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The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Free Ebook The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald
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Short-listed for the Booker Prize
“Fitzgerald was the author of several slim, perfect novels. The Blue Flower and The Beginning of Spring both had me abuzz for days the first time I read them. She was curiously perfect.”— Teju Cole, author of Open City
“Writing so precise and lilting it can make you shiver.” — Los Angeles Times
March 1913. Moscow is stirring herself to meet the beginning of spring. English painter Frank Reid returns from work one night to find that his wife has gone away; no one knows where or why, or whether she’ll ever come back. All Frank knows for sure is that he is now alone and must find someone to care for his three young children.
Into Frank’s life comes Lisa Ivanovna, a quiet, calming beauty from the country, untroubled to the point of seeming simple. But is she? And why has Frank’s bookkeeper, Selwyn Crane, gone to such lengths to bring these two together?
This new edition features an introduction by Andrew Miller, author of Pure, along with new cover art.
- Sales Rank: #375287 in eBooks
- Published on: 1998-09-03
- Released on: 2013-06-11
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
In March 1913, Frank Reid's wife abruptly leaves him and Moscow for her native England. Naturally, she takes their daughters and son with her. The children, however, only make it as far as the train station--and even after returning home remain unaffected by their brief exile. "They ought either to be quieter or more noisy than before," their father thinks, "and it was disconcerting that they seemed to be exactly the same." Frank's routines, however, drift into disorder as he tries desperately to take charge of life at home and work. Even his printing plant is suddenly confronted by the specters of modernization and utter instability.
In Penelope Fitzgerald's fiction, affection and remorse are all too often allied, and desire and design seem never to meet. Frank wants little more than a quiet, confident life--something for which he is deeply unsuited, and which Russia certainly will not go out of her way to provide. The Beginning of Spring is filled with echoes of past wrongs and whispers of the revolution to come, even if the author evokes these with abrupt comic brio. (In one disturbance, "A great many shots had hit people for whom they were not intended.") As ever, Fitzgerald makes us care for--and want to know ever more about--her characters, even the minor players. Her two-page description of Frank's chief type compositor, for instance, is a miracle of precision and humor, sympathy and mystery. And the accountant Selwyn Crane--a Tolstoy devotée, self-published poet, and expert at making others feel guilty--is a sublime creation. His appetite for do-gooding is insatiable. After one fit of apparent altriusm, "Selwyn subsided. Now that he saw everything was going well, his mind was turning to his next charitable enterprise. With the terrible aimlessness of the benevolent, he was casting round for a new misfortune." As she evokes her household of tears and laughter, Fitzgerald's prose is as witty as ever, rendering the past present and the modern timeless. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
Booker Prize-winner Fitzgerald ( Offshore ; Innocence ) reveals here the depth of a distinct and imaginative talent to amuse. Set in Moscow in the spring of 1913, the story concerns an English household that has fallen apart with the unexpected flight of Nellie Reid, a good and proper wife and heretofore devoted mother of three young children. (Fitzgerald is especially good at very droll children.) Nellie's husband, Frank, must carry on with his family and printing business while holding out hope for her return. A mysterious young woman from the countryside--she may be a dryad--is engaged to care for the children, and the plot, such as it is, takes many unexpected turns. But one doesn't read Fitzgerald for plot structure so much as for her sheer powers of invention: her novel raises more questions than it means to answer. Rich in subtle characterizations, wit and wonderfully textured prose, Fitzgerald's seventh novel succeeds in evoking the very essence of life one long-ago spring at 22 Lipka Street.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Set in Moscow in 1913, this tale chronicles several months in the life of Frank Reid, who is mysteriously deserted by his wife and must engage the simple peasant girl Lisa Ivanova to care for his three small children. Reid plods along in a remarkably mundane existence, relating to everyone with an amazing, unflagging apathy. Even an armed student radical who breaks into his shop and shoots at him cannot stir him to action. Lisa, to her credit, manages to stir him briefly to passion. The sole bright spot in this otherwise bleak, boring saga is Reid's hilariously precocious daughter, Dolly, whose abrupt, insightful comments are priceless. In this story, resolved anticlimactically in the last line of the text, there is very little spring, but a lot of grim, eternal winter.
