Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best of Pym!, March 3, 2006
I thought I had read all of Pym's novels, but then realized that I had somehow missed No Fond Return of Love. After making up for my mistake, I would have to say that No Fond Return of Love has become my very favorite Pym work. That the story revolves around the incredibly patient and self-effacing folks who compose academic bibliographies (in the days when it was all done by hand), is a stroke of comic genius. Aside from the usual wit and depth of insight, it has the most wonderfully intricate plot and the most fleshed-out and real characters of all her fine books. Dulcie Mainwaring is a saint! And, a very real person. Everyone gets what she wants in this novel, and although the reader may disagree with the main characters' choices, they are THEIR choices and totally believable. This is also the sunniest and funniest of all the Pym novels, and I found myself literally laughing out loud at the many human failings and foibles Pym reveals in her most kind, generous, and forgiving manner.
Pym is always compared to Jane Austen, but No Fond Return of Love seems to me a finer work than anything of Miss Austen's. I enjoyed every single moment of this book and look forward to a re-reading of it quite soon.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
sweet, witty little romance, January 13, 2001
This is the first Barbara Pym I have read and I have to say I was a bit put off at first. It was written and set around the 1950's in London about Dulcie Mainwairing -a 30-odd year old woman and Aylwin Forbes a 47-year-old man. It is quite odd, no very odd. In many ways. There are a cast of extras in it, Laurel, Dulcie's niece; Viola, a rather cynical woman Dulcie meets who boards with her; Mrs Williton, an aunt, an uncle, two highly eccentric neighbours and a very strange bed and Breakfast owner who is Aylwin's mother. They seem to rattle around in this story which is mostly about Dulcie's gentle obsession with Aylwin. She has clearly fallen in love and does all the strange things one does when you fall in love - she looks him up in books, finds out where his brother is, visits his mother's boarding house, and this book is mostly about that obsession - but in the end all these characters floating around seem to tie up their loose ends or become important to the story. More important, and what I really began to enjoy about Pym was the way she tied up different motifs in the plot which were seen from different characters points of view. A stone squirrel in a front yard, a stuffed eagle in the boarding house. At one stage we see Aylwin unpacking, he has bought nothing intellectual to read, just Henry James - later downstairs Dulcie overhears him and wonders to her self why he is talking so Henry Jamesian. Its just a nice overlay of images from different viewpoints and it starts you realising how much in common Dulcie and Aylwin have.Like I said, I was a bit put off at first, but its a lovely, gentle, clever little romance that fairly soon I was really enjoying it.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Life's Problems Are Often Eased By Hot Milky Drinks", August 24, 2008
If you read novels in order to vicariously experience 1) Passionate Romance, 2) Hot Sex, 3) Violent Degradation and Tearful Redemption, 4) Political Intrigue or 5) Action/ Adventure, it's a fair bet you will not enjoy reading a book by Barbara Pym. If, however, you enjoy reading about 1) Dowdy, Socially Awkward 30-ish Spinsters, 2) Middle-aged Washed-Up Academics, 3) Confused Clergymen, 4) The Finer Points of Anglo-Catholic Liturgy and Lifestyle, or 5) Tea -- you will enjoy her immensely. Her stories of socially awkward people living lives of very quiet church-going, gardening, tea-sipping desperation in Post-War Britain are written with a light, witty hand and a keen, sensitive mind. For good reason she was known in her time as the new Jane Austen. In this one, our heroine, Dulcie Mainwaring, meets both Viola Dace and Aylwin Forbes at a conference for researchers and becomes involved in a romantic triangle that results in more confusion, disappointment, awkwardness and hot milky drinks than... uhh... actual romance. Still, all turns out more-or-less right in the end and all the more satisfying because of it. Delightful.
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