Firbank: Five Novels [Paperback]

Ronald Firbank (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 1981

Firbank, Five Novels. Part high-camp comedy of manners and part fairy tale.

Product Details

• Paperback: 342 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (May 17, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811207994
• ISBN-13: 978-0811207997
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #161,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Firbank anthology out there, March 3, 2002

By 

Timothy Hulsey (Charlottesville, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Firbank: Five Novels (Paperback)

Firbank is seldom considered a serious novelist, or a major literary modernist. It's easy to see why he's underrated; most of his writings are quite brief, and infused with a daring sense of high camp. But Firbank's terse narration and elliptical dialogue require as much sophistication from readers as the novels of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.

This anthology contains most of Firbank's best work -- the outrageous _Flower Beneath the Foot_, the sublimely scabrous _Valmouth_, and his rueful final novel _Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli_. (Cardinal Pirelli, a closeted boy-lover, is probably the single strongest character in all of Firbank's fiction.) Even at his campiest, Firbank acknowledges the possibility of tragedy -- and this awareness distinguishes his novels from mere social whimsy.

The absence of _Caprice_ from this particular collection is a bit of a letdown, because this short novel is probably the best introduction to Firbank's skewed world view. (On a separate note, the regrettably racist title _Prancing N----r_ was not Firbank's own. Firbank actually called the novel _Sorrow in Sunlight_, and his American admirer Carl Van Vechten retitled the book to titillate U.S. audiences. Although Van Vechten's gambit worked, and _Prancing N----r_ was the only one of Firbank's novels to achieve substantial U.S. sales during his lifetime, the original British title is much better, and ought to be restored.)

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 5 fractured fables by Firbank, June 27, 2005

By 

A.J. (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Firbank: Five Novels (Paperback)

Ronald Firbank, whose forty-year lifespan (1886-1926) covers a particularly bountiful era of English prose artistry, is so eccentrically individual an author he almost seems to be a creature invented by Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. His five short novels, collected in this New Directions Paperback edition, are utterly unclassifiable; no genre suggests itself when they are being read. His prose, as fastidiously styled as a coiffured poodle, as twee as an afternoon tea, is bewilderingly florid even beyond the standards of his contemporaries. With the descriptive proclivities of an interior decorator, he paints with all the colors on the palette; an orchid is not just an orchid but a "rose-lipped" orchid with a "lilac beard." England had not seen lyrical flamboyance like this since Oscar Wilde a quarter century before, and would not see it again until the ascendance of Freddie Mercury a half century later.

But Firbank's writing is not just fancy window dressing. His stories may look like fairy tales because of the whimsical characters and settings, but his narrative technique fractures the linearity of the plots by focusing on external details. In "The Flower Beneath the Foot," for example, the subject of the conversation in the first few pages is not immediately apparent, but disclosure gradually occurs over the course of the following chapters: His Weariness the Prince Yousef's mother, the Queen of some mythical Arabesque realm called the Land of Dates, disapproves of her son's desire to marry the humble convent-dwelling Mademoiselle de Nazianzi instead of Princess Elsie of England. Not until the final paragraph does Firbank dispel the story's genteel facade to reveal a passionately beating, and broken, heart.

Firbank's characters are garish works of art, most of them either impossibly frivolous nobles of theatrically exaggerated primness or paupers with pride and dignity. As in "The Flower Beneath the Foot," a common theme is star-crossed love, a romance between two people of different social stations. This love can be interracial, as it is in "Valmouth," a British colony with a climate so salubrious that the inhabitants live well over a hundred years, as well as in another novel with an evidently Caribbean setting and a controversial title which I refrain from typing so as not to have to wrestle with the Amazon censorship filter. Infatuation can also be grotesque, as it is in "The Artificial Princess," whose heroine, reluctantly betrothed to a foreign Crown Prince, unwittingly encounters the Devil on the night of her debut.

Firbank, one of the first of many English Catholic writers to emerge in the twentieth century, is comfortable setting one of his novels in Spain. "Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli" is self-explanatory, as the good cardinal, who allows aristocratic dogs to be baptized as a favor to wealthy patrons and disguises himself in the street as laity of either gender, risks being defrocked by the Roman church for his perceived sacrileges.

This is humor, but of a less obvious sort; unlike P.G. Wodehouse, who made a handsome living with his comical portraits of the upper class, Firbank doesn't target a specific group of people or stratum of society, nor does he seem interested in such petty substantiality. His fiction, insulated in a world unscarred by war and populated by dainty animated dolls, is an idyllic extension of reality, somehow a reminder of the limitless expanse of literature where formulas lose their validity and time stands still. Toss aside all your preconceptions, because these novellas will surprise you.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I love Firbank because he's not p.c., June 17, 1999

By 

Laura Canon "longtime reader" (Henderson, NV USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Firbank: Five Novels (Paperback)

And he writes well. It's true the books are somewhat obscure, but so what? Firbank doesn't take anything seriously. Everything is a fantasy. You float through a world of handsome choirboys, old ladies talking scandal, schoolgirls preening for marriage. Corruption is everywhere, and no one points a finger. I think his best novel is his last, "Concerning some eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli." His earlier works ramble a little. "Cardinal Pirelli" is set in Spain and is sort of a satire of the Catholic Church. If you take certain things seriously, Firbank is not for you. But if you are open minded and would like to read something different from most novels, you may enjoy him.