Customer Reviews

The Enchanted April

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The lure of Italy, particularly during a dismal, rainy day elsewhere, is hard to resist. For four British women, the attraction brings them to San Salvatore, a Tuscan villa, for an entire month of vacation.

The women are very different. Lotty Wilkins, nervous and talkative, is treated like a child by her husband and is starting to chafe from his oppression. Rose Arbuthnot, with a "face like a disappointed madonna," is pious, sweet, and desperately unhappy. Margaret Fisher, stern and demanding, lives in a past peppered with famous literary encounters. And Caroline Dester, striking beautiful and popular, is lonely and bored with her whirlwind social life.

The four rent San Salvatore together, and immediately begin to change. Lotty loses her nervous demeanor, and becomes a self confident, mature woman. Rose blossoms when she realizes that she does possess beauty, and wins back the love of her formerly indifferent husband. Margaret thaws out and begins to smile and relax, even conversing with the other tenants, living in the present instead of the dusty past. And Caroline re-opens her heart to love and friendship by recognizing the emptiness of her life before she left for Italy.

What is it that changes these women? Sun and rest in a beautiful place? Yes, partly, but mostly it is the friendship of three extraordinary people.

I'd love to see this enjoyable novel brought back into print.

I am 1/3rd of the way through this book. If you enjoy Austen and the like, as I do, you will enjoy this novel. However, I encourage you to buy a different edition. This edition of the book is riddled with typos. "r" instead of "n", "her" instead of "he", etc. And it's not just occaisionally. Sometimes it's several on a page. It interupts the flow of the story and I'm about ready to chuck this copy and check a different edition out of the library.

For the start of this book I was a bit worried I wouldn't finish it, as it felt in the beginning like a terribly earnest `ladies' book; but I soon found out what a lovely book it is - I would call it charming if that wasn't so twee.

Four women - all strangers - spend a month sharing a house in Italy. Slowly but surely they slough off their old, grey skins and discover happiness. Much of this happiness comes simply from a change in their perceptions. Lotty, slightly fey, is the first to fall for the house's charms, and soon begins to act like the person she really is, rather than the quiet mousy woman her life has made her. When her husband comes to visit he realises what a wonder his wife is, and though his motives for visiting were less than pure, he falls back in love with the woman he first married. Rose, who constantly battles to square any enjoyment in life with her conscious, has the same effect when her husband accidentally arrives near the end of her holiday - he realises that his wife is still the woman he first married.

The other two women also have their epiphanies - old Mrs Fisher realises that living in the past, her only enjoyment being memories of the good and the great she met in her youth, is not as enjoyable as she thought; she lightens up and moves on to let happiness in to her life. And beautiful Scrap - Lady Caroline - realises how empty her life is. Slowly through the book we see her formulate a future life, and though she hasn't reached it by the novel's end, you feel she will.

This is a clever book - it makes you question how your perceptions flavour your life, and it also makes you question your perceptions of others. If only we all had a house in Italy to spend time reflecting on these issues.....

Whenever my life becomes cold, dreary and unlovely, I can crawl between these covers and escape to Italy and the companionship of four interesting, generous women. I emerge a few hours later refreshed and renewed. It's a lot cheaper than therapy or a real vacation to Italy and doesn't carry the hazards of a hangover or shopping spree but I think it does as much more real good, providing relief and release. You should all own a copy.

This book consists of a little jewel of a plot in the most sumptous of settings--Italy's Riviera dei Fiore. Four women, for very different reasons, attempt to escape for one month to San Salvatore, a medieval castle. Gradualy, each woman begins to reveal more and more about herself until she finally sheds her public persona to reveal the real person underneath. Imbued with lighthearted romance, wisteria and sunshine, this beautiful novel will both captivate and delight you.

Always celebrated for its beautiful evocative setting in Portofino, THE ENCHANTED APRIL has also to some extent been dismissed as a sentimental trifle. It is not: for all its surface charm, it is also one of the most searching fictional works ever written on the nature of goodness, and its effects upon selfishness and acquisitiveness. Two Hampstead housewives, Rose Arbuthnot and Lottie Hawkins, advertise for two other women to share in the costs so that they may rent an Italian castle for the month of April and escape their loveless lives; when they and the other two women (the dazzling Lady Caroline Dester and the rigid bluestocking Mrs. Fisher) arrive at the spectacularly lovely castle, they begin to discover that not only have their spirits been refreshed but also that their value systems have changed through what amounts to the dispensation of the castle of a kind of secularized grace. Elizabeth von Arnim accomplishes this very probing study of modern British mores through the very subtle and unobtrusive psychological realist use of extended interior monologues. The result is a novel that is not only completely beguiling but actually quite thoughtful. A greatly underappreciated little gem.

Well, you've already heard about the story. Just wanted to add that the characters were so real, it was as if I were really there with them. A wonderful turn of events at the end. Caught me off guard. Very enjoyable. Beautiful writing. Now I've got to rent the movie.

Having loved both filmed versions of this story, I came to the book not anticipating any surprises, and in that respect I was correct. What I did get, however, was a more fully-formed understanding of each of the four women who come to San Salvatore. Each has her own quest, and each is surprised in the way that her quest is resolved.

Elizabeth von Arnim can harness language in ways that few other authors are able. She is, for instance, able to display what a walking joke Mr. Wilkins is, while letting him think that he's the very model of an educated man.

I started off loathing both Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline Dester in a way that wasn't true when watching the films. This made their transformations that much more satisfying, in the end.

I'm now interested in reading other books from Elizabeth von Arnim and, even more importantly, visiting the castello where the story is based. She wrote The Enchanted April after her own visit, and it has continued to "enchant" travelers in the many years since the publication of her novel. I can't wait to see the "tub of love" and be surrounded by wistaria myself.

Wonderful! I could read the book and watch the movie over and over! Treat yourself to a vacation in an Italian paradise with real characters and a physical beauty you could reach out and touch. Von Arnim makes this simple plot so magical and warm it makes you want to visit San Salvatore too!

This is a delightful story...one of my favorite books! Gives you a little faith that even seemingly irreconcileable situations can be restored or transformed, that drastically different people can find common ground and become friends, and that people can change their lives for the better! A sunny read for a dark winter day!