|
| Loving; Living; Party Going (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) | 
| Author: Henry Green
Creator: John Updike
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
Buy New: $9.00
You Save: $9.00 (50%)
New (28) from $9.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 97813
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1
ISBN: 0140186913
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780140186918
ASIN: 0140186913
Publication Date: February 1, 1993
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 20 | | NEXT » |
 Hannah got quite hysterical with excitement April 3, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
As far as I can tell the funny thing about the funny syntax in Living is the following. Dang by the way this comment has to appear under the edition introduced by John Updike, an insufferably smug charlatan of long standing I am reliably informed. A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of Himself. Or is that Pennsylvania? Who cares? Have you ever read any of this windy old geezer's book reviews? I'm not even going to mention the novels. In the name of Christ dude, unink the well. Quit hugging the shore, sail off on a permanent vacation--take Philip Roth with you why don't you--and forget to pack your pencils. Dear oh dear. Still and all and now that that unpleasantness is well behind us here's the skinny on Living: Green's way of writing here--he was only in his early twenties if you can believe it!--I was first lead to misunderstand by several people who think they know everything set out to approximate the talk of the men and indeed their womenfolk hammering out their time in and around an iron works in Birmingham in or around 1929. What we have here is a place of work, a foundry no less. Vernacular speech, demotic even, Green seems to want to write. And now time is passing. Slowly he turned pages. These are actual lines. And there's the rub. The magic worked here is just this: dress for dinner magnates trailing wives and gilded offspring also pulse into life in these pages. When Green gets to up the ante by taking in the excitations of young Richard Dupret, Hannah Glossop and the rest of the chaps, the original and supposed working-class register doesn't care to skip a dialectical beat. The ruse is curious only for a minute, then knee-slappingly audacious. The lack of definite articles and whatever else is mistakenly assumed to be wanting in these passages treating of hunt balls and weekends in the country starts actually to sound like something else again. Not just the spoken words then but the written ones too, the ones tending toward narration, description, begin to say their own lines. These phrases in their peculiar turn and awkwardness start incomprehensibly to speak more colourfully--to paint now a brand new picture. It's enough to make you go back to page one. I did just that and was glad to do it. The speech may continue to be spoken in a broken sort of English but the sense now is never ever less than straight up or crystal clear. "As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer," as Alex De Large might say. It gets better. A delicious, almost palpable, sense of time and place--akin somehow to nostalgia--is cautiously but openly being evoked right before your eyes. An aside. Does anyone remember Cyprian Lightwood's response to a spoken imperative to pull himself together in Against the Day? His words were these: "Not now Moistleigh, I'm succumbing to nostalgia." Good line that. Made an impression I'll wager. Probably not exactly neither here nor there though. The thing I'm eventually getting to here is Green starts to state his case in a spoken language, a type of talk, idiomatic even. The book is obviously and apparently an effort to write about speaking in authentic regional accents but then the rest of the telling kicks in and soon the book expands into some of the best bent out of shape writing qua writing I've very nearly ever read. A gift indeed I'm getting to be surer and surer. And all simply wrapped in a well will you looky here paperback book you're reading in your La-Z-Boy. And it doesn't even seem like it's the nightblue nostalgia either anymore in Henry Green, it's the farking thing itself. Bells sometimes. Yearning. The actual noise of living. Didn't this wonderful twentieth-century man write a self-portrait called Pack My Bag? Might have a goo at that I think. Let me just finish by inputting out loud a sentiment uttered in my best imitation of George Cole's voice as the incomparable Arfur Daley: Henry Green? That's a gentleman of the very highest proportions that is. A class act.
Realistic March 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
At first the wording was difficult to understand, but as I continued to read, the characters developed their own personalities, and Green's writing almost made me feel like I was a bystander in his settings. I learned to appreciate the dialog, especially the realistic colloquialism in the language of the servants. The books are enjoyable and entertaining, and reading this has made me a great fan of Henry Green.
