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The Holiday
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Celia lives in a London suburb with her beloved aunt in the post-war England of 1949. Witty, fragile, and quixotic, Celia is preoccupied with love—for her friends, her colleagues, her relatives, and especially for her adored cousin Casmilus, with whom she goes on holiday to visit Uncle Heber, the vicar. There they talk endlessly, argue, eat, tell stories, love, and hate. Wild humor alternates with waves of melancholy as Celia obsessively ponders the inevitable anguish of love. In this entrancing autobiographical tale, Stevie Smith captures the paradox of pain in all human affections.
Celia lives in a London suburb with her beloved aunt in the post-war England of 1949. Witty, fragile, and quixotic, Celia is preoccupied with love—for her friends, her colleagues, her relatives, and especially for her adored cousin Casmilus, with whom she goes on holiday to visit Uncle Heber, the vicar. There they talk endlessly, argue, eat, tell stories, love, and hate. Wild humor alternates with waves of melancholy as Celia obsessively ponders the inevitable anguish of love. In this entrancing autobiographical tale, Stevie Smith captures the paradox of pain in all human affections.
202 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1949
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About the author
Stevie Smith
73 books127 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist.
Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971), was an English poet and novelist.
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June 19, 2019The Holiday. Such a simple light-hearted title, a title you might expect to find on a schoolchild’s essay or a cheerful short story or a painting of pastel colored bathing huts or a prescription for wellness. But no, this narrative is not so easy to label.
In fact I struggled to think what sort of narrative it might be. It's not exactly memoir fiction as was Novel on Yellow Paper and the first half of Over the Frontier. Nor is it the dream-like adventure of the second half of the Frontier book though it does share some of the qualities of memoir and of dreaming.
Stevie Smith has chosen not to use her alter ego narrator Pompey from those other books here. Instead of Pompey we get Celia. Celia seems to have a life that resembles Pompey/Stevie's very closely; she lives with her aunt in a London suburb, works in an office in the city, parties with a bunch of well-to-do friends. But we hear about an extended family in this book, and most of the narrative concerns the two weeks she spends talking, talking, talking, with one of her cousins and their shared uncle, deep, deep, deep in the country.
Celia, how you do go on, he said.
Well, one does go on you know.
In an effort to put a label on what I was reading, I began to see the three characters in terms of the Christian Trinity figures, though if Stevie Smith had any such notion in mind, she keeps it well hidden. But still, that idea insisted on colonising my mind. The uncle appeared to me as a God the Father figure, semi-benevolent, semi-distant, altogether unfathomable. I imagined the cousin as a variation of the Holy Spirit, hovering protectively, full of knowledge, adept at foreign languages, but otherwise mysterious. Celia herself was very easy to envision as a Jesus figure. O, how she suffers! It's as if she carries all the woes of the world on her fragile frame. And she spends a lot of time wishing that the chalice of her suffering might pass, pass, pass from her.
There is another cousin in the story but he's mostly off stage. If I had to choose a symbolic role for him, I'd call him Death.
Celia thinks now and again of marrying him.
In fact I struggled to think what sort of narrative it might be. It's not exactly memoir fiction as was Novel on Yellow Paper and the first half of Over the Frontier. Nor is it the dream-like adventure of the second half of the Frontier book though it does share some of the qualities of memoir and of dreaming.
Stevie Smith has chosen not to use her alter ego narrator Pompey from those other books here. Instead of Pompey we get Celia. Celia seems to have a life that resembles Pompey/Stevie's very closely; she lives with her aunt in a London suburb, works in an office in the city, parties with a bunch of well-to-do friends. But we hear about an extended family in this book, and most of the narrative concerns the two weeks she spends talking, talking, talking, with one of her cousins and their shared uncle, deep, deep, deep in the country.
Celia, how you do go on, he said.
Well, one does go on you know.
In an effort to put a label on what I was reading, I began to see the three characters in terms of the Christian Trinity figures, though if Stevie Smith had any such notion in mind, she keeps it well hidden. But still, that idea insisted on colonising my mind. The uncle appeared to me as a God the Father figure, semi-benevolent, semi-distant, altogether unfathomable. I imagined the cousin as a variation of the Holy Spirit, hovering protectively, full of knowledge, adept at foreign languages, but otherwise mysterious. Celia herself was very easy to envision as a Jesus figure. O, how she suffers! It's as if she carries all the woes of the world on her fragile frame. And she spends a lot of time wishing that the chalice of her suffering might pass, pass, pass from her.
