( if you don't know what I mean listen to the Queens speech). Needless to say this didn't help me to take them or their dilemmas more seriously.
I disliked Leopold and Henrietta and found Charles the plush monkey (who was only a toy) to be a far more animated and likeable character. As for the adults (who were responsible for the accidental conception of Leopold); I found their story to be the most emotionally neutered love story I've ever encountered. Max and Karen plan their lovers tryst with stiff upper lips and military precision leaving the story with the residual romance of an abandoned fish supper on a wet weekend in Barry Island. I suppose the saving grace is Madame Fisher; a sinister corpse-like, bed-bound figure who despite never making it past 15 degrees from the prone position, still manages to meddle in everyones affairs. Bowen has created a memorable villain here... who knew an old biddy in a bed jacket could be so scary?
I chose the House in Paris from the 1001 books list based on the name alone, as I knew nothing of the plot and being incredibly lazy did not bother to investigate prior to purchase. About Paris? hmmm, sounds lovely. It's not a lively book, nor is it particularly romantic or evocative of any kind of Parisian joie de vivre, and for the majority of the time I was reading I kept imagining all the characters with those impossibly clipped BBC accents that were so prevalent in the 40's and 50's amongst the upper middle classes ( if you don't know what I mean listen to the Queens speech). Needless to say this didn't help me to take them or their dilemmas more seriously.
I disliked Leopold and Henrietta and found Charles the plush monkey (who was only a toy) to be a far more animated and likeable character. As for the adults (who were responsible for the accidental conception of Leopold); I found their story to be the most emotionally neutered love story I've ever encountered. Max and Karen plan their lovers tryst with stiff upper lips and military precision leaving the story with the residual romance of an abandoned fish supper on a wet weekend in Barry Island. I suppose the saving grace is Madame Fisher; a sinister corpse-like, bed-bound figure who despite never making it past 15 degrees from the prone position, still manages to meddle in everyones affairs. Bowen has created a memorable villain here... who knew an old biddy in a bed jacket could be so scary?
August 5, 2023
These indifferent streets and early morning faces oppressed Henrietta, who was expecting to find Paris more gay and kind.
I think this is one of - if not the - most dense and oblique of Bowen's elegant, fraught novels. It immediately requires re-reading to tease out what is going on here and what the book is really about. On the surface, it's the most Jamesian of her texts: What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw for those faux-innocent children with their inscrutability; The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove for those love triangles. But, at the same time, this is recognisably and securely in Bowen territory too: her 'death of the heart' narratives and the way melodrama becomes subsumed to something more muted and harsh.
As always, there's almost an audible crackle from the brittle language that clothes the plot and much of the 'action' feels subterranean: emotions seethe but the surface often appears placid. There's a real sense of claustrophobia and oppression in the eponymous house in Paris as two generations play out their dramas - or is that three? And is the love triangle really a square? .
Nothing in Bowen's world is sugar-coated - for all her elegant, poised prose, there's something deeply broken in the psyches she explores and a harshness that permeates her novels.
April 25, 2018
Elegant and Melodramatic
“This is both a very elegant and a very melodramatic novel.” A. S. Byatt has it right, but her introduction, from which this comes, should absolutely not be read before the book itself. More a personal account of her own various experiences with the novel than an aid for the first-time reader, it manages to give away every important surprise. But elegant and melodramatic, yes. This was my return also, to a novel which I first read in 2005, and this time I skipped straight to the first chapter. To be softly seduced by Bowen’s elegance, which I can’t remember noticing before. Then drawn into the passionate but off-kilter romance of the middle section. Then knocked for a loop by what I was glad to see Byatt nail as melodrama, when I finally read her so-called introduction as a retrospective guide.
Elegance first, starting with the novel’s structure. It is in three sections, called respectively “The Present,” “The Past,” and “The Present.” Henrietta Mountjoy, a young girl of eleven or so, is looked after by some friends of her grandmother’s, the Fishers, while passing through Paris on the way to the Riviera. As things turn out, she does not leave the quiet house of the old lady and her daughter until it is time for her evening train. But she does meet there a boy of about her own age, Léopold, who has come to Paris to meet his birth mother for the first time. The middle section will reveal who Léopold is, and explain some of curious tensions that seem to revolve around his presence. The fact that these mysteries are observed by a sensitive but innocent girl with no possible understanding of adult sexuality provides a teasingly oblique perspective which is surely a large part of the elegance. Byatt compares Henrietta favorably to the title character in Henry James’ What Maisie Knew ; but then I love Maisie, and am not prepared to exalt one little girl over the other.
Also elegant—exquisitely so—is Bowen’s prose and social observation. This is a book that waits a long time before things begin to happen. But you do not mind, because there is such pleasure in reading Bowen’s descriptions that it seems almost a shame to replace their infinite potential by mere action. Here are three examples, all from the second part, whose heroine is a young woman called Karen Michaelis. How beautifully Bowen captures the moneyed liberalism of her parents:
I said that the section called “The Past” might almost stand on its own. So why not let it do so? The Paris house is not the locus of any of the real action, but it does frame the narrative. Karen’s story means so much more to us after the many hints sensed, but never grasped, by Henrietta and Léopold in the first part. And the long central section ends without all its issues being fully resolved. The last 50 pages, headed once again “The Present,” cannot tie up all the loose ends; the time gap between sections makes that impossible. But there is a welcome hint of a resolution with Léopold. Meanwhile Henrietta takes her train to the South unchanged—except for the seeds of adult knowledge now planted inside her. So the book ends in ellipses; the elegance in that is to treasure.
“This is both a very elegant and a very melodramatic novel.” A. S. Byatt has it right, but her introduction, from which this comes, should absolutely not be read before the book itself. More a personal account of her own various experiences with the novel than an aid for the first-time reader, it manages to give away every important surprise. But elegant and melodramatic, yes. This was my return also, to a novel which I first read in 2005, and this time I skipped straight to the first chapter. To be softly seduced by Bowen’s elegance, which I can’t remember noticing before. Then drawn into the passionate but off-kilter romance of the middle section. Then knocked for a loop by what I was glad to see Byatt nail as melodrama, when I finally read her so-called introduction as a retrospective guide.
Elegance first, starting with the novel’s structure. It is in three sections, called respectively “The Present,” “The Past,” and “The Present.” Henrietta Mountjoy, a young girl of eleven or so, is looked after by some friends of her grandmother’s, the Fishers, while passing through Paris on the way to the Riviera. As things turn out, she does not leave the quiet house of the old lady and her daughter until it is time for her evening train. But she does meet there a boy of about her own age, Léopold, who has come to Paris to meet his birth mother for the first time. The middle section will reveal who Léopold is, and explain some of curious tensions that seem to revolve around his presence. The fact that these mysteries are observed by a sensitive but innocent girl with no possible understanding of adult sexuality provides a teasingly oblique perspective which is surely a large part of the elegance. Byatt compares Henrietta favorably to the title character in Henry James’ What Maisie Knew ; but then I love Maisie, and am not prepared to exalt one little girl over the other.
