The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald - 1978 - Introduction 2014 by David Nicholls - Preface by Hermione Lee

 

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald - 1978 

• Introduction 2014 by David Nicholls - Preface by Hermione Lee

Earlier this Month I posted on At Freddie’s, Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel set in a Children’s theater in London.

Prior to this month The Beginning of Spring was the fourth novel by Penelope Fitzgerald which I have had the great pleasure of reading.   I have posted on her Offshore, then her acknowledged by all masterwork, Blue Flower based on the life of Novalis, one of her numerous short stories, as well as a novel, Human Voices set at the BBC during 1940.  I also read Penelope Fitzgerald:A Life by Hermione Lee.

The Bookshop is set in the imaginary small English Seaside town of Hardborough,said to be a thinly disguised version of Southwold.  Florence Green, a middle aged widow, has decided to open a book store. She picks as her location an abandoned building said to be haunted by a poltergeist.  We go along as she applies for a bank loan, overcomes lots of obstacles and at last opens.  For a year she does well, steadily building clients, starting a lending library, establishing relationships with wholesale book vendors and even hires a teenage helper and a part time bookkeeper. We get glimpses of the lives of numerous village residents.  Basically if your family has not lived their for at least two hundred years you are considered a  new arrival.

Then the very influential wealthy Mrs Gamart decides she wants to start a cultural center using the bookstore property. Her nephew, member of parliament for the area, gets a bill passed which allows the town to force Mrs Green to sell her property to be used for the cultural center. Sadly Mrs Green is evicted.

The novel focuses on class differences, snobbery and micro aggressions perpetrated on Mrs Green as well as the love of some residents for her store and for books.  It was a lot of fun learning what happened when she displayed Lolita in the window of her store.

The Bookshop  was short listed for The Booker 

Prize.

I greatly enjoyed the Bookshop . It is for sale as a Kindle for $1.95.

PENELOPE FITZGERALD (1916–2000) was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. She won the 

Circle Award in fiction for The Blue Flower, the Booker Prize for Offshore, and three of her novels—The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, and The Beginning of Spring—were short-listed for the Booker Prize.