 Still Miss "Upstairs Downstairs?" November 26, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you are one of the legions of fans of one of the Public Broadcasting System's all-time favorite Masterpiece Theater shows, "Upstairs, Downstairs,"courtesy of the British Broadcasting Company, of course, have I got good news for you. You see, there was this now little-known, early 20th century British writer, Henry Green, who was considered a major competitor of the young Evelyn Waugh's in the British society novel sweepstakes. And Green appears to have taken precisely the worlds of upstairs, downstairs, as his focus. The book, "Loving, Living, Party Going" that's today's topic is a compendium of three short novels by those names, and they are all about life below, and above stairs.
As John Updike explains in his insightful introduction, Green differed from his contemporaries in several important ways. He was the son of a highly successful businessman, and became a successful businessman himself - he had no need to write for money, only for love. He also used the vehicle of his fiction to escape into the working classes, Updike notes, whereas D.H. Lawrence used his fiction to escape from them.
"Loving" is a tale of downstairs life when upstairs is largely away. It's set in a great country house, actually a castle, in neutral Ireland during World War II, when the ladies of the house, the Tennants, are in England. It concerns itself, amid rumors of German invasion and attacks by the Irish Republican Army, largely with the courtship of Charley Raunce, promoted from footman to butler when the previous incumbent dies, and Edith, a housemaid. It's written in what was supposedly the vocabulary and accents of the people it concerns: Green apparently wanted to break away from standard written English to something more expressive. Frankly, this just annoyed me. I've no idea if the author is correct - who would, nowadays--and it just made it harder to read. But within this short novel, Green succeeds in creating a great many rounded, realistic characters, he treats them with great affection as he tells their stories, and actually achieves a powerful conclusion.
The next novel, "Living," is similar. It concerns a Birmingham iron foundry, the men who work there, and the foundry's owners, though once again, the focus is strongly on the workmen. And the tale is told in their speech, Brummagem, supposedly that of Birmingham's working class, that isn't any easier for us than that of the servants. But Green again creates a remarkably rich world within these few pages, giving us a less successful urban courtship,and again achieves surprising power.
The third novel, "Party Going," by contrast, largely concerns itself with upstairs: young people, marooned in a major London train station and its hotel by one of that city's killer fogs, on their way to a swank, all-expenses party thrown by a friend in the French Riviera. The spinster aunt of one of the women, by chance, has ended up with them, and she's been taken quite ill; these society flirts don't quite know what to do about her. A mysterious male character wanders through, trying out all the accents we've wrestled with; is he the writer's stand-in? Anyway, once again, Green ably creates a large cast of individuated characters, in an even shorter piece of writing: and thank goodness, they mostly speak English we can recognize. We are safe in society novel country here.
Green's female characters seem to share a regrettable tendency toward the vapors; guess it went with the landscape. The Birmingham-set novel, surprisingly, mentions the environmental hazards of the factory, and the neighborhood of factories where its workers live. It even mentions the workers' environmentally caused illnesses. The world of "Upstairs Downstairs" was not necessarily the perfect place to live, you know.
Green tackles the big subjects June 13, 2003
22 out of 22 found this review helpful
Have you ever sat and thought, man, I wish someone would write a book about living? And possibly loving? Well, Henry Green has gone out and done just that. I had never thought that a book about going to parties might be necessary, but after reading it I think that Mr. Green has indeed performed a valuable service. This wonderful collection of novels is, quite frankly, a comprehensive exploration, and no new books need be written on any of these subjects. In any case, the writing made my jaw drop in spots, it was so good, and Green way of looking at things is funny and humane while being mercilessly clear-eyed. The only reason I think they've stopped teaching his books in colleges is because they don't have the sort of things one can write papers about: complicated networks of imagery and whatnot that can be dug out of the text and have a title slapped on them. Green's book are too alive to have anything particularly systematic going on in them, while retaining the structure and unity of true works of art. Amazing books, go out and read them.
 Cliche-driven doggerel! Yuck! February 13, 2003
4 out of 66 found this review helpful
I only read "Loving," but let me tell you, that book is the worst. Every fundamental rule of writing is broken is this "book." Yuck! I mean, the last line of the book is really "and they lived happily ever after." Puh-leeze!
|
|
|
Wildlife, nature and the Environment
Sponsored Links
Learn how to get your own Amazon Book shop | |
