Discussion Area: The Language of Cold Comfort Farm
6:37 PM PDT, May 11, 2008
Notes from Kathy:
One of the reasons I enjoy rereading Cold Comfort Farm on a regular basis is that the language always captivates me. Stella Gibbons’ writing is remarkably versatile, contained just in this one book. She does what seems to be a creditable job of portraying the country dialect of her cousins, as well as the religious ranting of Amos. Her two- and three-star descriptive passages have striking if sometimes strange imagery. I am tickled by the way she throws in odd words, some of which I’m convinced she’s made up, so that I feel compelled to search dictionaries, even though the word’s meaning is deducible from the context. Sometimes when my husband is washing the dishes with the handled scrub brush he remembers about Adam Lambsbreath “clettering the dishes” with his little twig or with his little mop. I think Gibbons is purposely teasing us with these odd words; she’s up front with this game sometimes, as when Flora is trying to guess whether Reuben’s use of scranlet is a good or a bad accomplishment. Gibbons, in her introductory letter to Anthony Pookworthy, talks about having to relearn a convoluted style to counter her short and direct journalistic training. Does she ever really regress to that “poor, nasty, brutish and short” prose in Cold Comfort Farm? If she does, it is part of her plan, since I think she is always in complete control of her prose and gets it to accomplish what she intends. It would be interesting for someone better at it than I to try to identify the different styles that Gibbons uses throughout the book, both the more serious styles that she is making fun of, as well as her own unique voices. -- Kathy Gursky Discussion Area: More Characters from Cold Comfort Farm
9:09 AM PDT, May 2, 2008
Notes from Kathy:
On to the characters (the human ones)! If I had to pick my favorite character, or perhaps my favorite character transformation, I would be hard pressed to choose. Like other posters on this blog, Amos with his fiery preaching and “there’s no butter in hell!” is memorable. I really like the way his listeners settle in comfortably to hear his sermon; they may be quiverers in their singing, but they don’t seem terribly frightened by his rants. It’s more like people settling in to watch a familiar TV show. And I do admire the way Flora manages her subtle twists to get past his concern about putting himself forward. She manages to enlist Reuben’s aid as well. But ask me again tomorrow and I’d probably pick a different favorite. Let’s hear about your choices. -- Kathy Gursky Discussion Area: Starting to talk about characters
2:44 PM PDT, April 25, 2008
Notes from Kathy:
This is a hard book to discuss without getting into spoilers, isn’t it? Fortunately it’s also a fairly short and fast read, so I think we’ll just go on the assumption that everyone has made it through. I thought it might be fun to talk about some of the non-human characters first, and then move on to discussing the people. One of my enduring images from the TV show which was fully confirmed when I read the book was that of the huge pot of porridge that was constantly on the boil in the kitchen, and which seemed to have a voice of its own in the story. It acts as a kind of Greek chorus, amplifying Judith’s emotions in her scenes with Seth. Then of course there are the bull and cows. I particularly like the way the cows seem to be taking care of Adam as much as he takes care of them; they might be the calmest and most rational beings on the farm. The whole business of the legs falling off is so completely absurd, yet such a matter-of-fact occurrence to Adam and Reuben. Or maybe it’s absurd just because they take it so normally. Finally, the descriptive imagery of Cold Comfort Farm itself is so rich and inventive, yet the picture it paints is of something that seems physically impossible. I’d love to see someone try to make an actual layout of the farm buildings with their absurd architecture and inaccessible areas. From the initial descriptions it almost seemed that the farm would exhibit a personality of its own, but there are so many peculiar characters inhabiting it I don’t think it could compete. What images struck your fancy or your funny bone? -- Kathy Gursky Discussion Area: Getting started with Cold Comfort Farm
3:30 PM PDT, April 21, 2008
Notes from Kathy:
Welcome to the Penguin Classics Book Discussion blog. We're ready to start our discussion of Cold Comfort Farm (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), one of my favorite books (which certainly shouldn’t deter anyone from disliking it and saying so!). As we generally do, I’d like to start with first impressions. Let’s try to stick to the first part of the book, before Flora goes to stay with her relatives, and let’s also follow the usual practice of warning if your comments include spoilers, to benefit those readers who haven’t finished the book yet. I was introduced to Cold Comfort Farm by the BBC series that aired in the 1970s on Masterpiece Theater here in the U.S. I watched the show with my mother, and we both loved it. So naturally I went out and found the book, which is