Fifty Days of Solitude (Paperback)

by Doris Grumbach (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
When her companion Sylvia left for an extended book-buying trip, Doris Grumbach was given 50 days alone in their home on the coast of Maine. It was the winter of 1993 and the 75-year-old Grumbach surrounded herself with silence and music, with books and an empty journal, with paintings and the view out her window of a bare winter landscape. Fifty Days of Solitude is a memoir of what Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the "inscape": the deep, meandering landscape of an interior life. Grumbach's observations about the paintings of Edward Hopper, the death of a friend from AIDS, and the life-long grief of Dr. Anna Perkins for her companion Miss Hannay are full of dignity and pathos. Fifty Days of Solitude is a rendering of the mind and heart alone, of how distance and silence inform our compassion and intellect.

From Publishers Weekly
This quiet, elegantly written memoir by critic, novelist and essayist Grumbach ( Coming into the End Zone ) sensitively depicts the mingled pleasure and privation of turning one's back on the world. In the winter of 1993, with her companion away on a book-buying trip, the author decided "to attempt a trial return to the core of myself, staying absolutely alone" in their house in Sargentville, Maine. She shut off the phone and didn't watch television; although she went into town to collect her mail and attend church, Grumbach avoided speaking with the postmistress and fellow parishioners. Music and books were her only companions as she observed the natural world outside and wrestled with her own work indoors. It was a tranquil yet often somber experience: "My mail," she notes, "contained an inordinate amount of bad news," particularly about friends whose deaths prompted thoughts of her own mortality. In the book's most moving passages, she recalls a young dancer's slow demise from AIDS and the suicide of a writing student, the latter a chilling account of Grumbach's inability to help a tortured man who felt utterly alone. The author does not pretend to offer big revelations here, merely the intimate story of one woman's immersion in "the universal solitude in which we all have lived, try as we might to escape it." 20,000 first printing; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (November 30, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807070610
• ISBN-13: 978-0807070611
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #692,266 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #3 in

  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( G ) > Grumbach, Doris

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a gem, October 2, 2000

By	W. K. Miller "kenmiller32" (NC, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I first read this book about 3 years ago. I don't read many books by writers about writing, and I don't read many autobiographical books by writers, period. However, I read the first few pages of this book, and I was captivated.

She moved herself into an isolated country house for 50 days.

Grumbach's style is simple, plain, and direct. Her book is a study of one person's solitude; as such, it works well as a personal "coming of age" story. That may strike you as odd, because Grumbach is probably in her 50's or 60's, but it's a personal journey story, a tale of one person's finding herself, of imposing a solitary life upon herself.

It's about solitude, and adjusting yourself from a more frenetic way of life to a simpler way of life, socially.

I generally don't read this sort of thing at all, but I loved this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Free from Blather...., March 20, 2005

By	Nayland Blake "NaylandBlake" (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This slim, spare book touches on many of the gravest issues of our time while avoiding both smug solemnity and grinning uplift.

Grumbach's voice is considered, flinty even, much like the wintery Maine landscape detailed in the book. As her days of solitude progress she writes of history, piety, AIDS, the experience of aging, the borders between the individual and the community, and the often invisible lives of women. She watches everything and lets that observation live on the page without forcing conclusions onto it.

This is a profoundly religious book, and a profoundly feminist one. It wrestles with sacredness, without the silly cliches of so much writing about "the sacred". Its rectitude and honesty are a rebuke to much of the fuzzy-minded writing out there.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The dream devoutly to be wished, April 22, 2005

By	Corinne H. Smith (Athol, MA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Fifty Days of Solitude (Hardcover)

Isn't it every writer's dream to have fifty days of solitude? Seven weeks of blissful nothingness, with no demands on one's time or space? Well, that's the kind of "vacation" Doris Grumbach took during one Maine winter. While she did make some inroads on the novel she was working on, she found herself spending more moments in personal reflection -- about past experiences, about friends and family members, about being alone, and about writing in general. The result is this slim volume of musings. Readers who are writers will get the most out of these pages. Anyone considering spending some time alone will benefit as well. For it is only after we know who we are on our own, that we can understand our connections with others.