Also elegant—exquisitely so—is Bowen’s prose and social observation. This is a book that waits a long time before things begin to happen. But you do not mind, because there is such pleasure in reading Bowen’s descriptions that it seems almost a shame to replace their infinite potential by mere action. Here are three examples, all from the second part, whose heroine is a young woman called Karen Michaelis. How beautifully Bowen captures the moneyed liberalism of her parents:
Her parents saw little reason to renew their ideas, which had lately been ahead of their time and were still not out of date.Early in the section Karen goes to visit an aunt in Ireland, only to come to the gradual realization that she is terminally ill. Here, Bowen’s use of offstage music is a foreshadowing of what she would later do in To the North :
Up there in the drawing-room, Aunt Violet began playing Schubert; notes came stepping lightly onto the moment in which Karen realized she was going to die. Phrases of music formed and hung in the garden, where violently green young branches flamed in the spring dusk. A hurt earthly smell rose from the piteous roots of the daisies and those small wounds in the turf that her uncle, not speaking, kept pressing at with his toe. Down there below the terrace, the harbour locked in green headlands lay glassy under the cold sky. No one familiar in Karen’s life had died yet: the scene round her looked at once momentous and ghostly, as in that light that sometimes comes before storms.And here is Bowen’s penetrating analysis of first love, a little tongue-in-cheek but still penetrating:
She thought, young girls like the excess of any quality. Without knowing, they want to suffer, to suffer they must exaggerate; they like to have loud chords struck on them. Loving art better than life, they need men to be actors; only an actor moves them, with his telling smile, undomestic, out of touch with the everyday that they dread. They love to enjoy love as a system of doubts and shocks. They are right: not seeking husbands yet, they have no reason to see love socially. This natural fleshly protest against good taste is broken down soon enough; their natural love of the cad is outwitted by their mothers.The long middle section of the book, which could almost stand on its own as a separate novella, shows Karen poised between the two kinds of love: the doubts and shocks of the first and the social propriety of the second. So long as Bowen maintains the suspense, her control is perfect. But now, well past the midpoint of the novel, she is split between two not entirely compatible directions. One is action; the other, perhaps as the result of action, is self-examination. In the techniques she uses for the latter, you are suddenly aware of her debt to Virginia Woolf, but I don’t think she entirely succeeds in her own terms; there is an artifice that fits ill with the modulated naturalism of the rest of the book. And in this context, the more startling bits of action—I am thinking especially of Léopold’s father—do indeed seem, in Byatt’s word, melodramatic. I found myself thinking of her most obvious successor, Anita Brookner, who writes about many of the same subjects and settings with perhaps less flair, but even greater economy of action. Brookner at her best is elegance personified, perfect in her control of the emotional temperature. But then, by daring less than Bowen, she also misses the chance of being a novelist of the very first rank, which Elizabeth Bowen surely is.
I said that the section called “The Past” might almost stand on its own. So why not let it do so? The Paris house is not the locus of any of the real action, but it does frame the narrative. Karen’s story means so much more to us after the many hints sensed, but never grasped, by Henrietta and Léopold in the first part. And the long central section ends without all its issues being fully resolved. The last 50 pages, headed once again “The Present,” cannot tie up all the loose ends; the time gap between sections makes that impossible. But there is a welcome hint of a resolution with Léopold. Meanwhile Henrietta takes her train to the South unchanged—except for the seeds of adult knowledge now planted inside her. So the book ends in ellipses; the elegance in that is to treasure.
June 20, 2022
“Tendida, con el pelo colgándole del sofá, como si fuera alguien en un nuevo elemento, parecía una niña a la que hace levitar un prestidigator y, aunque rígida en el aire y profundamente dormida, se mantiene alerta. Pero ahora despierta, su comportamiento revelaba un aire de clarividencia y sensatez, como el de la Alicia en el País de las Maravillas..."
Cuando me sumergí en la lectura de esta novela de Elizabeth Bowen no sabía lo que me esperaba. Los que me leéis, sabéis que este año me he atrevido con autores considerados “posmodernistas”, pesos pesados con los que no me había atrevido hasta ahora y que estoy disfrutando muchísimo, pero huyendo un poco de tanta modernidad, pensé en leer algo más “clásico”y cogí una de las novelas que tenía en mi pila desde hacia siglos, “La Casa en París” de Elizabeth Bowen. A medida que me fui adentrando en la lectura, no podía dejar de sorprenderme porque lo que hace la Bowen en esta novela no tiene nada de clásico, todo lo contrario, si pienso que fue una novela publicada en 1935, no podía dejar de alucinar por lo moderna y arriesgada en su planteamiento aunque el argumento sea un tema de los de toda la vida. Los diferentes puntos de vista, lo que NO se dice, los diálogos minimalistas, la elipsis, y un narrador ambiguo que se cuela como si fuera un fantasma cuando menos te lo esperas, son detalles que me hacian plantearme hasta qué punto Elizabeth Bowen estaba experimentando con la forma cuando la escribía. Asi que se puede decir que huyendo un poco de tanta modernidad, fuí buscando un clásico, que realmente resultó de lo más moderno que he podido leer: parece un galimatías, pero intentaré explicarlo.
La novela comienza con el segmento titulado "Presente". Henrietta es una niña de doce años cuya madre acaba de fallecer que viaja a la casa de las Fisher en Paris antes de encontrarse con su abuela que vive en el sur de Francia. La casa de las Fisher va a servir como punto de encuentro mientras tiene que coger otro tren hacia el sur. Alli Henrietta conoce a Leopold, un niño de diez años que está en casa de las Fisher precisamente porque se tiene que encontrar con su madre (amiga de las Fisher) a la que no conoce. La novela transcurre en 24 horas y está dividida en tres partes: Presente, Pasado y vuelta al Presente.
Cuando comienza la novela lo hace bajo el punto de vista de la niña, Henrietta, y un poco más tarde de Leopold, niños, avispados eso si, pero que tienen que ir descifrando los códigos de los adultos porque cuando se conocen descubren que la casa no solo está llena de secretos, sino que los adultos y sus secretos, quizá puedan ser desentrañados por ellos, así que el lector lo contempla todo desde la perspectiva de ellos aunque intuyendo que tras esas conversaciones ambiguas donde se esconde todo, algo pasa.
"En una reunión de tres o más personas se pierde el pudor, pero la franqueza asusta a dos personas cuando se hallan a solas, conscientes de lo cerca que están la una de la otra. Mas una reunión de tres personas es como estar en público: las tres se sienten seguras; la persona que antes estuvo cerca de tí, se transforma en una simple cara al otro lado de la bandeja ¿Se es menos uno mismo de lo que era antes?"
La segunda parte, “Pasado”, es una belleza que me ha hecho rendirme a los pies de Elizabeth Bowen, Aqui se narra en flashback la historia de Karen, la madre de Leopold, su confusión, sus dudas justo antes de casarse, su huída de la realidad para intentar encontrarse a si misma y la lucha por combatir las presiones sociales. Aquí el tema del amor está contado con letras mayúsculas pero desde una perspectiva muy elíptica donde las continuas dudas de Karen llevan el peso de la narración; creo que pocas veces he podido conectar tanto con una historia de amor por todos esos diálogos donde apenas se dice nada y donde el lector puede intuírlo todo. En este segmento es donde noto que Elizabeth Bowen experimenta más con la forma, porque aunque es una historia del pasado, la Bowen incluye una voz del presente que al principio me dejó descolocada, pero cuando la descifré, me impactó. En la tercera parte, “Presente”, volvemos a la casa en Paris, dónde los personajes continúan acechando esos secretos y sin embargo, el lector ya puede conocer algo mejor la esencia gracias al Pasado.
La casa de las Fisher que está habitada por Madame Fisher y su hija Naomi es pura atmósfera, y es una casa que además de punto de encuentro, sirve para identificar perfectamente a sus personajes, porque todos han pasado por allí, incluso los personajes del pasado, asi que respira atmósfera por los cuatro costados. Es la casa que conoce la respuesta a los secretos de ese pasado y el lugar que va a servir para que estos dos niños, Henrietta y Leopold, suban un nivel en su evolución hacia el mundo de los adultos.
"Leopold, que miraba a Ray con insolencia y perspicacia, con la barbilla alzada, había dicho:
- A ella le da miedo el pasado."
Me ha parecida una belleza de novela que he disfrutado dosificándola, hermosísima por todos los temas que toca: la muerte, la infancia, el amor, el sexo, la búsqueda de tu propia identidad y de tu lugar en el mundo, los lazos familiares (esas madres son antológicas)…, y la forma en la que Elizabeth Bowen lo narra es lo que me ha dejado impactada, cada frase está aquí cuidadosamente elegida, elaborada y, porque cada uno de los personajes, tiene todo un mundo interior que despliega durante la historia y las consecuencias de cómo algunos actos afectan al presente, están aquí perfectamente descritos. Por ejemplo, el personaje de Madame Fisher, la viuda dueña de la casa en Paris, está soberbiamente descrito por Elizabeth Bowen y de cómo ya en la vejez contempla algunos pasajes de su pasado con cierta ironía, porque además con esta cita, ya está aportando la autora todo lo que hay que saber de Madame Fisher y de sus actos:
"-Si-dijo la señora Fisher-. Mi matrimonio fue muy rrrrrrrrrrromántico.