- Ronald L. Coombs, SUNY Health Science Ctr. at Brooklyn Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
123 of 132 people found the following review helpful.
Not For Every Taste
By Paul Frandano
Cutting straight to the chase after reading the very polarized views of other reviewers: Although Penelope Fitzgerald's slender novel contains much to admire, it is most certainly not composed to be a popular entertainment, and its successes will appeal more to admirers of "literary fiction"--and, hence, to "critics"--than perhaps to the general reader. Fitzgerald presumes the reader knows something, and cares, about the late 18th Century context; she hopes we might be stimulated by imagining contemporaries of Fichte and Kant discussing their ideas; she presumes that, to us, "romanticism" is more than a word or a line from Shelly and that, by recovering, or compiling, everyday details from a time and world long lost, she can help us understand the romantic sensibility and, ultimately, Hardenberg's--and our--ambiguous longing for "the Blue Flower."
I particularly enjoyed Fitzgerald's vignette approach--55 short chapters, each of which is a set piece, generally with a wry punchline--which allows Fitzgerald to view Friedrich von Hardenberg's improbable romance at odd angles. I for one marvel at this choice of subject, a decision by a professional author as seemingly improbable and hopelessly romantic as the subject itself.
And yet, despite the author's absolute mastery of her material, her strong cast of winning characters, and the wonderful--although irretrievably high-brow--sense of humor suffusing the entire narrative, I never felt myself emotionally drawn in. One reads on because each page is delightful, and, for many readers (obviously, me included) this is sufficient. But on the basis of slender narrative evidence, we are expected to understand, rather than led toward empathy with, Hardenberg and his inconceivable attachment. Perhaps Fitzgerald's plan was, in writing the simplest of love stories, to avoid cluttering the universe with additional examples of cheap sentimentalism, leaving us with a "mystery of love." In different hands, the novel clearly might have become just that--dismissively sentimental. Instead, she goes the other way: Fitzgerald is a cool observer keenly attuned, in a very modern sense, to the ironies her story poses, but she never truly enages our hearts.
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful.
Wow! How could this be written by someone who wasn't there?
By Ricardo Ramos
This is the most likable of the four PF novels I've read (I admire all of them). Her ability to create characters with extreme economy is breath-taking. Even more than in _Blue Flower_, she illuminates a milieu distant and time and space, the Moscow of a British businessman in Moscow ca. 1913 (i.e., on the verge of the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution further off). I don't really know that there were households or businesses like those she brings to life. If the concrete details are imagined rather than researched, her accomplishment is even greater, but it is also considerable if she has "merely" brought back to life vanished Russian and expatrate English ways of being.
One of Fitzgerald's many gifts is creating prematurely wise prepubescent female characters (as in _The Bookshop_ and _Offshore_) who view the fumblings of adults with clear-eyed but mostly gracious bemusement and fitfully attempt to keep the adults from totally mucking up. Dolly takes that role here. The omniscient narrator has her own compassionate bemusement at the frailities of adults who want to be loved and try to be useful to others. Frank and Selwyn are prime examples from this book. As far as I can tell, the only thing Ms. Fitzgerald can't do is create rounded prepubescent male characters (Ben here).
48 of 53 people found the following review helpful.
