Providings

by Elspeth Davie

Since Providings, her first novel, was first published in 1965, Elspeth Davie has gained recognition as one of the most original and individual of current British writers, winner of many major literary prizes, whose starting point is the relationship between people and things. The capacity of inanimate objects to take over and rule our lives has always fascinated her, and from her acute observation of human frailty, this Edinburgh novelist has created a special world in which writing of great stylistic distinction is coloured with humour, whimsy and poignancy. Peter Beck has left home for the first time, but 'home' in the shape of parcels of jam, sent by his mother, pursues him everywhere. The jam piles up in his bed-sitting room and his attempts to dispose of it without actually throwing it away lead him into compromising or embarrassing situations. The jam comes to dominate his life as ultimately does the furniture he sells and all the other paraphernalia with which people clutter their lives. The publishers are reissuing Elspeth Davie s first three works of fiction simultaneously in 1984 in both Britain and in the United States of America.

Genres: Novels

202 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Elspeth Davie was born in Scotland but spent her earliest years in the south of England. She went to school in Edinburgh and trained at the University and Edinburgh College of Art. She taught painting for some years. Married, with one daughter, she lived for some time in Ireland before returning to Scotland. Her novels include Providings, Creating a Scene and Climbers on a Stair. Her collections of short stories include The Spark and The High Tide Talker.

Davie was awarded the 1978 Katherine Mansfield Prize for Short Stories. Her work was released by the world-famous Calder Publications. She was married to the Scottish philosopher and writer George Elder Davie.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The despair of the utterly everyday, expressed with the modest, absurd inevitability of a kind of more realist Stacey Levine, perhaps. Here, objects have a strange hold over their owners. Initially, this is expressed in the endless jams sent the protagonist by his mother, jams of which he can never unburden himsel, slowly filling the pantry with their inescapable gooey weight. Honestly, I got the idea here pretty quickly, but all this plot time devoted to jam, even symbolic jam, became rather trying. Later though, Davie broadens her object-focus to encompass the entirety of the home, as her protagonist struggles to complete a set of perfect model rooms at the furniture showroom. These ersatz homes constructed in furniture showrooms exert a peculiar power over my own imagination as they attempt to fabricate feelings of security, comfort, and belonging which they'll never actually be able to provide on their own, and so from about the midpoint, I was much more on board. Davie is a lost Calder author, seems worth pursuing further.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic case of right book//wrong time.

I fucking adore Elspeth Davie. Her cold, black Scottish heart is a thing of wonderment and deep happiness for me. Anyone that loves doing horrible shit to good people (fictive people) is alright in my annals. But this debut, like so many, is so knotted within itself that it gave me cramps (not the good Lux/Ivy variety). Davie has a truly original story to tell, and one oddly, if only harmonically, ringing of Gaddis' Recogs main tortured saint, but not yet the belief in herself to tell it, well, originally. That is, to tell it like only Elspeth Davie could. Whereas her later work is bettered by its economy and full-plunging into dialectical Glaswegian, here she's reticent to even give her character's LITERAL voice. When she does, they're imbedded in too-long paragraphs that get caught up in stage direction. Wait:

I have a shorthand for this: there are two types of authors: writers that are concerned with moving shit from A to B; and writers that credit their reader with the ability to make that synaptic leap for themselves based upon the assumption that the reader is not a fucking idiot. Let's call the first Naturalism, and the second, good (har). You get me, you know what I mean, etc. Anyone that has ever read, say, Stephen King knows that the man can move some fucking shit from A to B. Is it interesting? While not for me, I can't say anything other than the man has that facility. So do Zola and Dickens and countless, countless others. It's just not for me. If for you, do you...Wait:

An even shorter-handed version: I don't like Lou Reed. Lester Bangs famously described the 'Lou Reed School of Lyricism' (I'm paraphrasing), as 'There is a chair/I sit in the chair/I am sitting in the chair.' Which, to me, is as perfect a description of Lou Reed as it is this book. The only problem? I worship, anointed in funky oils, at the Altar of John Cale. I LOVE Davie just a little-scootch later, or, obviously, after she'd shaken off the Lou Reed in her.

There, that clears it all up. Phew

(Once again, I have number one hombre MJ Nichols to thank, yet again!, for hipping me to someone that would have never come on my radar ((however inadvertently he did this)). To repay in your Glaswegian tongue, "Youse my mensch.")