Mofándose de sí misma, sonrió al recordar su matrimonio, como si se tratase de un objeto fantástico, un camafeo o un abanico pintado, que le hubiese llamado la atención y al que dio uso y valor durante un tiempo."
Parece fácil lo que hace pero es tan díficil comprimir momentos tan auténticos en apenas un párrafo y es todavía más difícil dejar información flotando en el ambiente sin decirla, para que lector participe activamente en la historia. Se podría decir que es una novela sobre el complejo mundo de los adultos visto a través de dos niños que no entienden nada, pero que pueden intuír historias en silencios reprimidos por esos adultos. Difícil poner en palabras lo que me ha calado esta novela, pero así y todo es una novela para volver a ella una y otra vez. Sigue siendo tan moderna como cuando se escribió.
Tengo que decir que la edición de Pre-Textos (magnífica) viene con un Prólogo de Antonia S. Byatt que no lo leí todavía porque intuyo que puede desvelar bastante de la novela, pero sí que me gustaría hacer notar a las editoriales que este tipo de Prólogos deberían ir al final del libro para no desvelar de qué va el texto. Nunca leo los Prólogos antes de leer la novela, por eso mismo. La traducción es de Silvia Barbero.
"Max dijo en Boulogne: -Las cosas no pueden hacerse sin más-. Creí que quería decir que no deben hacerse, pero lo que quería decir era que no pueden hacerse."
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
Cuando me sumergí en la lectura de esta novela de Elizabeth Bowen no sabía lo que me esperaba. Los que me leéis, sabéis que este año me he atrevido con autores considerados “posmodernistas”, pesos pesados con los que no me había atrevido hasta ahora y que estoy disfrutando muchísimo, pero huyendo un poco de tanta modernidad, pensé en leer algo más “clásico”y cogí una de las novelas que tenía en mi pila desde hacia siglos, “La Casa en París” de Elizabeth Bowen. A medida que me fui adentrando en la lectura, no podía dejar de sorprenderme porque lo que hace la Bowen en esta novela no tiene nada de clásico, todo lo contrario, si pienso que fue una novela publicada en 1935, no podía dejar de alucinar por lo moderna y arriesgada en su planteamiento aunque el argumento sea un tema de los de toda la vida. Los diferentes puntos de vista, lo que NO se dice, los diálogos minimalistas, la elipsis, y un narrador ambiguo que se cuela como si fuera un fantasma cuando menos te lo esperas, son detalles que me hacian plantearme hasta qué punto Elizabeth Bowen estaba experimentando con la forma cuando la escribía. Asi que se puede decir que huyendo un poco de tanta modernidad, fuí buscando un clásico, que realmente resultó de lo más moderno que he podido leer: parece un galimatías, pero intentaré explicarlo.
La novela comienza con el segmento titulado "Presente". Henrietta es una niña de doce años cuya madre acaba de fallecer que viaja a la casa de las Fisher en Paris antes de encontrarse con su abuela que vive en el sur de Francia. La casa de las Fisher va a servir como punto de encuentro mientras tiene que coger otro tren hacia el sur. Alli Henrietta conoce a Leopold, un niño de diez años que está en casa de las Fisher precisamente porque se tiene que encontrar con su madre (amiga de las Fisher) a la que no conoce. La novela transcurre en 24 horas y está dividida en tres partes: Presente, Pasado y vuelta al Presente.
Cuando comienza la novela lo hace bajo el punto de vista de la niña, Henrietta, y un poco más tarde de Leopold, niños, avispados eso si, pero que tienen que ir descifrando los códigos de los adultos porque cuando se conocen descubren que la casa no solo está llena de secretos, sino que los adultos y sus secretos, quizá puedan ser desentrañados por ellos, así que el lector lo contempla todo desde la perspectiva de ellos aunque intuyendo que tras esas conversaciones ambiguas donde se esconde todo, algo pasa.
"En una reunión de tres o más personas se pierde el pudor, pero la franqueza asusta a dos personas cuando se hallan a solas, conscientes de lo cerca que están la una de la otra. Mas una reunión de tres personas es como estar en público: las tres se sienten seguras; la persona que antes estuvo cerca de tí, se transforma en una simple cara al otro lado de la bandeja ¿Se es menos uno mismo de lo que era antes?"
La segunda parte, “Pasado”, es una belleza que me ha hecho rendirme a los pies de Elizabeth Bowen, Aqui se narra en flashback la historia de Karen, la madre de Leopold, su confusión, sus dudas justo antes de casarse, su huída de la realidad para intentar encontrarse a si misma y la lucha por combatir las presiones sociales. Aquí el tema del amor está contado con letras mayúsculas pero desde una perspectiva muy elíptica donde las continuas dudas de Karen llevan el peso de la narración; creo que pocas veces he podido conectar tanto con una historia de amor por todos esos diálogos donde apenas se dice nada y donde el lector puede intuírlo todo. En este segmento es donde noto que Elizabeth Bowen experimenta más con la forma, porque aunque es una historia del pasado, la Bowen incluye una voz del presente que al principio me dejó descolocada, pero cuando la descifré, me impactó. En la tercera parte, “Presente”, volvemos a la casa en Paris, dónde los personajes continúan acechando esos secretos y sin embargo, el lector ya puede conocer algo mejor la esencia gracias al Pasado.
La casa de las Fisher que está habitada por Madame Fisher y su hija Naomi es pura atmósfera, y es una casa que además de punto de encuentro, sirve para identificar perfectamente a sus personajes, porque todos han pasado por allí, incluso los personajes del pasado, asi que respira atmósfera por los cuatro costados. Es la casa que conoce la respuesta a los secretos de ese pasado y el lugar que va a servir para que estos dos niños, Henrietta y Leopold, suban un nivel en su evolución hacia el mundo de los adultos.
"Leopold, que miraba a Ray con insolencia y perspicacia, con la barbilla alzada, había dicho:
- A ella le da miedo el pasado."
Me ha parecida una belleza de novela que he disfrutado dosificándola, hermosísima por todos los temas que toca: la muerte, la infancia, el amor, el sexo, la búsqueda de tu propia identidad y de tu lugar en el mundo, los lazos familiares (esas madres son antológicas)…, y la forma en la que Elizabeth Bowen lo narra es lo que me ha dejado impactada, cada frase está aquí cuidadosamente elegida, elaborada y, porque cada uno de los personajes, tiene todo un mundo interior que despliega durante la historia y las consecuencias de cómo algunos actos afectan al presente, están aquí perfectamente descritos. Por ejemplo, el personaje de Madame Fisher, la viuda dueña de la casa en Paris, está soberbiamente descrito por Elizabeth Bowen y de cómo ya en la vejez contempla algunos pasajes de su pasado con cierta ironía, porque además con esta cita, ya está aportando la autora todo lo que hay que saber de Madame Fisher y de sus actos:
"-Si-dijo la señora Fisher-. Mi matrimonio fue muy rrrrrrrrrrromántico.
Mofándose de sí misma, sonrió al recordar su matrimonio, como si se tratase de un objeto fantástico, un camafeo o un abanico pintado, que le hubiese llamado la atención y al que dio uso y valor durante un tiempo."
Parece fácil lo que hace pero es tan díficil comprimir momentos tan auténticos en apenas un párrafo y es todavía más difícil dejar información flotando en el ambiente sin decirla, para que lector participe activamente en la historia. Se podría decir que es una novela sobre el complejo mundo de los adultos visto a través de dos niños que no entienden nada, pero que pueden intuír historias en silencios reprimidos por esos adultos. Difícil poner en palabras lo que me ha calado esta novela, pero así y todo es una novela para volver a ella una y otra vez. Sigue siendo tan moderna como cuando se escribió.