There is another cousin in the story but he's mostly off stage. If I had to choose a symbolic role for him, I'd call him Death.
Celia thinks now and again of marrying him.
January 2, 2022
I like Smith’s poetry better than her prose.
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
This novel was published in 1949, although it was written mostly before the war, Smith inserted the term post-war to update it. The character of Celia is based on Smith, even to the extent that she lived with her aunt and like Smith struggled with her mental health. Celia works for “The Ministry” along with a loose group of friends and relations. Towards the end of the rather brief novel there is a holiday to the depths of the countryside (rural Lincolnshire) to stay with Uncle Heber, a country vicar. The main protagonists are Clem and Tiny (twins who don’t get on), their sister Lopez and Caz (Casmilus), who appears to be Celia’s cousin and with whom she appears to be in love. There is little actually going on, but there is a great deal of talk about a wide variety of subjects; often politics, relationships, death and the meaning of life.
There are interesting descriptions of life and customs: ever heard of whale oil cake (I hadn’t and don’t have any desire to try it!) and as you would expect Smith’s prose does feel poetic. However there is often a twist:
“I left the kitchen and walked all over Heber's house, looking into the old rooms and trailing the dark passages. It is empty, it is very old and musty. The furniture is simple, it is what one wants and no more. There is a dagger over the fire-place in the hall. There is an old chest where Uncle Heber keeps his clean surplices. I go up to the back stairs where the servants used to tread, bringing trays and coal. I am glad we have got rid of them. I detest the servant class, they are the victims and the victimizers, there is no freedom where they are.”
In the London part of the book there is an Indian character. It was not entirely clear to me what Smith was trying to do with the discussions on India:
"The conversation now got into politics. Caz gave me a malicious look and said: We should quit India that is what we should do, there is nothing else for us to do but that; we should quite India.
It is not so simple as that, I said ... the rest of the world is very unanimous to say the English should quit India, Palestine, Malaya, the Antarctic and South Africa; but why, please? Why should the world, with none too clean a forefinger, point out the path of Sainthood for England to follow, while they go quite another way themselves? … And their social habits, these Indians, they are so pretty I suppose and so practical, eh? Burn the widows, rape the kids, up the castes, and hurrah for Indian legal probity ... The English law is above the world, I said, it is not to be bought, it is strong, flexible and impartial"
Other views are expressed and discussed, but there is a distinct aura of British superiority, even in leaving. Ambivalence about imperialism sloppily expressed I can do without.
There were positives and the writing is impressive, but it was too self-absorbed and sometimes too knowing.
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
This novel was published in 1949, although it was written mostly before the war, Smith inserted the term post-war to update it. The character of Celia is based on Smith, even to the extent that she lived with her aunt and like Smith struggled with her mental health. Celia works for “The Ministry” along with a loose group of friends and relations. Towards the end of the rather brief novel there is a holiday to the depths of the countryside (rural Lincolnshire) to stay with Uncle Heber, a country vicar. The main protagonists are Clem and Tiny (twins who don’t get on), their sister Lopez and Caz (Casmilus), who appears to be Celia’s cousin and with whom she appears to be in love. There is little actually going on, but there is a great deal of talk about a wide variety of subjects; often politics, relationships, death and the meaning of life.
There are interesting descriptions of life and customs: ever heard of whale oil cake (I hadn’t and don’t have any desire to try it!) and as you would expect Smith’s prose does feel poetic. However there is often a twist:
“I left the kitchen and walked all over Heber's house, looking into the old rooms and trailing the dark passages. It is empty, it is very old and musty. The furniture is simple, it is what one wants and no more. There is a dagger over the fire-place in the hall. There is an old chest where Uncle Heber keeps his clean surplices. I go up to the back stairs where the servants used to tread, bringing trays and coal. I am glad we have got rid of them. I detest the servant class, they are the victims and the victimizers, there is no freedom where they are.”