even better. I’ve also read this book aloud to friends; it’s great fun that way, even though I’m not good at the appropriate rural accents. Having seen the TV show first and knowing it was funny made it very easy to get into the book’s humor when I read it. Do you sometimes find yourself resisting the humor when you’ve been told it’s a funny book, or does that help guide your reactions? Certainly Stella Gibbons makes it clear from the very first, with her dedicatory note, that this is a humorous book. Knowing that the book you are about to start is funny (or billed as funny), how do your expectations and impressions change as you begin reading? I find that I have different reactions to the characters than I would if they were set in a serious book, and certainly tolerate quirks and behaviors differently. Flora is indifferent to her parents’ death and is matter-of-fact in her approach to living off her relatives. I take these attitudes as stated without wondering about underlying psychological issues. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I enjoy the book so much – the characters’ quirks are right out in front of us, and I don’t have to try to understand their hidden depths, just enjoy what I see. What are your initial reactions to Cold Comfort Farm? -- Kathy Gursky Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions wins the international Brit Insurance Graphics Award
8:50 AM PDT, April 16, 2008
The Penguin Classics Deluxe Series has been chosen as the winner in the Graphics category for the Brit Insurance Designs of the year. The jury was so enthusiastic about the Penguin Classics Deluxe Series’ design and the wonderful art direction that it was named a clear winner. The awards ceremony was held on March 18th at the Design Museum in London. In choosing them the judges commented, "It’s a great achievement by its creative director Paul Buckley in commissioning a highly skilled group of illustrators and cartoonists whose creative visions have produced some fantastic atmospheric yet very individual covers with high artistic flair and design integrity." The Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, also known as the Graphic Classics, are listed below:  Ceremony  Cold Comfort Farm  Candide: Or, Optimism  Jane Austen, The Complete Novels  Lady Chatterley's Lover  Fairy Tales  The Portable Dorothy Parker  The New York Trilogy  The Jungle  Frankenstein  One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:  Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories  The Dharma Bums  We Have Always Lived in the Castle  Metamorphosis and Other Stories  Little Women  The Three Musketeers  Kristin Lavransdatter Selection #6: Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
12:54 PM PDT, April 4, 2008
Stella Gibbons (1902–1989), novelist and poet, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for Cold Comfort Farm, her first novel. Her other works include Nightingale Wood, Westwood, and Beside the Pearly Waters.
A hilarious parody of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy’s novels, we're sure that readers will be engrossed by Ms. Gibbons’ master work between chuckles. Start reading now, and we’ll launch the discussion on April 21st.
************************************************** ***************** See all of the Penguin Classics Reading Group selections: http://www.amazon.com/penguinclassics
Discussion Area: Would You Recommend Ceremony?
4:49 PM PDT, March 30, 2008
Notes from Kathy:
We are coming to the close of our discussions of Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. I am particularly grateful to Ms. Silko for giving us a glimpse of a centered and positive future for Tayo; I think I am not alone in having come to like, respect, and care about him. My last discussion topic is to ask: would you recommend this book to other people? What would you say about it, either to recommend it or to steer readers away from it? Since I pushed for the selection of Ceremony for this reading group, it’s probably obvious that I do recommend it, and recommend it highly. For people living in the American Southwest it is one way to begin to know something about the Pueblo Indian culture of this area. For that reason, I think it is particularly valuable to me and my neighbors. If that were its primary merit, I might hesitate to recommend it to others who were not interested in that particular culture. But one of the strengths of Ceremony is that it touches on a number of universal themes quite apart from the details of Native American culture: insider/outsider relationships, war and healing, learning from one’s birth culture, connecting to the land, the nature of evil. I value Ceremony for its richness of culture and character, for the way its themes transcend the local to range to the universal, and the way that it doesn’t oversimplify the complexities of human nature. Thank you all for your perceptive and thoughtful discussions, as always. -- Kathy Gursky GUEST VIEWPOINT: Leslie Marmon Silko
8:19 AM PDT, March 25, 2008
We are very fortunate to have a guest viewpoint from Leslie Marmon Silko, author of Ceremony. Here, Ms. Silko envisions
Tayo's life after the final pages of Ceremony.
