In the Bookshop, nothing happens and it’s very sad. My favorite of the novels is The Bookshop- and this is perhaps a controversial opinion Fitzgerald would write her Big Important Historical Novels later in her career, but I am partial to her earlier books, which seem to mine the same obsessions as the later ones, but domestically, instead of grafted-on historical tropes. And yet, you feel certain after sometimes less than 50,000 words that you have seen the specificity of multiple lives and layers of experience you have felt the force of them. The books are short and breezy, so much open space, with scenes that fall off before other novelists might feel they’ve begun. Byatt, Julian Barnes-is how does she do it? The touch is so light, yet so confident. Penelope Fitzgerald via wikimedia / Source: The repeated phrase when people discuss Penelope Fitzgerald’s work, not by laymen or by students, but by critics and intellectuals-A. I read books because the magic of a brain contained in language, put to paper, given to me in this small perfect container, is one of the great joys of my life. I read books because life piles up and is hard, and books take me somewhere else and I am reminded that life is also sort of magic life is charming life is messy, mixed-up, funny, sharp. I miss my kids and they’re maybe growing up without me while I try to find a way to support them. We keep accidentally overdrafting our checking account and I keep taking weekend work and night time work and there’s no time to do the thing I wish that I could do. But I read books for months like this, in which everything feels too much, in which kids are getting shot at school and in their backyards the globe is warming Twitter exists.

I don’t know why other people read books. I’ve been pulling colleagues into rooms after class and before faculty meetings to whisper to them about her, to convince them to order her books on their phones while we wait on the subway platform after work. I read the Hermione Lee biography and clutched it to my chest when it wasn’t open, walking to my train transfer, trudging from the subway to our house when it was dark and late and I’d just gotten free from my second, night time job. I don’t always mention the train.Īfter having a hard time finding a book that kept me awake on my commute, because I’ve not been sleeping lately, I sort of dove into Fitzgerald’s books a couple of months ago. When friends ask me how I’m doing, I give some version of that description. I’ve been doing other things, too, but mostly I’ve been doing that. I’ve been riding the subway and reading Penelope Fitzgerald and crying lately.

The bookshop penelope fitzgerald review