In the London part of the book there is an Indian character. It was not entirely clear to me what Smith was trying to do with the discussions on India:
"The conversation now got into politics. Caz gave me a malicious look and said: We should quit India that is what we should do, there is nothing else for us to do but that; we should quite India.
It is not so simple as that, I said ... the rest of the world is very unanimous to say the English should quit India, Palestine, Malaya, the Antarctic and South Africa; but why, please? Why should the world, with none too clean a forefinger, point out the path of Sainthood for England to follow, while they go quite another way themselves? … And their social habits, these Indians, they are so pretty I suppose and so practical, eh? Burn the widows, rape the kids, up the castes, and hurrah for Indian legal probity ... The English law is above the world, I said, it is not to be bought, it is strong, flexible and impartial"
Other views are expressed and discussed, but there is a distinct aura of British superiority, even in leaving. Ambivalence about imperialism sloppily expressed I can do without.
There were positives and the writing is impressive, but it was too self-absorbed and sometimes too knowing.
October 27, 2018
Kind of like Philip Larkin, Smith covers her learning with a lumpy grey tarp. Her tools are misleadingly simple, demotic words (in a novel written during WWII, it feels relevant to note that Churchill tried to use "Anglo-Saxon words with the least number of syllables"). "He always liked larking, now he's dead" (from her best known poem). The fact that, while publishing this book several years after the war had ended, she simply replaced occurrences of the term "war" with "post-war", which makes little sense in many places ("Will we ever win the post-war?" "How long will the post-war go on?") gives you a sense of the seeming unseriousness of her technique, and whether you think this lazy or inspired is a pretty good bellwether for your feelings on the novel. There is background chatter of India and Palestine, de Gaulle and Stalin, but none of it matters a whit, because the narrator is listless and unhappy, perhaps bipolar, nursing an unreciprocated crush on her cousin Casmilus. For my money, in its perfectly flat yet elegant evocation of ennui, it's a minor masterpiece.
Asking if things like Celia's bizarre jingoism is sincere seems beside the point. Much of this text is odd and unfamiliar in (for me) just the right way, talk of Gibbon and the countryside veering onto questions about Jupiter's atmosphere. Smith's character Celia (presumably somewhat autobiographical) is learned and terribly unhappy, bleeding her vulnerability onto the page, constantly crying and thinking of suicide. And yet for all that those around her seem to appreciate her company, much as the literary world gave great esteem and success to this anxious poet and her jagged mind.
Asking if things like Celia's bizarre jingoism is sincere seems beside the point. Much of this text is odd and unfamiliar in (for me) just the right way, talk of Gibbon and the countryside veering onto questions about Jupiter's atmosphere. Smith's character Celia (presumably somewhat autobiographical) is learned and terribly unhappy, bleeding her vulnerability onto the page, constantly crying and thinking of suicide. And yet for all that those around her seem to appreciate her company, much as the literary world gave great esteem and success to this anxious poet and her jagged mind.
December 13, 2022
I was hoping to love The Holiday as the premise sounded like something that I would appreciate: An office worker goes on holiday to her uncle and discusses a variety of topics. In reality my gripe with this book was the writing. At times the conversational tone and use of archaic expressions did not gel with me.
As a little bit of background Stevie Smith was a poet but had to write novels in order to have her poems accepted by publishers. In a way this could explain the language and the reason why The Holiday feels ‘forced’. Saying that it is her favourite one of the three but that still is not a redeeming factor in my eyes.
As always I am glad to have read The Holiday as it helps me distinguish what I like. I tend to find discussions about both the first and second world wars a bit of a bugbear with me as I think it’s a topic that’s been exhausted and it shows up quite a bit here. On a more positive note, The Holiday is autobiographical and I did like how Smith captured office politics but other than that, I can’t say that I really liked this book.
As a little bit of background Stevie Smith was a poet but had to write novels in order to have her poems accepted by publishers. In a way this could explain the language and the reason why The Holiday feels ‘forced’. Saying that it is her favourite one of the three but that still is not a redeeming factor in my eyes.