Tengo que decir que la edición de Pre-Textos (magnífica) viene con un Prólogo de Antonia S. Byatt que no lo leí todavía porque intuyo que puede desvelar bastante de la novela, pero sí que me gustaría hacer notar a las editoriales que este tipo de Prólogos deberían ir al final del libro para no desvelar de qué va el texto. Nunca leo los Prólogos antes de leer la novela, por eso mismo. La traducción es de Silvia Barbero.
"Max dijo en Boulogne: -Las cosas no pueden hacerse sin más-. Creí que quería decir que no deben hacerse, pero lo que quería decir era que no pueden hacerse."
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021...
January 28, 2013
"In the first rank of the brilliant women writers," asserts the New York Times blurb, offensively. Actually Bowen is in the first rank of the brilliant writers. Her craftsmanship is exquisite, she is masterful at having her characters express the perfect emotion, and if there's a writer of adult novels who can write from a child's vantage point better, I don't know who it is.
The House in Paris is divided into three sections. The first and last, titled "The Present," take place over the course of one day. Eleven-year-old Henrietta is stopping over in the Paris home of Miss and Mme. Fisher, family friends, on her way to live with her grandmother in the south of France. Coincidentally a nine-year-old boy named Leopold is at the Fisher house the same day in order to be introduced to his birth mother, whom he has never met. By the end of the first section we know quite a few intriguing spoilers relating these characters, and a terrible sadness descends. Yet the tension in the novel never abates, as the second section ("The Past") goes ten years back to introduce us to Leopold's mother Karen, his father, and reintroduce their mutual friend Miss Fisher. This section is told from Karen's point of view and is set in London, Ireland, and France. We then return to the present and the Fisher house, where yet more surprising plotting unfolds.
Some of my favorite passages:
The inside of the house – with its shallow door-panels, lozenge door-knobs, polished brass ball on the end of the banisters, stuffy red matt paper with stripes to artfully shadowed as to appear bars – was more than simply novel to Henrietta, it was antagonistic, as though it had been invented to put her out. She felt the house was acting, nothing seemed to be natural; objects did not wait to be seen but came crowding in on her, each with what amounted to its aggressive cry.
Leopold lives unhappily in Italy with his adoptive family:
Spezia offered Leopold almost nothing: his precocity devoured itself there, rejecting the steep sunny coast and nibbling blue edge of the sea that had drowned Shelley. His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite.
An excerpt from a letter in which Leopold's adoptive parents explain the delicate way they are raising him:
“We do not consider him ripe for direct sex-instruction yet, though my husband is working towards this through botany and mythology. When the revelation regarding himself must come, what better prototypes could he find than the Greek and other heroes, we feel. His religious sense seems to be still dormant. We are educating him on broad undenominational lines such as God is Love.”
Leopold's birth mother, ten years in the past, visits relatives in County Cork:
Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone her pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say “Oh look!” Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.
May 31, 2012
When I started this book, I wondered if I would make it to the end. Everything seemed disjointed. No one spoke or acted as real people spoke or acted (at least not as I've experienced them). The children weren't really children; the adults...not sure what they were.
Then I came to the middle section labeled "The Past". This section opened the book up for me, making the characters real, illuminating the author's choices (for me) even for the strange dialogue and monologue choices. Everything else seemed to flow then. Evil people were still evil, weak were still weak, foolish still foolish, but now I could see sense in the arc of the novel. Reality didn't exist until after that middle section had been explained (in my "Paris world view"). Then there could be closure of sorts.
So I will not give spoilers for the plot...the major points are there in the GR description. This is not a book for everyone as plot is not going to carry the reader along. There is a lot of talk. So be ready for patient reading.
3.5 to 3.75, rounded to 4
Then I came to the middle section labeled "The Past". This section opened the book up for me, making the characters real, illuminating the author's choices (for me) even for the strange dialogue and monologue choices. Everything else seemed to flow then. Evil people were still evil, weak were still weak, foolish still foolish, but now I could see sense in the arc of the novel. Reality didn't exist until after that middle section had been explained (in my "Paris world view"). Then there could be closure of sorts.
So I will not give spoilers for the plot...the major points are there in the GR description. This is not a book for everyone as plot is not going to carry the reader along. There is a lot of talk. So be ready for patient reading.
3.5 to 3.75, rounded to 4
April 1, 2009
"But to be quite oneself one must first waste a little time."
What a coincidence--I just stumbled onto this group at the precise moment I'm reading The House in Paris! In the 90s, I wrote my diss on Bowen and other neglected British women authors (Olivia Manning, Storm Jameson, Antonia White, Betty Miller [Jonathan's mother:], Rebecca West), but mainly Bowen; she was my portal into the work of these women writing in Woolf's shadow. Last week, I reviewed Victoria Glendinning's biography of Bowen and was reminded that for all her resemblance to James, Bowen was an Impressionist, which approach Glendinning attributes in some degree to the fact that Bowen was extremely nearsighted and hated to wear her glasses. Thus those long, blurry, inferential descriptions of landscapes and interiors, as well as the extremely detailed accounts of faces (Max's, for instance). As with James, the reader has to surrender to Bowen's primary sensibility of life with the lid on--what's going on inside, what heated it, what's radiating unseen, how powerful those invisible, usually unconscious motives. You have the easiest time if you just let her take you where she's going (right down to the bone); those moments when you suddenly find yourself trying to decode pronoun reference happen when you come up for air, try to frame what you're reading in some more familiar shape. You just get in your own way.
That said, I must also confess that The House in Paris is the one of her novels I remembered having tried twice to get through and failing both times, chiefly because Henrietta and Leopold didn't seem like children but like miniature adults. But this time, she got me with "It is never natural for children to smile at each other." Now I am loving what a workout she is. And planning to reread several others, the more obscure (Eva Trout, To the North) as well as my well-worn favorites, The Heat of the Day and The Little Girls.
P. S. The end is brilliant. She earns everything. I wouldn't spoil it for you even if I hated you.
What a coincidence--I just stumbled onto this group at the precise moment I'm reading The House in Paris! In the 90s, I wrote my diss on Bowen and other neglected British women authors (Olivia Manning, Storm Jameson, Antonia White, Betty Miller [Jonathan's mother:], Rebecca West), but mainly Bowen; she was my portal into the work of these women writing in Woolf's shadow. Last week, I reviewed Victoria Glendinning's biography of Bowen and was reminded that for all her resemblance to James, Bowen was an Impressionist, which approach Glendinning attributes in some degree to the fact that Bowen was extremely nearsighted and hated to wear her glasses. Thus those long, blurry, inferential descriptions of landscapes and interiors, as well as the extremely detailed accounts of faces (Max's, for instance). As with James, the reader has to surrender to Bowen's primary sensibility of life with the lid on--what's going on inside, what heated it, what's radiating unseen, how powerful those invisible, usually unconscious motives. You have the easiest time if you just let her take you where she's going (right down to the bone); those moments when you suddenly find yourself trying to decode pronoun reference happen when you come up for air, try to frame what you're reading in some more familiar shape. You just get in your own way.
That said, I must also confess that The House in Paris is the one of her novels I remembered having tried twice to get through and failing both times, chiefly because Henrietta and Leopold didn't seem like children but like miniature adults. But this time, she got me with "It is never natural for children to smile at each other." Now I am loving what a workout she is. And planning to reread several others, the more obscure (Eva Trout, To the North) as well as my well-worn favorites, The Heat of the Day and The Little Girls.
P. S. The end is brilliant. She earns everything. I wouldn't spoil it for you even if I hated you.
February 11, 2022
I could barely look away from the middle section of this book. It’s divided into three, the first and last both labelled ‘The Present’; the middle is titled ‘The Past’. The book opens with the arrival of 11yo Henrietta at the Paris house of her grandmother’s friend, Miss Naomi Fisher, where she is to spend the day before continuing her trip to her grandmothers in the south of France. Also there is 8yo Leopold, an adopted boy there to meet his birth mother and Mme Fisher, Naomi’s mother who is ill in bed upstairs. The Past is the story of Leopolds parents and how he came to be. There is so much unsaid between the many characters particularly the upper class ones, they are more concerned with appearances than emotions and the story that is revealed is written in a precise way, almost constrained yet there is obviously powerful feelings guiding the actions off the characters. I’m sure this style would not be to everyone’s taste but I really enjoyed it, I’ll have to read more of her books!
