58 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another gem from the NYRB Press, February 20, 2001
This review is from: A House and Its Head (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
I'm beginning to become addicted to these little neglected treasures that the NYRB Press is reissuing. Not only are the editions themselves little marvels (with beautiful and well-chosen color covers and gorgeous paper stock), but whoever is making the choices for which books are reissued has near-infallible taste.
A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD, like so many of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels, reads something like a modern updating of a Greek tragedy: most of the novel is told through dialogue, there is a kind of chorus that comments on the action of the principal characters, and the plot involves murder, incest, and familial cruelty. Yet for all these borrowings Compton-Burnett paradoxically remains wonderfully sui generis: no one else has ever mastered her capability for evoking such extreme subtlety in manners that the merest cruel nuances can become evoked (if one reads carefully enough). She is also a master plotter: just when you think you've caught up with the characters' schemes, she allows the other characters in the novel to make similar realizations, and then jumps even further ahead. This is a real page-turner as well as a subtle commentary on Edwardian manners and moral monstrousness.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stunning work of classic fiction by a true modernist, May 25, 2011
This review is from: A House and Its Head (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
Compton-Burnett (abbreviated as CB henceforth) is one of the truly remarkable modernist writers, with a span of resonant fiction that she wrote from the 1920s through to the 1960s. Through her principal and powerful focus on the use of dialogue in her fiction to convey in a dramatic way her characters' individual personalities, tensions, complexities, resentments, repressions and sometimes savage irony - she herself is a savage, i.e., wonderful Swiftian ironist/satirist, scalpel-sharp - she is reminiscent of other modernists, in particular and most especially of William Gaddis (e.g.,
Recognitions,
Carpenter's Gothic (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin), and
Jr, Henry Green (e.g.,
Loving; Living; Party Going (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics), the dialogue from the early plays of Harold Pinter
Complete Works, Vol. 1 and sometimes Samuel Beckett.
As with her other fiction, she has a set of themes she returns to time and again - you could call them obsessions, in a way, from the Victorian repressive household settings, to the patriarchal, remote, powerfully domineering father/husband of the household, to the anaesthetised (dream-state-like) wives, and the children, who are fearful or sometimes wonderfully, mordantly insubordinate (as with Nance, the daughter in this novel), or otherwise self-serving, and monstrously deceptive (as with Sybil, here).
In the Edgeworth family in A House and its Head, published in 1935, you therefore have the archetypally representative CB family. The author often referred to it as one of the two of her most favourite works (the other being Manservant and Maidservant (New York Review Books Classics)). It opens with a conversation between husband and wife that is disconnected, disjointed, alienated and reminds you of Pinter's early work (The Room, The Birthday Party). While Duncan Edgeworth, the father, is without doubt a tyrant, dictating all terms to his family, there are two snakes in the grass in the apparently-servile daughter, Sybil, who in some ways is far more destructive than him; and Grant, Duncan's nephew.
As with Gaddis' fiction, sometimes it can be difficult to identify the speaker of the dialogue, as CB rarely identifies the person; you come to recognise them through their individual natures and thereby the content of what they say. This is what makes her so identifiably such a modernist, and she remains a radical and remarkable one at that. While demanding in regard of conversation, the satire and razor-sharp language and characterisation make this and all her other fiction well worth the effort (never a painful effort, by the way, just requiring a participating, not passive, energy on the part of the reader) and, as with her other novels, it leaves you intellectually and emotionally rewarded. And amazed at her brilliance.
For those who are keen to learn more about CB, I highly recommend three excellent sources:
1. A dedicated, very helpful website on CB, her work and her critics, titled the Ivy Compton-Burnett Home Page, which you can usually find listed as the second search result under Google, if you search under the author's name
2. In this edition there is an excellent afterword by Francine Prose, the National Book Award-nominated novelist, which you can access for free online at New York Review of Books' website (NYBooks), just search for the title of the novel or the author. In it, Prose characterises CB's fiction rather wonderfully as '[...] less like conventional fictions than like the laboratory notes of a meticulous and rather mad scientist.'
3. Hilary Spurling's masterful biography,
Ivy: the life of I. Compton-Burnett.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A landmark of 20th c. fiction, September 30, 2011
This review is from: A House and Its Head (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)
Ivy Compton-Burnett may not be a household name, and may even be obscure among dedicated readers of literary fiction, but that shouldn't be the case. Writing almost entirely in dialogue, Compton-Burnett uses the frame of polite conversation in Victorian England in this novel to expose deeply flawed characters willing both to commit things like adultery, murder and a whole host of other acts leading up to a casually stunning final few chapters. The delightfully slithering way Compton-Burnett's characters behave in A House and Its Head make for feverish reading if you're willing to have a little patience at the start to get to know the many characters. Compton-Burnett's work is also interesting as a precursor to William Gaddis in its brilliant use of dialogue, but you should read A House and Its Head on its own merits and you'll absolutely be rewarded for your effort.
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