As always I am glad to have read The Holiday as it helps me distinguish what I like. I tend to find discussions about both the first and second world wars a bit of a bugbear with me as I think it’s a topic that’s been exhausted and it shows up quite a bit here. On a more positive note, The Holiday is autobiographical and I did like how Smith captured office politics but other than that, I can’t say that I really liked this book.
November 13, 2017
2.5 stars. Not gonna lie, spent most of this completely baffled.
It felt a bit like a party with too many people - noisy and overcrowded, with no space to connect. Not in terms of characters, and not really in terms of plot, because not much actually happens from what I understood. But our main character Celia often goes off on peculiar tangents which is really disorienting. Now I love a good daydream as much as the next person, but it’s not as fun to try follow somebody else’s erratic inner monologue.
I never felt connected or rooted enough to grasp if I was reading anything of note. I had to concentrate so much with this and I still didn’t take away anything - what was the point? For want of a better word, this novel was just unnecessarily busy.
There were some striking phrases on occasion, and some lines that made me titter a little. But all in all, I just didn’t gel with this writing style, and as a result this was nothing to write home about.
It felt a bit like a party with too many people - noisy and overcrowded, with no space to connect. Not in terms of characters, and not really in terms of plot, because not much actually happens from what I understood. But our main character Celia often goes off on peculiar tangents which is really disorienting. Now I love a good daydream as much as the next person, but it’s not as fun to try follow somebody else’s erratic inner monologue.
I never felt connected or rooted enough to grasp if I was reading anything of note. I had to concentrate so much with this and I still didn’t take away anything - what was the point? For want of a better word, this novel was just unnecessarily busy.
There were some striking phrases on occasion, and some lines that made me titter a little. But all in all, I just didn’t gel with this writing style, and as a result this was nothing to write home about.
August 3, 2014
First read 2006
"This hunger we have is a good thing, it is the long shin bone that shows the child will grow tall"
I can completely understand people finding Smith's prose irritatingly mannered or just incomprehensible. I seem to be very attuned to her, and to have similar feelings about love and friendship, so that I feel she has taken a short cut and gone right to the marrow of what she wants to say. Like many other poets, Smith is able to write about emotional responses, love and relationships in a sharply evocative way, using images and figurative language to say what most of us find incommunicable. In Smith's case, there is an originality, freshness and quirkiness about her whimsical (but never sentimental) style of poetry that makes her ideas leap to life in my mind with great energy.
This book, presumed to be loosely autobiographical or at least featuring a version of Smith as the protagonist, is an almost plotless account from the point of view of Celia, a single young woman who lives in London with her aunt, of a fortnight of her social life in an atmosphere of post-war malaise, which includes a holiday with her uncle in Lincolnshire. She is often brilliant and funny when it comes to describing social situations, and her characters all dance off the page. One of them, Basil, is based on George Orwell, whom Smith knew.
Celia is emotionally fragile, even suicidal, and very engaged in reconstructing an image of England in the post-war period. God and Death constantly lurch into her consciousness, and there are countless provocative political statements. Since I am dedicated to decolonisation, I will share some of these:
"[the middle classes] could not have the gay and lackadaisical carelessness of the poor, who, living from hand to mouth, did indeed take no thought for the morrow"
This conversation goes on, with Celia's horrible position much criticised with the evils committed in India by the British, but she takes refuge in defensive post-war patriotism that seems to justify any injustice in the spirit of the times. She ends the conversation:
I have to downgrade this book a whole star for that paragraph of embarrassing false foolish nonsense. But the argument does go on, it is not allowed to stand, and on the next page she says at least "nothing is simple, nothing to be settled." And I see it is the war and the propaganda of imperialism and the spirit of the times that makes her opinions so ridiculous.
To get the bad taste out, here are some nice bits, by which you might decide whether or not to read it:
"This hunger we have is a good thing, it is the long shin bone that shows the child will grow tall"
I can completely understand people finding Smith's prose irritatingly mannered or just incomprehensible. I seem to be very attuned to her, and to have similar feelings about love and friendship, so that I feel she has taken a short cut and gone right to the marrow of what she wants to say. Like many other poets, Smith is able to write about emotional responses, love and relationships in a sharply evocative way, using images and figurative language to say what most of us find incommunicable. In Smith's case, there is an originality, freshness and quirkiness about her whimsical (but never sentimental) style of poetry that makes her ideas leap to life in my mind with great energy.