Read
January 3, 2022Elizabeth Bowen foi a minha primeira tentativa na literatura feminina irlandesa, por isso a curiosidade pela sua biografia acompanhou a leitura e bem que o fez porque a mesma é relevante para a obra.
Aos sete anos, órfã de pai, Bowen vai viver para Inglaterra junto da mãe que morre dois anos depois. Daí, a jovem irá passar a viver em casa de familiares em Kent. Começa a escrever com 20, e aos 23 publica a primeira coleção de contos.
De escrita lenta e teor autobiográfico, cada livro de Bowen compreende cerca de 2 a 3 anos de trabalho. No entanto, mesmo a trabalhar para os serviços de informação durante a II Guerra Mundial, Bowen continua a produzir a intervalos regulares e publica diversos livros durante os anos que se seguem.
O livro A Casa de Paris (1935), versando sobre uma pequena Henrietta que parte para viver com a avó, fazendo uma paragem em casa das Fisher - à semelhança da pequena Bowen -, não esgota aqui as referências autobiográficas:
reflete também, ao que parece, o triângulo amoroso em que a escritora se viu envolvida nos anos 20/30 e que alimenta a narrativa de fundo que se nos apresenta.
Face à negligência e ao abandono que ela própria conheceu, Bowen responde com uma obra focada e clara, inteiramente dominada por si e onde nada, mas mesmo nada, se sacrifica ao estilo. Desenrolado-se em três momentos distintos: presente, passado e presente (que depois de conhecido o passado não volta a ser o presente de anteriormente), a complexa trama tecida por Bowen, em torno de duas crianças sujeitas ao egoísmo, às vaidades e ao governo despótico de adultos bem intencionados, fornece um vislumbre de prosa de cariz psicológico, repleta de nuances e de uma atmosfera intemporal que apenas acrescentam ao seu magnífico trabalho.
Enquanto debate e explora as implicações psicológicas e o impacto das escolhas impostas na vida das crianças pelos adultos, a escritora não deixa de apelar ao nosso raciocínio como à nossa capacidade de maravilhamento perante os mistério da Vida que assumem as mais diversas formas:
"Quando três ou mais pessoas se juntam, paira uma certa audácia no ar: dizem-se diretamente coisas que assustariam só duas pessoas, milimetricamente conscientes de quão próximas estão uma da outra. Três é como estar em público, as pessoas sentem-se seguras; aquela pessoa que antes estava tão próxima torna-se um rosto do outro lado do tabuleiro. Somos menos nós próprios do que antes? Jamais o saberemos."
117
Oferecendo ao leitor uma posição privilegiada de espectadore omnipresente, Bowen trabalha também os tempos verbais, enquanto usa e abusa de flashbacks, de modo a aproximar o tempo da nossa leitura daquele da ação.
E assim, aquilo que temos é uma longa e complicada história de adultos apresentada e trazida até nós pelo olhar e pela curiosidade de duas crianças. O mérito de Bowen, porém, não se limita a um enredo interessante, uma forma culta ou um estilo polido, a sua escrita é de uma beleza enternecedora, cada palavra é medida e pensadas para ocupar determinado lugar em determinada frase.
Não se acabam aqui os elogios possíveis. E a vida de Bowen é interessante o suficiente para merecer também ela maior reflexão e pesquisa, mas as leituras são pessoais e não devemos deixar mais que o suficiente para influenciar (esperamos sempre fazê-lo) outros a explorar estas obras. Roubá-los do prazer de descobrir cada frase neste livro seria um crime.
Com um começo assim compete agora partir para mais leituras no feminino e mais leituras que nos cheguem da Irlanda.
Para abrir caminho, esta foi a escolha mais que acertada.
Aos sete anos, órfã de pai, Bowen vai viver para Inglaterra junto da mãe que morre dois anos depois. Daí, a jovem irá passar a viver em casa de familiares em Kent. Começa a escrever com 20, e aos 23 publica a primeira coleção de contos.
De escrita lenta e teor autobiográfico, cada livro de Bowen compreende cerca de 2 a 3 anos de trabalho. No entanto, mesmo a trabalhar para os serviços de informação durante a II Guerra Mundial, Bowen continua a produzir a intervalos regulares e publica diversos livros durante os anos que se seguem.
O livro A Casa de Paris (1935), versando sobre uma pequena Henrietta que parte para viver com a avó, fazendo uma paragem em casa das Fisher - à semelhança da pequena Bowen -, não esgota aqui as referências autobiográficas:
reflete também, ao que parece, o triângulo amoroso em que a escritora se viu envolvida nos anos 20/30 e que alimenta a narrativa de fundo que se nos apresenta.
Face à negligência e ao abandono que ela própria conheceu, Bowen responde com uma obra focada e clara, inteiramente dominada por si e onde nada, mas mesmo nada, se sacrifica ao estilo. Desenrolado-se em três momentos distintos: presente, passado e presente (que depois de conhecido o passado não volta a ser o presente de anteriormente), a complexa trama tecida por Bowen, em torno de duas crianças sujeitas ao egoísmo, às vaidades e ao governo despótico de adultos bem intencionados, fornece um vislumbre de prosa de cariz psicológico, repleta de nuances e de uma atmosfera intemporal que apenas acrescentam ao seu magnífico trabalho.
Enquanto debate e explora as implicações psicológicas e o impacto das escolhas impostas na vida das crianças pelos adultos, a escritora não deixa de apelar ao nosso raciocínio como à nossa capacidade de maravilhamento perante os mistério da Vida que assumem as mais diversas formas:
"Quando três ou mais pessoas se juntam, paira uma certa audácia no ar: dizem-se diretamente coisas que assustariam só duas pessoas, milimetricamente conscientes de quão próximas estão uma da outra. Três é como estar em público, as pessoas sentem-se seguras; aquela pessoa que antes estava tão próxima torna-se um rosto do outro lado do tabuleiro. Somos menos nós próprios do que antes? Jamais o saberemos."
117
Oferecendo ao leitor uma posição privilegiada de espectadore omnipresente, Bowen trabalha também os tempos verbais, enquanto usa e abusa de flashbacks, de modo a aproximar o tempo da nossa leitura daquele da ação.
E assim, aquilo que temos é uma longa e complicada história de adultos apresentada e trazida até nós pelo olhar e pela curiosidade de duas crianças. O mérito de Bowen, porém, não se limita a um enredo interessante, uma forma culta ou um estilo polido, a sua escrita é de uma beleza enternecedora, cada palavra é medida e pensadas para ocupar determinado lugar em determinada frase.
Não se acabam aqui os elogios possíveis. E a vida de Bowen é interessante o suficiente para merecer também ela maior reflexão e pesquisa, mas as leituras são pessoais e não devemos deixar mais que o suficiente para influenciar (esperamos sempre fazê-lo) outros a explorar estas obras. Roubá-los do prazer de descobrir cada frase neste livro seria um crime.
Com um começo assim compete agora partir para mais leituras no feminino e mais leituras que nos cheguem da Irlanda.
Para abrir caminho, esta foi a escolha mais que acertada.
November 17, 2011
Rating: 2.75* of five
The Book Report: Henrietta and Leopold, two young people in transit, come together at the Paris house of Miss Fisher, a mousy spinster, and her formidable mother Madame Fisher. Henrietta is the granddaughter of an old frenemy of Madame's; Leopold has a less well-explained, more painful connection to the Fishers. He is there in the Fisher house to meet, for the first time, his mother. She gave him up for adoption because he was the product of a fling, a casual passion indulged with serious consequences. Many of them, in fact, and they continue to reverberate through the house in Paris...the lives of each person in the house start out the day without any portentous signs that, by the end of the day, there will be no one left standing unchanged.
My Review: Oh dear, oh dear, it's just no use. I can't like this book. It's sentimental, it's melodramatic, and I just didn't get off to a good start with it, since I detested Harriet the prim, smug little dumpling and abhorred wet, sniveling, spineless Miss Fisher.
