- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Moyer Bell and its subsidiaries; New edition edition (Jan 1 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1559212284
- ISBN-13: 978-1559212281
- Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 14 x 1.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 340 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #203,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
In A FEW GREEN LEAVES the author combines the rural settings of her earliest novels with many of the themes- and even some of the characters- of her later ones. Switching points of view among many characters, she builds with accumulating effect the picture of life in a town forgotten by time yet affected dramatically by it. Historical time- represented by Druid ruins, the local eighteenth-century country manor, and the last aristocrats who occupied it in the 1920s- is juxtaposed against the banalities of life in today's world.
About the Author
Barbara Pym, who died on January 11, 1980, spent the last few years of her life in an Oxfordshire village, sharing a small cottage with her sister. In 1977, after sixteen years in the wilderness she published QUARTET IN AUTUMN. It was treated as a major literary event, as was her next novel, THE SWEET DOVE DIED.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Few Dead Leaves,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Few Green Leaves (Paperback)
I was keen to read something by Barbara Pym, having heard about her for years. Previous reviews on Amazon encouraged me to select this novel. The story of Emma, a single woman in her thirties who retreats to an English country village to write up her anthropological studies, held intellectual, romantic and picturesque promise. What a disappointment I had! Emma's intellectual pursuit is vaguely dismissed in a solitary sentence as 'something to do with attitudes toward almost everything you could think of in one of the new towns.' As for romance, Emma and her suitors, if that is the word, manage nothing beyond a bit of inarticulate, adolescent gaping and groping. And Pym assiduously avoids evoking any sense of rural beauty or natural mystery.Yes, Pym offers some wry descriptions of her passive characters' glancing collisions during their Brownian motion through life. Some readers may enjoy the irony with which she manipulates references to English literature and stock props of the English countryside (e.g. a spiritless protagonist named after Jane Austen's charming heroine, and dismissive references to the local 'DMV' or 'deserted medieval village'). But the craftsmanship is weak, with chapters beginning and ending for no particular reason; disjointed jumps among disparate points of view within a single paragraph; and plodding reportage of trivial incidents that never stitch together into a coherent design. While the author is at pains to tells us that her characters have interests -- the rector, for example, is described as obsessed with village history -- they display no real passion for anything, let alone for one another. The characters develop all the way from boring to dreary, which puts a rather strict limit on dramatic movement. It was a struggle getting to the end of the book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wisdom And Hopefulness,
By
This review is from: A Few Green Leaves (Paperback)
This is another review comparing Barbara Pym's books so that readers can choose between them.A FEW GREEN LEAVES is my favorite. After writing about London settings, Pym returns to the small country village of her beginnings. But, this village lacks the comfortable traditionalism of her earlier SOME TAME GAZELLE. Much of the book dwells on the changes that have come about in the English countryside by 1980. A FEW GREEN LEAVES is not depressing, however. It is instead humorously realistic about the incongruities between what people have been raised to expect and what actually is. In this sense, it is the most profound of her books because it demonstrates how we can still get the most out of life when only "a few green leaves" remain. This book was written at the end of Pym's life and it contains wisdom and hopefulness as well as, of course, great humor.
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of Barbara Pym's best,
This review is from: A Few Green Leaves (Paperback)
"A Few Green Leaves" is one of Barbara Pym's best novels. It is full of characters familiar to readers of Pym's other novels; rectors, widows, spinsters, eccentrics, anthropologists and a cat lady. There is romance, but in true Pym fashion it is not always suitable. It is subtly funny and poignantly sad, often at the same time. The heroine, Emma Howick, is a prototypical Pym spinster, intellectual, unsure and perhaps uninterested in the classic ways to attract a man. She is an anthropologist recently moved to a small village to live in her mother's cottage. I discovered Barbara Pym's work while in college and nothing she has written has ever disappointed me.
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