|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
|
Product Description
Review
SOME TAME GAZELLE is my personal favourite for its sparkling high comedy and its treasury of characters ... She makes me smile, laugh out loud, consider my own foibles and fantasies, and, above all, suffer real regret when I reach the final page. Of how many authors can you honestly say that? Mavis Cheek
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
"One of my favorites of Pym's novels, it turns a shrewd, mocking, but always affectionate eye on English country life 30 years ago. Pym's fans will feel completely at home when they step into the Jane Austen-like lives of Harriet and Belinda Bede."- Christian Science Monitor
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Barbara Pym's Sunniest Side,
By
This review is from: Some Tame Gazelle (Paperback)
I have just reread SOME TAME GAZELLE and would like to write a comparison to Pym's other novels, for readers trying to decide between them. Of course, they are all marvelous, if you enjoy her kind of very gentle English social humor.SOME TAME GAZELLE is, I think the most light-hearted and optimistic of Pym's books. The world it presents is very established and secure and the character of Harriet is one of her bubbliest and most life-affirming. The ridiculous foibles of all the characters are looked on with a very forgiving eye. The down side of this book is its moral seems to be the more things stay the same, the better. Naturally, this doesn't make for a very exciting plot (none of her books are very plot-heavy, but this least of all) and there is a flatness to the ending. The humor is also less profound. The relationship between the sisters is the strongest element in this book. The weakest is that it doesn't end up very far from where it started out. But that certainly is a delightful and amusing place.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Touching and funny,
By P. A. Hogan (Providence RI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Some Tame Gazelle (Paperback)
In the early chapters of "Some Tame Gazelles" we are taken on a "Pym moments" romp through the day-to-day lives of the spinster sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede. Timid, sentimental Belinda (one of Pym's "Excellent Women")elder of the two, a faithful church worker, has loved the peevish, married Archdeacon Henry Hoccleve ("dear Henry") for over 30 years. Belinda quotes 18th Century poets, wears "sensible" shoes and longs for "some sympathetic person to whom she could say that Dr. Johnson had been so right when he had said that all change is of itself an evil." Plump ("attractive in a fat Teutonic way"),jolly and style-conscious Harriet, in her middle fifties, has a fondness for young curates to whom she serves boiled chicken suppers and makes presents of hand-knitted socks and home-made jellies. We meet: The Reverend Edgar Donne, the latest in a long line of young curates fussed over by Harriet; Edith Liversidge ("a kind of decayed gentlewoman"), the disheveled, blunt-speaking neighbor with an interest in sanitation arrangements; the dreary, snobbish Connie Aspinall, who basks in the memory of her glory days when she was companion to Lady Grudge of Belgrave Square ("a kind of relation of one of Queen Alexandra's Ladies-in-Waiting"); Miss Prior, the touchy sewing woman, in a tender and humorous episode involving cauliflower cheese; the melancholy Count Ricardo Bianco, who on a regular basis offers proposals of marriage to Harriet. There is Archdeacon Hoccleve, the object of Belinda's devotion ("her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the cosiness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning"), whose standoffish behavior and proclivity for choosing unsuitable prayers and for preaching obscure literary sermons no one understands win him little favor among the people in his parish. And there are more matchless Pym characters set against a quintessential Pym story, touching and funny and quite wonderful.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid provincial light comedy,
By
This review is from: Some Tame Gazelle (Paperback)
Some Tame Gazelle is an early Barbara Pymnovel, but her many strengths are fully in evidence. She shows that she knows her way with provincial village life, which she portrays in neither a fond haze nor quite in the harsh light of reality, but in some alternative dimension, like our own, but somehow a bit more kind. The protagonists are two "Pym women", middle-aged, content, educated middlebrows, shrewd, amusing, humble and yet quite self-possessed. The central joke--"spinsters" doting on the local clergy--is soon lost in the subtle but larger point: these are two women who live life largely on their own terms, affectations and all. This is a good read, not at all an "early" novel. My only real criticism is that the plot seems to spin a bit in mid-novel, but it rights itself again by the end.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