The subtext of Harriet's grandmother's Sapphic affair with the invalid Madame Fisher, and the Big Reveal of Leopold's true connection to the Fishers, were not enough to make me change my low opinion of the book. Perhaps if I'd read it in 1935 I'd've been more enrapt. Here in 2011, not so much. I don't think Bowen was all that as a prose stylist, frankly, but I don't think the novel is her form. Her short fiction is far more limpidly written, and lucidly plotted. But still and all, the book isn't the worst I've ever read. I just wish it had been either shorter or longer. The middle section set in the past is awkwardly placed in the narrative, and the present-day bits don't really need it to make sense, so it should either be snipped out like an appendix or expanded to be a full narrative of its own.
Not recommended, but no travelers' advisories posted about it either. (Male readers take note, if while reading this book you feel an uncomfortable fullness in your abdomen, that's a uterus growing in response to your new, higher estrogen levels.)
The Book Report: Henrietta and Leopold, two young people in transit, come together at the Paris house of Miss Fisher, a mousy spinster, and her formidable mother Madame Fisher. Henrietta is the granddaughter of an old frenemy of Madame's; Leopold has a less well-explained, more painful connection to the Fishers. He is there in the Fisher house to meet, for the first time, his mother. She gave him up for adoption because he was the product of a fling, a casual passion indulged with serious consequences. Many of them, in fact, and they continue to reverberate through the house in Paris...the lives of each person in the house start out the day without any portentous signs that, by the end of the day, there will be no one left standing unchanged.
My Review: Oh dear, oh dear, it's just no use. I can't like this book. It's sentimental, it's melodramatic, and I just didn't get off to a good start with it, since I detested Harriet the prim, smug little dumpling and abhorred wet, sniveling, spineless Miss Fisher.
The subtext of Harriet's grandmother's Sapphic affair with the invalid Madame Fisher, and the Big Reveal of Leopold's true connection to the Fishers, were not enough to make me change my low opinion of the book. Perhaps if I'd read it in 1935 I'd've been more enrapt. Here in 2011, not so much. I don't think Bowen was all that as a prose stylist, frankly, but I don't think the novel is her form. Her short fiction is far more limpidly written, and lucidly plotted. But still and all, the book isn't the worst I've ever read. I just wish it had been either shorter or longer. The middle section set in the past is awkwardly placed in the narrative, and the present-day bits don't really need it to make sense, so it should either be snipped out like an appendix or expanded to be a full narrative of its own.
Not recommended, but no travelers' advisories posted about it either. (Male readers take note, if while reading this book you feel an uncomfortable fullness in your abdomen, that's a uterus growing in response to your new, higher estrogen levels.)
May 10, 2019
The most important thing I have to say here is do NOT choose the audio format, that is to say the audiobook narrated by Michal Friedman. Friedman’s over-dramatization makes it extremely difficult for a listener to make sense of the author’s intent. Words are not spoken clearly. Friedman makes all the characters sound as children. She does not pronounce even the simplest of French words correctly. The word “gare” in Gare du Nord in Paris, is but one example. She attempts to make the French characters sound French by fabricating a fake French intonation. This is the worst audiobook narration I have ever run into. I had been warned by other listeners that the narration was poor, but I mistakenly assumed I could get around this. The book I have given three stars, the audiobook only one! Listening to this was a struggle from start to finish.
Now with that off my chest. I will speak pf of my views of the novel, published first in 1935 and Elizabeth Bowen’s fifth.
The story is split into three sections, the first and the third take place on a single February day in a house in Paris, sometime after the First World War, probably at the end of the 1920s or the early 1930s. Two children, previously unknown to each other, are coincidentally there in the house on the same day. Neither are Parisians or even French. Both will soon be leaving. Henrietta is eleven and Leopold is nine. Leopold is to meet his mother, whom he has never met before! He has been living with adoptive parents in Italy. Henrietta will at the end of the day be travelling to her grandmother in southern France. The first and the third section are titled “The Present”.
The second section, titled “The Past”, delves into why Leopold will be meeting his mother now, for the first time in his life. It is about how his parents’ lives have shaped his. We shift from the kids’ lives in the present to the adults’ lives in the past. This section is however not necessarily true! Perhaps this explains why the situation is as it is.
The House in Paris is categorized as a modernist novel. The reader follows perceived thoughts and imaginings, stream of consciousness writing in the style of Virginia Woolf. She came to praise Bowen’s book, as did A.S. Byatt.There is an introduction written by A.S. Byatt which, to avoid spoilers, even she states might better be read at the end. Why wasn’t it placed there?!
In my view the strength of the book lies in its accurate and perceptive portrayal of how an adult versus a child views a given event. How does a child think and how might a child behave and how does an adult think and behave in a particular situation? Of course, they will not be the same but for both what has occurred before will have an effect. Bowen kept me thinking and comparing. Leopold’s behavior and thoughts stumped me at times. Would a nine-year-old child with Leopold’s background think this way? The reader observes the interaction between children and adults and their different ways of perceiving events.
I have an easier time with stream of consciousness when my thoughts correspond to those of the character whose thoughts we are following. This did not always happen here. Some thoughts I could not understand at all. Other times I was thinking the author got it just right. I would be super intrigued by how she had expressed an idea. All the time I was struggling to ignore how the narrator was influencing my perception of the lines. I might perhaps have given the book more stars had I been left in peace and not need to struggle against the audiobook narration.
***********************
The Death of the Heart 4 stars
The House in Paris 3 stars
The Demon Lover TBR in May 2019
Now with that off my chest. I will speak pf of my views of the novel, published first in 1935 and Elizabeth Bowen’s fifth.
The story is split into three sections, the first and the third take place on a single February day in a house in Paris, sometime after the First World War, probably at the end of the 1920s or the early 1930s. Two children, previously unknown to each other, are coincidentally there in the house on the same day. Neither are Parisians or even French. Both will soon be leaving. Henrietta is eleven and Leopold is nine. Leopold is to meet his mother, whom he has never met before! He has been living with adoptive parents in Italy. Henrietta will at the end of the day be travelling to her grandmother in southern France. The first and the third section are titled “The Present”.
The second section, titled “The Past”, delves into why Leopold will be meeting his mother now, for the first time in his life. It is about how his parents’ lives have shaped his. We shift from the kids’ lives in the present to the adults’ lives in the past. This section is however not necessarily true! Perhaps this explains why the situation is as it is.
The House in Paris is categorized as a modernist novel. The reader follows perceived thoughts and imaginings, stream of consciousness writing in the style of Virginia Woolf. She came to praise Bowen’s book, as did A.S. Byatt.There is an introduction written by A.S. Byatt which, to avoid spoilers, even she states might better be read at the end. Why wasn’t it placed there?!
In my view the strength of the book lies in its accurate and perceptive portrayal of how an adult versus a child views a given event. How does a child think and how might a child behave and how does an adult think and behave in a particular situation? Of course, they will not be the same but for both what has occurred before will have an effect. Bowen kept me thinking and comparing. Leopold’s behavior and thoughts stumped me at times. Would a nine-year-old child with Leopold’s background think this way? The reader observes the interaction between children and adults and their different ways of perceiving events.
I have an easier time with stream of consciousness when my thoughts correspond to those of the character whose thoughts we are following. This did not always happen here. Some thoughts I could not understand at all. Other times I was thinking the author got it just right. I would be super intrigued by how she had expressed an idea. All the time I was struggling to ignore how the narrator was influencing my perception of the lines. I might perhaps have given the book more stars had I been left in peace and not need to struggle against the audiobook narration.
***********************
The Death of the Heart 4 stars
The House in Paris 3 stars
The Demon Lover TBR in May 2019
February 29, 2016
Tessa Hadley in her marvelous novel The Past, said that she shamelessly borrowed the structure of her novel from this Elizabeth Bowen classic. At the time I read this, I had (shamefully) never heard of Bowen or The House in Paris. As in Hadley's novel, this book starts out and ends in "The Present". The focus of The Present is two children, Leopold and Henrietta, who are stopping at the house of Mme. Fisher in Paris for just a day as a connection point for further journeying. The bulk of this book is in the middle section "The Past", where we learn the backstory of one of these children and how they came to be connected to Mme. Fisher.
