| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Missing the Radletts,
This review is from: The Blessing (Paperback)
My only real complaint about "The Blessing" is that it is not told by Fanny (as is The Pursuit of Love, Love in a Cold Climate and Don't Tell Alfred) - but it is part of the series. Sigi, Grace and Charles Edouard turn up as crucial characters in 'Don't tell Alfred' so it is part of the series of four - and I just love Fanny and her wonderfully eccentric relatives.This is the story of Grace - beautiful, glamorous but slightly unintellectual British girl who has a hurried love match with wildly attractive and irresistible Frenchman, Charles-Edouard. Within 2 weeks they are married but then only see each other once in the next 7 years. A happy consequence of those first impassioned days is The Blessing - a son, Sigismond. Charles-Eduoard returns, sweeping Grace and Sigismond off to France and a new life. She has to come to terms with France, french life, and a very, very French husband who loves women. Unfortunately for Grace and Charles-Eduoard, what they don't realise is that it is also about Sigismond coming to terms with growing up with two parents and not quite so much attention. The marriage falls apart by degrees weighed down by Grace's expectations, a cunning, scheming young son and a staunchly English Nanny. Mitford writes characters with such a light touch and such irreverent good fun it is wonderful to watch the whole relationship peeled back like layers of an onion.... Its enjoyable sharp social satire of life just after the war in Britain and France.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I shrieked,
By Leslie Chang (New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Blessing (Paperback)
-- as Nancy Mitford herself would have said. The Blessing, along with Love in a Cold Climate, represents the best of her always hilarious fiction. Evelyn Waugh gets all the credit for being the satirist of their generation (if you really want to be amused, read their correspondence, expertly edited by Charlotte Mosley, Mitford's niece-in-law), but there was no one funnier than Mitford then nor, alas, is there anyone as funny now, a fact which says much -- none of it good -- about our current society and how (groan) seriously we all take ourselves. I mean, think about it: the woman lived through the Blitz, a sister's attempted suicide, another sister's imprisonment (tho' Nancy herself was partially responsible for that one), her brother's death in WW II, and several miscarriages. If she could still poke such brilliant fun at herself and others, then why must we all act like self-absorbed guests at one giant pity party? What I wouldn't give for a good shrieker these days.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mitford's most Waugh-like comedy.,
This review is from: The Blessing (Paperback)
Nancy Mitford's comic variant on 'The American' is certainly more FUN than Henry James ever was; after a bitty start, it turns into a classic comedy about cultural clashes, loneliness, abandonment, love. Mitford's eye is strictly realistic in her attitudes, if not her style - in the tacit spaces, one can hear Grace's howls of despair. The book is full of exquisite characters - Charles-Edouard, dashing, aristocratic, Resistance hero who uses his Frenchness as an excuse for serial adultery; Sigi, the Blessing ot the title, a devious monster who sees his happiness in his parents' divorce; the variously sophisticated and cynical grandes dames of French society; the spectacularly pompous 'Heck' Dexter, millionaire advisor to the US President. But Mitford not only has a gift for portraying eccentricity; she somehow makes dogged dullness palpable as in Grace's half-hearted suitor Hughie. This is Mitford's most Waugh-like novel - full of short, pregnant, elliptical scenes, told in terse, comic sentences. The frustrating lack of structure means that scenes don't accumulate emotionally as they do in Waugh, leaving the book feeling a little thin (unlike her masterpieces, 'The Pursuit of Love' and 'Love in a Cold Climate'), but with this much pleasure, who cares?
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
|
|
|
|
