Something Happened Yesterday [Hardcover]

Beryl Bainbridge (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1998

Like Alan Bennett's Writing Home, this collection of Bainbridge's personal essays presents a pleasantly idiosyncratic blend of subtle observations on contemporary England and personal memories of its past.

For six years during the late eighties and early nineties, Bainbridge often began her column with "Something happened yesterday..".. This offhand opening could lead to a humorous experience at a concert at the Albert Hall, a stint as a fortune-teller for her street's annual carnival in Camden Town, or excursions with her grandchildren to the Regents Park Zoo, shady Soho cinemas, and Madam Tussaud's Chambers of Horrors. She also works in anecdotes of her colorful past as well, such as her career performing sound effects for the Manchester BBC at the age of twelve, her arrival alone in London at sixteen, or the afternoon her ex-mother-in-law blew a hole in the ceiling with a pistol.

A new and very different delight for the many fans of Bainbridge's novels, Something Happened Yesterday also includes exchanges between Bainbridge and her readers, such like those with Fred about the history of beryl (the gemstone) and the committee for East Clyst's "Cooker Prize" of a gas oven for winning authors.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For six years, English novelist Beryl Bainbridge (The Birthday Boys) wrote a slightly dotty column for the London Evening Standard. Although the subject matter generally stays within the city's immediate environs, Bainbridge's skewed, droll reports will indulge her fans around the globe. Barmy digression is her stock in trade: attending a meeting to protest budget cuts in library services, she muses about playwright Joe Orton, who was "so incensed at his Islington branch failing to stock a copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that he defaced the jackets of lesser books and substantially raised the expectations of readers of Dorothy L. Sayers by incorporating the word 'knickers' in the blurb of one of her novels." Like a terrier with a juicy rat betwixt her teeth, Bainbridge grabs onto such small and large events as an MP hauled up for spanking and defended by "a medical chap" who claims "a whipping a day is more beneficial than an apple," a block fair where she is inveigled into reading fortunes, and an intrepid 5-year-old who interrupts a heated political discussion with a hose. --Francesca Coltrera

From Publishers Weekly

Originally when Bainbridge was asked to write a short weekly column for the Evening Standard, she "mistakenly attempted to grapple with so-called burning issues." Daunted by the amount of research and "informed comment" this required, she decided instead to focus on the daily events of her life, hence the rather modest title for this selection of 50 columns. As it happens, things that happened yesterday lead to recollections of things that happened many years previously as well as to things that didn't happen to her at all. Anyone who is familiar with Bainbridge's novels, say, The Secret Glass, will know that even the most ordinary council flat closet has some macabre skeleton ready-made for her sharp satire. Here the same applies: the structural decline of part of her house recalls the time her ex-mother-in-law tried to shoot her; thinking about exercise evokes her attempts to find out what kind of paperwork she would need to bury her mother in the back yard. She has little hobbies, like her museum with its piece of Herod's temple, her mother's teeth, a friend's gallstone, Melvyn Bragg's discarded sock. Her kids appear often, but more often is "a past which has become more real than the present." Bainbridge (who is best known in the U.S. for her novel The Birthday Boys, about Scott's expedition to the South Pole) is very English. Her humor is dry, pointed and very rooted in the culture, and some things may evade an American audience. The funniest bits, and often the most British, are the footnotes?Bainbridge's sober responses to letters from earnest eccentrics who could or should be Bainbridge's creations.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub; 1ST edition (August 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786705175
• ISBN-13: 978-0786705177
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,807,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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