The House in Paris takes place in Paris, Ireland and London and is full of secrets, pregnant with expectation, energized by anticipation, misunderstanding, mistrust and cultural prejudice. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of this book, at once feeling slow and frenetic. Bowen's primary story-telling device is dialogue, dialogue filled with hidden meaning delivered in staccato. This tempo gets even more frenetic when Bowen writes in monologue, telling a person's thoughts. That aspect I found brilliant - don't our thoughts flood into our mind at that pace, often leading to confusion, heightened anxiety and doubt?
I wondered in the first section of The House in Paris if I would like it. But in the middle section, Bowen writes passages of such brilliant insight into friendship, loyalty, romantic relationships/situations that they often took my breath away. Maybe a book where the reader needs some "seasoning" to truly relate, but I ended up loving Bowen's story.
The House in Paris takes place in Paris, Ireland and London and is full of secrets, pregnant with expectation, energized by anticipation, misunderstanding, mistrust and cultural prejudice. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of this book, at once feeling slow and frenetic. Bowen's primary story-telling device is dialogue, dialogue filled with hidden meaning delivered in staccato. This tempo gets even more frenetic when Bowen writes in monologue, telling a person's thoughts. That aspect I found brilliant - don't our thoughts flood into our mind at that pace, often leading to confusion, heightened anxiety and doubt?
I wondered in the first section of The House in Paris if I would like it. But in the middle section, Bowen writes passages of such brilliant insight into friendship, loyalty, romantic relationships/situations that they often took my breath away. Maybe a book where the reader needs some "seasoning" to truly relate, but I ended up loving Bowen's story.
January 18, 2017
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0889b1lDescription: 1: From her deathbed, the sinister Madame Fisher weaves the lives of young Henrietta and Leopold as she manipulated others before them. But who is Karen, the mother who gave Leopold away? Will Madame Fisher reveal her secrets of love, scandal and death?
2: Apart for five years, Karen agrees to an illicit meeting with Max that is set to spark fatal consequences.
3: Fading fast, is scheming Mme Fisher sowing the seeds for the ultimate destruction of her house in Paris?
Stars Sara Kestelman as Mme Fisher, Sunny Ormonde as Karen, Susan Bovell as Naomi Fisher, John Duttine as Max, Ann Windsor as Aunt Violet, David King as Uncle Bill, Fiona Christie as Henrietta and Joshua Goodman as Leopold.
3* The Last September
CR The House in Paris
4* The Heat of the Day
3* The Demon Lover
4* Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh
Read
August 2, 2019A day fraught with drama and discovery in the Fisher residence in Paris…
This is the day in which eleven year old Henrietta is in transit to her grandmother’s house in the South of France, but having to spend a day in Paris with Madame and Miss Fisher until her next chaperone can join her to continue the journey.
This is the day when young Leopold has come to Paris with high hopes.
It will be a day of bitter disappointments, when a person young or old may be changed in a moment just as Karen’s life changed in a moment in the past. Who Karen is, and what happened in the past is revealed in the middle section of the novel.
#####
Some of the characters:
Mme Fisher: this sick old lady ls confined to her bed upstairs, but there is much more to her than meets the eye. I thoroughly enjoyed her conversation with Leopold.
Miss Naomi Fisher: “I am not femme du monde.” She fiddles and fusses and tries to please. In the process she drives Henrietta nuts by constantly telling her to go and play. Henrietta indignantly but politely replies: “‘We don’t really play very much.’”
Henrietta: Being told not to ask questions, she responds: “‘I never ask people things,’ said Henrietta coldly.’” and promptly asks questions. She doesn’t fuss over Leopold, but treats him somewhat indifferently which endears her to him to some degree. “Now he had said so much his excitement eased a little: he felt a cloudy liking for Henrietta and began to be glad she was in the room. Her matter-of-fact manner made him feel less extraordinary.”
Leopold: Leopold is fussed over and nurtured. “He was over understood.” “Where he came from, kindness thickened the air and sentiment fattened on the mystery of his birth.” He is utterly fed up!
The section titled The Past tells the story of a different set of adults, but best not to say anything more here. The characterisation throughout is excellent, and even inanimate objects come alive: “The door shut behind them with a triumphant click.” Elizabeth Bowen deftly and eloquently deals with the disappointments and devastation in her characters’ lives.
#####
A few more quotes:
“But she could not hear the clock without seeing the pendulum, with that bright hypnotic disc at its tip, which set the beat of her thoughts till they were not thoughts.”
“There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.”
“That autumn they sent her away to a finishing school, from which she came back next year with an unchippable glaze.”
“You suppose the spools of negatives that are memory (from moments when the whole being was, unknown, exposed), developed without being cut for a false reason: entire letters, dialogues which, once spoken, remain spoken for ever being unwound from the dark, word by word.”
“‘I think that humour is English courage,’ she said.”
“Her words showered slowly on to Leopold, like cold slow drops detached by their own weight from a tree standing passive, exhausted after rain.”
“They both saw the crack across the crust of life.”
“Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone.”
This is the day in which eleven year old Henrietta is in transit to her grandmother’s house in the South of France, but having to spend a day in Paris with Madame and Miss Fisher until her next chaperone can join her to continue the journey.
This is the day when young Leopold has come to Paris with high hopes.
It will be a day of bitter disappointments, when a person young or old may be changed in a moment just as Karen’s life changed in a moment in the past. Who Karen is, and what happened in the past is revealed in the middle section of the novel.
#####
Some of the characters:
Mme Fisher: this sick old lady ls confined to her bed upstairs, but there is much more to her than meets the eye. I thoroughly enjoyed her conversation with Leopold.
Miss Naomi Fisher: “I am not femme du monde.” She fiddles and fusses and tries to please. In the process she drives Henrietta nuts by constantly telling her to go and play. Henrietta indignantly but politely replies: “‘We don’t really play very much.’”
Henrietta: Being told not to ask questions, she responds: “‘I never ask people things,’ said Henrietta coldly.’” and promptly asks questions. She doesn’t fuss over Leopold, but treats him somewhat indifferently which endears her to him to some degree. “Now he had said so much his excitement eased a little: he felt a cloudy liking for Henrietta and began to be glad she was in the room. Her matter-of-fact manner made him feel less extraordinary.”
Leopold: Leopold is fussed over and nurtured. “He was over understood.” “Where he came from, kindness thickened the air and sentiment fattened on the mystery of his birth.” He is utterly fed up!
The section titled The Past tells the story of a different set of adults, but best not to say anything more here. The characterisation throughout is excellent, and even inanimate objects come alive: “The door shut behind them with a triumphant click.” Elizabeth Bowen deftly and eloquently deals with the disappointments and devastation in her characters’ lives.
#####
A few more quotes:
“But she could not hear the clock without seeing the pendulum, with that bright hypnotic disc at its tip, which set the beat of her thoughts till they were not thoughts.”
“There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.”
“That autumn they sent her away to a finishing school, from which she came back next year with an unchippable glaze.”
“You suppose the spools of negatives that are memory (from moments when the whole being was, unknown, exposed), developed without being cut for a false reason: entire letters, dialogues which, once spoken, remain spoken for ever being unwound from the dark, word by word.”
“‘I think that humour is English courage,’ she said.”
“Her words showered slowly on to Leopold, like cold slow drops detached by their own weight from a tree standing passive, exhausted after rain.”
“They both saw the crack across the crust of life.”
“Never to lie is to have no lock to your door, you are never wholly alone.”
August 25, 2023
This may be my last Elizabeth Bowen. I read her Death of the Heart, some weeks ago. Had high hopes that this would be better. Her writing is lovely. Most of the time. Other times it seems straining too hard to be lovely. Many times I had to backtrack and reread in order to make a sentence scan into sense. Way too much mulling and discussing of the unmullable and undiscussable. Some things cannot be put into words, are best left for us to interpret through images and actions.