comment on non-personal German Romanticism
By A Customer
"The Blue Flower" is a comment on German Romanticism (Novalis was a famous Romantic poet), primarily addressing two characteristics: 1. that the highest experience is the "weltschmerz" of Goethe, the melancholy loneliness achieved by uniting oneself to non-personal nature; 2. that the child (the primitive, the noble savage -Rousseau) who achieves this union naturally is to be elevated to an ideal. As a matter of fact the book is patterned on Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" which sparked the German Romantic movement and in fact was blamed for the suicide of many of its readers. In the melancholy loneliness of union with the non-personal deity, nature, there is no difference between life and death. Suicide is embraced as a melding with nature- the Bernhard walks into the water and both he and Fritz want to die. In the 18th c. due in large part to the success of Newton and other scientists, non-personal nature had started to replace the personal God. The philosophy of science derives from British empiricism - nothing can be known except through experience and all knowledge must be tested against the individual entity. Novalis and the German Romantics objected to the resulting mechanical image of the world brought on by science. They were steeped in and shaped by the philosophy of the great German thinker, Kant, who wrote in response to the Scottish empiricist, Hume. Kant proposes that our minds and our knowledge of the external world are not separate things but are one, turning the emphasis away from the reality of the objective external entity. For Kant our knowledge of the world reflects more about the structure of the mind than it tells us of the outside world, so he speaks of something like sieves in the mind - space/time, cause/effect - which sift our experience and mold our impressions. The subjective, self-conscious becomes the primary source of reality. Followers of Kant like Fichte, who taught Novalis, carried this to the extreme and became pure mentalists. For them reality results from the struggles of the inner self-conscious; the individual entity does not even exist (Kant never went this far). The German Romantics are closely allied to this philosophy in its emphasis on the subjective self-conscious creating reality. But Novalis also criticizes the mentalists for leaving no room for love, emotions, feelings. He sought to harmonize the inner, subjective self-conscious with nature which had become a mechanical clock of mechanical parts. The Romantics felt that primitive man or the child had an immediate relation to nature, a certain oneness, but the 18th c. man of feeling had been alienated from nature. In the tradition of Kant their emphasis was on the inner self-conscious and they turned inward to poetry and music. The Schlegels and Novalis believed that poetry as metaphor created the fantasy and mythology which would rejoin man to nature. Their new image of the world was the organic flower, rather than the machine. They also had a theory of irony whereby they ridiculed common sense and the expected, traditional way of doing things, in an effort to reveal the inadequacy of reality, thus to destroy it and supplant it with their poetic image. This is basically an egotistical philosophy seeking union of the inner self with a nature devoid of person - to find the blue flower one turns away from family and friends and seeks a "blue" (melancholy) union alone with a rarity of nature. Fritz and the Bernhard in the story are unable to love. Fritz does not really love Sophie nor care about her fulfillment. He would keep her a child. There is perhaps a close identity between this Romanticism and the later philosophy of Existentialism, where the non-personlism of nature becomes the "benign indifference of the universe" and there is no meaning to becoming. Sophie is more a heroine, as she begins to grow as a person ( in relation to other persons), then Fritz is a hero. His brother Erasmus seems to break through the stifling pathos of the era, really loves Sophie and finds joy. The names, Erasmus and Bernhard, by evoking historical characters, become symbolically significant to the theme. The story takes place in post Reformation Germany (Fritz's family belong to a Protestan sect) and it is historically Erasmus of Rotterdam who is Luther's intellectual counterpart and who does not break away from the existing church. Erasmus esteems joy and regrets the lack of it in some of the reformers. The Bernhard's name is a combination of his mother's name and his fathers's. His mother's name Bernardine is ridiculed by the father. St. Bernard from the Middle Ages spoke of each believer having a mystical experience with the personal God. This mysticism is rejected by some of the Protestant reformers. The Bernhard achieves a kind of melancholic, mystical union with the non-personal nature-deity. Fritz' friend, the young doctor Dietmahler, muses that he can save himself by going to Britain. Philosophically England offers him an esape from those who would deny reality (or the existence of the external individual entity in favor of the primacy of the inner self-conscious). In the British empiricism of Hume and Locke, knowledge comes from the interaction with the physical world, where the individual entity really exists. Experiential konwledge implies growth, and imparts meaning to becoming. Tangentially with this appeal to the Empiricist school I think the author may have been commenting on the indifference to cruelty which could coexist with the mentalists like Fichte and the German romantics, who would deny the reality of the individual entity. For Fritz the individual entity and hence the differences between entitiies is not real. Fritz searches for a unit that could be used to measure the physical as well as the spiritual. This unit where both dimensions subsist is the individual person, who by definition can only exist in relation to others. The Romantic sees eveerything melding into the non-personal, non-differentiated, soup of nature, hence Fritz' constant assertion, "all is one." With the reality of the person denied, the opposition to cruelty diminishes. Perhaps the history of philosophy brings us to the choice of personal or non-personal ideal, even personal or non-personal God.
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