This book, presumed to be loosely autobiographical or at least featuring a version of Smith as the protagonist, is an almost plotless account from the point of view of Celia, a single young woman who lives in London with her aunt, of a fortnight of her social life in an atmosphere of post-war malaise, which includes a holiday with her uncle in Lincolnshire. She is often brilliant and funny when it comes to describing social situations, and her characters all dance off the page. One of them, Basil, is based on George Orwell, whom Smith knew.
Celia is emotionally fragile, even suicidal, and very engaged in reconstructing an image of England in the post-war period. God and Death constantly lurch into her consciousness, and there are countless provocative political statements. Since I am dedicated to decolonisation, I will share some of these:
"[the middle classes] could not have the gay and lackadaisical carelessness of the poor, who, living from hand to mouth, did indeed take no thought for the morrow"
"The conversation now got into politics. Caz gave me a malicious look and said: We should quit India[...] It is not so simple as that, I said[...] the rest of the world is very unanimous to say the Englih should quit India, Palestine, Malaya, the Antarctic and South Africa; but why, please? Why should the world, with none too clean a forefinger, point out the path of Sainthood for England to follow, while they go quite another way themselves? [...] And their social habits, these Indians, they are so pretty I suppose and so practical, eh? Burn the widows, rape the kids, up the castes, and hurrah for Indian legal probity[...] The English law is above the world, I said, it is not to be bought, it is strong, flexible and impartial"
This conversation goes on, with Celia's horrible position much criticised with the evils committed in India by the British, but she takes refuge in defensive post-war patriotism that seems to justify any injustice in the spirit of the times. She ends the conversation:
"We are leaving India. It is a thing beyond thought in the world's history, it is the first time since men grew to cities and government, the first time that a great Power in the full flush of the greatest victory that men have won, it is the first time that such a Power has taken its vassal country, its under-nation for three hundred years in liege, and given it freedom; it is the first time a great colonizing Power, not driven by weakness but in strength choosing to go, has walked out for conscience sake and for the feeling that the time has come. That is the answer to the voices in the night"
I have to downgrade this book a whole star for that paragraph of embarrassing false foolish nonsense. But the argument does go on, it is not allowed to stand, and on the next page she says at least "nothing is simple, nothing to be settled." And I see it is the war and the propaganda of imperialism and the spirit of the times that makes her opinions so ridiculous.
To get the bad taste out, here are some nice bits, by which you might decide whether or not to read it:
"When I was on the diabolical coast of Cornwall for my last leave I was at the Lizard, it was on a farm just outside Lizard Town. There the Atlantic fog came drifting over the cliffs, and the rocks and boulders lay with their scorched black bottoms to the heavy skies, this volcanic and terrible upheaval of the Cornish scene. And all the time it was the heavy skies, the wind and the rain, and then a great calm, and so foggy. We used to grope our way down to the bathing coves, through the fog to Church Cove, going through the cemetery, where the old church tower stood with its chest-mat of heavy ivy, and had need of it, and we used to dive off the rocks of Church Cove, guessing where the sea might be by the faint lapping of the waves against a hidden base."
"I think that [intellectuality...] runs mostly with the twenty-to-fifty years of man, and that instinctuality, that brings with it so much glee, so much pleasure that cannot be told, so much of a vaunting mischievous humility, so much of a truly imperial meekness, runs with childhood and old age; and as I am by nature of this type of person, it is perhaps because I now run in these middleyears that I am not enjoying it but must cast ever backwards to my childhood and forwards to my old age.[...] The feeling of full enjoyment will flood in again, we must get through these middle years"
November 14, 2021
Quite a challenging read, best read in long chunks as it feels quite disjointed as you jump from dialogue to the retelling of a scenario that took place in previous years. I wondered if this structure reflected how lost and disjointed people felt immediately after the end of the Second World War. How does everyone build a new world when they are getting back to ordinary life ?