The little boy (whose name I've already forgotten) is like no little boy that I could believe in. His musings are more than precocious, they would be strange even in an adult. And what was the function of Henrietta? Is she an observer through whose eyes we are supposed to see the events unfold? But she is absent for a large portion of the book.
Maybe I just don't get it.
The little boy (whose name I've already forgotten) is like no little boy that I could believe in. His musings are more than precocious, they would be strange even in an adult. And what was the function of Henrietta? Is she an observer through whose eyes we are supposed to see the events unfold? But she is absent for a large portion of the book.
Maybe I just don't get it.
April 11, 2009
There’s a great introduction by A.S. Byatt, particularly interesting because it contained personal reminisces of multiple readings of the book.
I almost arbitrarily chose the star rating for this book. I’ve never had such a difficult time rating a book. Honestly, at times during reading it, I could have chosen anything from 1 to 5 stars. It was a bizarre reading experience for me. It’s the most exasperating book I’ve read in the almost 2 years since I joined Goodreads. With many books I’ve had a difficult time choosing whether to rate a book 4 or 5 stars or 3 or 4 stars or 2 or 3 stars, but I’ve never had any dilemma more challenging than that. If I wasn’t so compulsive about rating every single one of my read books, I’d be tempted to leave this unrated.
I had a difficult time getting used to the author’s writing style which was spare and unusual, but lovely too. I felt stupid while reading because the writing style made reading this book feel challenging for me, but I felt as though I shouldn’t find it difficult. Because her language was so precise, I caught at least some of her grammatical errors, notably split infinitives. The fact that I noticed such things in a novel meant I was sometimes almost bored or at least not completely engrossed. Despite the beautiful prose, it took some effort on my part not to skim at certain points, but I never wanted to stop reading.
The liberal use of quotation marks for all the dialogue was distracting for me until I became used to them about 2/3 through the book.
This book was full of melancholy. I enjoyed the two children Henrietta and Leopold; she doesn’t underestimate children, which I appreciated. She captures emotion very well, and pain and loss and how neglect feels, and childhood. However, I didn’t find her depictions of the motivations of some of the adults completely believable. There were many absolutely beautiful passages but overall the cohesiveness I wanted was lacking for me. My favorite parts were the beginning and the end.
Overall, this book was a challenge, but what I’m disappointed in is myself for feeling that way. I’d like to say I’d read it again someday to see if I could get more out of it, but there’s just too many other books I’d rather read.
Edit: After reading and rating/reviewing this, after just a short time has elapsed, this book is growing on me more & more.
I almost arbitrarily chose the star rating for this book. I’ve never had such a difficult time rating a book. Honestly, at times during reading it, I could have chosen anything from 1 to 5 stars. It was a bizarre reading experience for me. It’s the most exasperating book I’ve read in the almost 2 years since I joined Goodreads. With many books I’ve had a difficult time choosing whether to rate a book 4 or 5 stars or 3 or 4 stars or 2 or 3 stars, but I’ve never had any dilemma more challenging than that. If I wasn’t so compulsive about rating every single one of my read books, I’d be tempted to leave this unrated.
I had a difficult time getting used to the author’s writing style which was spare and unusual, but lovely too. I felt stupid while reading because the writing style made reading this book feel challenging for me, but I felt as though I shouldn’t find it difficult. Because her language was so precise, I caught at least some of her grammatical errors, notably split infinitives. The fact that I noticed such things in a novel meant I was sometimes almost bored or at least not completely engrossed. Despite the beautiful prose, it took some effort on my part not to skim at certain points, but I never wanted to stop reading.
The liberal use of quotation marks for all the dialogue was distracting for me until I became used to them about 2/3 through the book.
This book was full of melancholy. I enjoyed the two children Henrietta and Leopold; she doesn’t underestimate children, which I appreciated. She captures emotion very well, and pain and loss and how neglect feels, and childhood. However, I didn’t find her depictions of the motivations of some of the adults completely believable. There were many absolutely beautiful passages but overall the cohesiveness I wanted was lacking for me. My favorite parts were the beginning and the end.
Overall, this book was a challenge, but what I’m disappointed in is myself for feeling that way. I’d like to say I’d read it again someday to see if I could get more out of it, but there’s just too many other books I’d rather read.
Edit: After reading and rating/reviewing this, after just a short time has elapsed, this book is growing on me more & more.
March 10, 2014
I no longer remember what motivated me to read (or rather listen to) this novel, which is my first experience of Elizabeth Bowen's writing. It's an odd work and I'm not exactly sure what I think or how I feel about it.
What I'm in no doubt about, though, is that I wish I'd read the novel and not listened to it. This has nothing to do with the writing and everything to do with the main narrator, Elizabeth Jasicki. Her voices for a number of the characters were over-fussy and mannered, her French and Italian accents mediocre, her pronunciation of some words in English eccentric and her pronunciation of most words in French just plain wrong. I'll make every effort to ensure that in future I avoid books Ms Jasicki narrates.
Now that I've got that off my chest, back to the book. The action, such as it is, occurs on a single day when two children - Henrietta and Leopold - meet in a house in Paris. Henrietta is en route to the south of France, where she will join her grandmother. Leopold has come to Paris from his adoptive parents in Italy because his birth mother has indicated a desire to see him. The events of the day are separated by an imagined telling of the story of Leopold's parents and of how Leopold came to be born.
What I like most about this work is Bowen's characterisation of Henrietta and Leopold. Neither of them are especially likeable, but I found their thought processes and their reactions believable. I also like the way Bowen handled her themes: identity, time, secrets and lies, the relationship between mothers and their children. Another plus is the prose, which is sharp and clear, even though the dialogue can be a bit clunky.
Overall, though, this was a frustrating literary experience, made more so by the ordinary narration. How can a novel manage to be simple and intricate, interesting and dull, restrained and melodramatic - all at the same time? I'm usually excited when I discover a new author and look forward to reading more of their work. Not so much this time. It's possible that this novel will grow on me over the next few weeks, but it could also remain a work I admire more than I love. It contains both five star and one star moments. The final rating is an average of two possible scores.
January 17, 2017
From BBC Radio 4 Extra:
From her deathbed, the sinister Madame Fisher weaves the lives of young Henrietta and Leopold as she manipulated others before them.
But who is Karen, the mother who gave Leopold away? Will Madame Fisher reveal her secrets of love, scandal and death?
Episode 2 of 3
Apart for five years, Karen agrees to an illicit meeting with Max that is set to spark fatal consequences.
Episode 3 of 3
Fading fast, is scheming Mme Fisher sowing the seeds for the ultimate destruction of her house in Paris?
Elizabeth Bowen's classic novel dramatised in three-parts by Margaret Steward.
Stars Sara Kestelman as Mme Fisher, Sunny Ormonde as Karen, Susan Bovell as Naomi Fisher, John Duttine as Max, Ann Windsor as Aunt Violet, David King as Uncle Bill, Fiona Christie as Henrietta and Joshua Goodman as Leopold.
Music by Anthea Gomez.
Producer: Sue Wilson
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1994.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0889b1l
From her deathbed, the sinister Madame Fisher weaves the lives of young Henrietta and Leopold as she manipulated others before them.
But who is Karen, the mother who gave Leopold away? Will Madame Fisher reveal her secrets of love, scandal and death?
Episode 2 of 3
Apart for five years, Karen agrees to an illicit meeting with Max that is set to spark fatal consequences.
Episode 3 of 3
Fading fast, is scheming Mme Fisher sowing the seeds for the ultimate destruction of her house in Paris?
Elizabeth Bowen's classic novel dramatised in three-parts by Margaret Steward.
Stars Sara Kestelman as Mme Fisher, Sunny Ormonde as Karen, Susan Bovell as Naomi Fisher, John Duttine as Max, Ann Windsor as Aunt Violet, David King as Uncle Bill, Fiona Christie as Henrietta and Joshua Goodman as Leopold.
Music by Anthea Gomez.
Producer: Sue Wilson
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1994.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0889b1l
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