*************************************** ***Spoiler Alert*** The origins of a novel are mysterious because these origins are related to all the other novels that have come before it in a given language, and the language extends far back in time and involves a community and history beyond the individual novelist, so that the novel belongs not just to the novelist who gives birth to it, the novel, once it is published, belongs to the world. The novelist may discuss her conscious intentions in writing a novel, but her subconscious intuitions can only be realized later by readers as they experience the words and images she creates. So in a sense, after a novel is written, the novelist who wrote it becomes just another reader of that novel, and her views should not be given more weight than the views of other conscientious readers. That said, this is what I feel about Tayo's life after the book. I imagined Tayo so intensely and spent so much time with him while I wrote the novel that for me, even now, he is alive. He is as dear to me as a child, so while one might imagine any fate for Tayo, I know Tayo is safe. His life after Ceremony is good---peaceful and filled with the beauty of the sky, the mesas and the junipers trees, and the horses and cattle, and of course, the people who prayed for his recovery from his experiences in the war. Tayo is at peace with himself and others, but I think he prefers to spend his days in the hills with his horse, attending to the cattle and doing other ranch chores. He returns to Laguna for the kat'sina dances and other religious and communal celebrations. He probably has a wife he loves and children and grandchildren now. He is a quiet man but when the children ask him questions, he answers by telling them stories---stories about Buzzard and Green Bottle Fly, and stories about the old folks, and stories about the war---he would not shy away from telling the children what tragedy war is. That's how I like to imagine Tayo today, surrounded by children, telling them the stories that helped save him. GUEST VIEWPOINT: Penguin Classics Editorial
8:09 AM PDT, March 21, 2008
Sheila Moaleman is performing an internship with Penguin Group USA, currently working with our Penguin
Classics editors.
*************************************** ***Spoiler Alert*** I would like to look at the dichotomies between internal/external and insider/outsider in Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. Tayo is an outsider in the novel on many different levels. He’s an outsider in his community because he is of mixed race, and an outsider in America because he’s Native American. He’s even an outsider among his veteran friends, since he does not glorify the war. He realizes the Army accepted him and is friends only because of the war, and that though they were united during battle they returned to being outsiders once the war ended. In the bar scene on page 57, Tayo feels the alcohol “loosening something deeper inside which clenched the anger and held it in place.” He watches as Emo plays with his victims’ teeth and raves about the good old days back when they were in the Army. His anger grows inside of him as he tries to black out the rattling of the bag full of teeth. The only way for him to release his anger from his stomach is to physically force it out. Tayo stabs Emo in the belly and in doing so empties his own stomach of rage. His anger changes from an internal feeling of sickness to an external act of violence. The medicine man, Old Betonie, uses the concept of internal vs. external to describe the immergence of evil. “They want us to believe all evil resides with white people…they want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery manipulates” (122). Instead of associating evil exclusively with “white people” he blames witches (or, in other words, a force larger than both Native Americans or the dominant white community) for evil. Although this account exposes the Native Americans closely to the concept of evil, it still reinforces that evil is outside of them. Old Betonie’s explanation has the same insider/outsider mentality that is apparent throughout the novel. The white community views the Native Americans as outsiders in their country just as the Native Americans see the evil witches as outsiders in their community. Does the idea that evil is an external entity contradict Tayo’s sense of anger living “deep inside, below his lungs” (58) or does it explain how the anger entered him?
—Sheila Discussion Area: One little sentence
7:27 PM PDT, March 16, 2008
Notes from Kathy:
Here’s a very specific question. There is a section near the end of Ceremony, when Tayo is fully “cured,” that I find interesting and ambiguous, and I wonder what your interpretations might be. In the deluxe edition it is on page 237, just before one of the poetry sections: “He thought of her then; she had always loved him, she had never left him, she had always been there.” Who is the “she” this sentence refers to? His mother? Ts’eh? The earth or nature? Any ideas? Maybe I’m missing the obvious! It seems important to me because it seems like a conclusion has been reached, something has been resolved or reconciled. I like the idea that it is his mother referred to, that he has brought that part of his missing life into harmony at last. -- Kathy Gursky
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In this space, Penguin Classics hosts a discussion of selected classics throughout the year. Selections will run the gamut from well-known favorites to cult classics and will represent writers from across the centuries and all regions of the globe. Please join us as we read great books together! You may contact us by e-mail at: ClassicReadingGroup@us.penguingroup.com Our facilitator, Kathryn Gursky, is a professional librarian, and we discovered her right here on Amazon.com when she wrote a review of the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection. We contacted Kathryn, one thing led to another, and before long we had dubbed her the Penguin Classics Librarian. We were immediately impressed with her effusive love of literature and her fresh, unfussy perspective. Quite simply, Kathryn is a book lover who loves to read, and reads a lot. The perfect embodiment of the Penguin Classics reader. Kathryn will be the lead blogger in our discussions, generously doling out her inspired ruminations and straight-up impressions. Shell comment on your feedback and keep the discussion percolating. We at Penguin will support Kathryn with occasional guest blogs drawing on the resources of our editorial experts, our writers and translators, and from time to time, other professionals in arts and letters. But the most important part of the Reading Group is you. The Amazon book community is an adventurous place where readers of all stripes embrace new voices, ancient texts, prose and poetry. It is, therefore, a perfect place to host a reading group. Subscribe to the Penguin Classics Reading Group blog and help make this a uniquely interesting place to visit.
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