July 24, 2022
The last of Stevie Smith's three novels--the first two were Novel on Yellow Paper, 1936, and Over the Frontier, 1939--The Holiday is set in England after World War II, probably in 1946 or 1947, as it takes place before Indian Independence (which however is in the air). Celia works in an unnamed government ministry, where she edits essays and stories published by the state. The first half of the book tracks her life there and at home with her aunt in the week or so leading up to her annual vacation; the second half takes places at the country residence of her uncle Heber, up north.
The foci of the novel are two. Celia is in love with her cousin Casmilus ("Caz"). They cannot marry, even though she desperately wants to, because, Caz insists, they are not cousins but half-siblings. While visiting Edward and Eve, Edward being another of Celia's uncles, in India, Celia's father had an affair with Eve and Caz is the product. There is no irrefutable evidence except Caz's own insistence that it's true, based on looks the two shared and his sense. Celia admits he's right, probably, intellectually, but emotionally cannot untie herself from Caz. There is a scene where she goes swimming naked and is carried away by the current; Caz, happening by, rescues her--it's far from clear she needed rescuing--and they converse on the bank, Celia completely unfazed by her state of undress. Other times she rests her head on Caz's shoulder, and once he lies stretched out on top of her. But none of these charged acts go any farther; Celia ends the book just as sad as she begins it.
The other theme is imperialism, especially what it meant for Britain and what should happen now that the war's over, Britain won, but has been left economically devastated. There is resentment against the Americans who claim full credit for the victory and superciliously demand Britain divest itself of its colonies; at the same time, Celia and at least some in her friendship circle see the empire as a distorting, damaging enterprise Britain needs to shed in order to recover. Celia has an Indian friend, Raji, her age, whom she met during a sojourn in India as a child; he is circumspect, but highly educated and smart, he clearly stands for the leadership class opposed to the empire and eager to see the last of the British.
Smith's characters are all beautifully drawn, with their own diverse and fully imagined personalities. The writing is classic Smith, in her rather mannered, choppy, funny prose, though toned down a bit from Novel on Yellow Paper. She's sui generis; every devotee of smart, personal English prose needs to read her.
The foci of the novel are two. Celia is in love with her cousin Casmilus ("Caz"). They cannot marry, even though she desperately wants to, because, Caz insists, they are not cousins but half-siblings. While visiting Edward and Eve, Edward being another of Celia's uncles, in India, Celia's father had an affair with Eve and Caz is the product. There is no irrefutable evidence except Caz's own insistence that it's true, based on looks the two shared and his sense. Celia admits he's right, probably, intellectually, but emotionally cannot untie herself from Caz. There is a scene where she goes swimming naked and is carried away by the current; Caz, happening by, rescues her--it's far from clear she needed rescuing--and they converse on the bank, Celia completely unfazed by her state of undress. Other times she rests her head on Caz's shoulder, and once he lies stretched out on top of her. But none of these charged acts go any farther; Celia ends the book just as sad as she begins it.
The other theme is imperialism, especially what it meant for Britain and what should happen now that the war's over, Britain won, but has been left economically devastated. There is resentment against the Americans who claim full credit for the victory and superciliously demand Britain divest itself of its colonies; at the same time, Celia and at least some in her friendship circle see the empire as a distorting, damaging enterprise Britain needs to shed in order to recover. Celia has an Indian friend, Raji, her age, whom she met during a sojourn in India as a child; he is circumspect, but highly educated and smart, he clearly stands for the leadership class opposed to the empire and eager to see the last of the British.
Smith's characters are all beautifully drawn, with their own diverse and fully imagined personalities. The writing is classic Smith, in her rather mannered, choppy, funny prose, though toned down a bit from Novel on Yellow Paper. She's sui generis; every devotee of smart, personal English prose needs to read her.
June 22, 2017
If "Katy t3h PeNgU1N oF d00m", Sheldon Cooper and Grandpa Simpson had a child that was in her twenties after the second world war, the protagonist of this "novel" would be her. Reading this book is boring and tedious, nothing of merit pulls through to make you at least appreciate the effort that went into it or just anything about it at all. It reads like the author vomited a bunch of random thoughts on paper and called it a day. Celia, the main character, is insufferable and extremely annoying. The book basically consists of her going on massive rants about politics, social issues, art, etc. interspersed with sprinklings of a „plot“, that is so thin and weak it is basically on life support. Her smugness and intellectual snobbery read like a post on reddit.com/r/iamverysmart. Pretentious, nonsensical and just plain tedious and boring, I don't recommend this book to anyone who values their time.
