This book is beautifully written and a has very simple plot. It is more of characterization of a family living in a dilapidated estate in Ireland than a story. Descriptions of the land and its people are wonderfully done. Unfortunately, it was sometimes difficult to read through due to too many double negatives. Enjoyable but doesn't stand out. ( )

There was something special about this book from the very first sentence. What was it? Perhaps it was the way that Bowen wrote - not just in her choice of words, but in her choice of sentence structure, with oddly placed adjective and adverb clusters that made you slow down your reading pace. This is not a book to speed through, you have to take it slowly and let the plot develop at its leisure, and you must give the characters a chance to speak to you, for every single one of them has their own compelling voice - a rare achievement in a book that avoids stereotype and cliche so handsomely.

The story, such as it is, concerns a family living in an old Irish mansion or castle; one day, the eldest daughter discovers a parcel of love letters, this event triggering a set of actions that bring up and resolve (or not) buried mysteries and secrets, and threaten to tear everything apart.

In all, a magnificent achievement. ( )

Another book that I really wanted to like, but didn't. The synopsis sounded good. It had so much potential, but it just didn't go anywhere. It claims to be poetic, but it was just confusing. As another reviewer put it, it felt like I was reading a book by Yoda. Maybe my opinion is tainted, because I recently read Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. That book was beautiful and poetic. ( )

Sometimes I love Bowen, sometimes she bores me to tears. And this is pretty easy to explain: when she's writing about peoples' relationships and the way we're always talking past one another and not saying what needs to be said, she's fabulous. When she's describing landscape or interior decorating she's almost always insufferable. Unfortunately for this short book, there's too much landscape and not enough people not quite relating to each other. Also, the ending is unbearably stupid; I suggest you just don't read the last chapter, which seems to have been added with the hope that someone would turn the book into a Hollywood rom-com. Also, what is with all the Yoda speak? "Cold, the room was now in the afternoon"? (Okay, I made that up, but you get the point.) Is that how Irish Protestants speak? Really?

Anyway, read Bowen, but read The Last September or The Heat of the Day instead. ( )

I picked this one up as Elizabeth Bowen was the author-of-the-month over at the "Monthly Author Reads" LibraryThing group, and I managed to find a second hand copy of this particular title. It's not one I would have chosen if I'd been given a choice, but it was on the "1001" list, and seemed slim so even if I didn't like it, it wouldn't take long.

Being slim wasn't the best aspect of this book, but it was a positive aspect.

In a rundown Irish country house in the 1950s, one very atmospherically hot summer day, a young girl finds a bundle of love letters from Guy, who had died during the Great War. Her mother, Lilia, had been engaged to Guy, and the country house belongs to Guy's cousin, Antonia, who lets Lilia and her husband (another cousin of Guy's) and their children live there, while she is off with her career as a photographer. Given the complexities of the surface relationships, you'd be right in thinking that there's going to be a lot of sublimated emotions going on. And there are, and that's not the sort of book I particular enjoy. Especially when the dialogue (which usually gives you insight) is as short and brief as, well, this:

'We were thinking of having supper.'
'Do as you please,' said she.
'What about you?'
'Today, you surpassed yourself.'
'Oh? - sorry.'

Etc. See? I'm not getting insights.

But it wasn't all awful. There were some wonderful thoughts on how the dead are still with us, the living, affecting our lives still through their untimely absence.

...though a generation was mown down his death seemed to her an invented story. Not that it was unlike him to be killed - lightly he had on the whole taken that for granted; they all sooner or later were; why should he not be? - but that it was unlike him to be dead. ... It would be long before Guy was done with life... It was simply that these years she went on living belonged to him, his lease upon them not having run out yet. The living were living his lifetime; and of this his contemporaries never were unaware. They were incomplete.

And, while the fact that the 1001 book describes this as her "funniest" book does fill me with dread when faced with the other Elizabeth Bowen novels on the 1001 list, it does have some amusing black humour with the incredible macabre nature of Maud, Lilia's youngest daughter. And the ending is a rather uplifting affair, suggesting that the next generation may be able to throw off the despair and ennui of the previous generations and find love of their own, and create new happy lives. ( )