February 13, 2023
"So what are they about? Oh people, said the young man. People? said the countess-ah, they are very difficult." ; "Oh, I say, if we were meant to come back to God, why were we sent out, why were we sent away? I wish for innocence more than anything, but I am conscious only of corruption."
September 30, 2020
Couldn't finish this. I didn't in fact reach the titular holiday as I was so irritated by the "ADHD" grasshopper style and the wittering upper-class heroine and her pretentious friends, who work in non-jobs in the Ministry of Something-or-other in post-WWII London. The author was a noted poet who was told by one of her publishers she should switch to fiction. I hope she switched back and that her poetry is better than this drivel.
April 26, 2024
Then I come back to the Ministry, and I lie down upon the floor of the lavatory and stare up at the ceiling where the plaster has been shaken off. I feel absolutely ghost-girl deficient. Ah, how much it tears.
It is not that life is so awful, but that I am, there is no end to the pain and fear, and to the general shiftiness of my character, I said, as it were to God, but actually to Caz.
It is not that life is so awful, but that I am, there is no end to the pain and fear, and to the general shiftiness of my character, I said, as it were to God, but actually to Caz.
August 26, 2020
i wanted to enjoy this book so much as I love her poetry, but i struggled through the first third and just could not enjoy the writing style or the narrative itself. I could not engage with the characters, found it confusing to follow what was actually meant to be happening and thought it was a shame. So although i have finished with it i did not finish it and that is rare for me with any books.
Read
October 24, 2023hm. I am not quite sure what to think. I like Stevie Smith but her prose leans a little too Duras for me to uncomplicatedly enjoy, a little too poetic, a little too emotionally strange if that makes sense. but I won't discount her - and it isn't to say I didn't enjoy the book - but perhaps not as much as I was expecting to anyway. anyway I like her anyway.
May 28, 2019
At times, this felt like a slog - but dotted through with lyrical sentences and poetry... a difficult read!
November 18, 2020
Not my cup of tea at all - in fact I am struggling to finish it! I had high hopes of this one, but have found it dated and tedious I am afraid. To much description of nothing much at all.
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October 29, 2021No stars cos I didn't finish it. Might give it another go at a later date.
August 9, 2022
It’s hard to “rate” a book like this—virtually without plot or direction but full of amusing, sharp, biting writing. The poems are her heart, of course, but this is not to be shunned.
November 16, 2025
Cousin attraction wrapped in cotton candy
March 15, 2025
Poets write the best prose, and Stevie Smith is the prime example of this fact. The lack of speech punctation throughout the novel is a compelling choice. I do hate, however, the poetry that the narrator intersperses among the prosaic content. And I'm afraid the actual plot didn't really stick in my mind at all.
Despite its flaws there is infinitely more to enjoy than not. Smith is the original sadgirl and the headiness and angst of this novel is extremely attractive. "When I was talking to Harley at the Ministry one day about my poems, he said, I am rather disturbed about this death feeling in your poems.
"Oh, I said, that is nothing, that death feeling, it is absolutely nothing."
Despite its flaws there is infinitely more to enjoy than not. Smith is the original sadgirl and the headiness and angst of this novel is extremely attractive. "When I was talking to Harley at the Ministry one day about my poems, he said, I am rather disturbed about this death feeling in your poems.
"Oh, I said, that is nothing, that death feeling, it is absolutely nothing."
March 11, 2010
Whew. This one was so much harder for me to get through than Novel on Yellow Paper! To be honest, I still have 15-20 pages of it left. Not much of a plot, which was expected, but instead of making up in richness what it lacked in plot, I sort of just found myself completely detached from her friendships and affairs in this one. Still a devout Stevie Smith fan, though. It did have its blindingly gorgeous moments.
July 15, 2009
At the halfway mark I doubt I could love this book more. When not reading it, I long to hop back in the company of Celia, guided by Smith's beautiful prose.
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May 14, 2019"Why do you not always work hard and so forget your beastly unhappiness? Oh well, that is just to say, I am happy when I am unconscious."
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