Barbara ComynsCritiques

I finally finished this short book. I delayed finishing it because I knew that when I was done, so was my mother. I know that might sound strange, but I started this book on January 10th. On January 13th my mother (who has been in palliative care since March 2023) took to her bed and was never to leave it alive. My 95-year-old mother passed away peacefully on January 20th, my birthday. I stayed at her house during that last week, reading bits of the book at night, and being surprised by two coincidences between the book and what was happening. 1) The protagonist's name is Bella, my mother's middle name. 2) There is a character in the book whose mother dies in childbirth, so his birthday will always be the day of his mother's death. After my mother passed away, we went through the burial and week-long mourning period and each night I tried to read The Juniper Tree but fell asleep after a page or two. It was as if I didn't want to finish it, because then I would know that my mother was really gone. Well, I just finished it. And she's really gone.

BTW, the book is a weird fairytale retelling of the Grimm story of the same name. The story is unusual, but I don't want to spoil anything. One plot development near the end of the novel was a sudden and not fully believable shock, but the denouement was satisfying.

No review - read so long ago that I don't recall it.

Sophia y Charles tienen veinte años cuando se conocen en un tren. Los dos son artistas, alegres y cándidos, y al cabo de un año deciden casarse en secreto. A la boda, sin embargo, va todo el mundo, quizá un primer indicio de que no siempre sabe uno bien dónde se mete. La novia cree que el control de natalidad consiste en ponerse «muy seria» y decir: «No tendré hijos». La madre del novio cree que su hijo «es un genio y se merece respeto».
En el Londres bohemio de los años 30, de mudanza en mudanza, entre niños y amantes inesperados, la inocencia y la esperanza tendrán que afrontar duras pruebas. Antes de conocer a su verdadero príncipe azul, Sophia se habrá convertido en la dulce heroína de un extraño cuento de hadas, en el que el hada madrina es una pequeña herencia imprevista y el ogro adopta la forma de cortes de gas y de luz, trabajos perdidos, comidas magras y una parentela entrometida y mezquina.

Lovely writing, some darkly humorous lines and situations, and the "bread" part of the book was a compelling narrative I found captivating. The rest felt a bit disjointed with lots of good tidbits throughout; I had trouble staying engaged despite how short it is. I'm looking forward to reading Comyns' The Jupiter Tree soon.

That ending was...unexpected.

This is a strange little book. I kept thinking of this as Little Women turned on its head. This is the story of five sisters told by the one in the middle. The river in reference here is the Avon, and the family is an upper class family that is apparently barely hanging on to its status and properties. It is told in an episodic fashion, non-linear, vignette-style. While the forward said it was semi-autobiographical, I kept hoping some of these events never occurred, particularly those in which animals and children were subjected to cruelty. Instances of both occurred a bit too often for my taste, but I tried to read it with a sense of humor, because otherwise it was a wee bit dark. I mean, any way you stack it, these are at worst abusive parents and at best apathetic ones.

then she (Granny) would say we were no better than Street Arabs or Charity Winks and should be horsewhipped, once Daddy took her at her word and did horsewhip me, it was so dreadful I couldn’t even cry out, then Granny got frit (frightened) and kept shouting, “No more, you will kill the child, stop, stop...”

The same father who beats Barbara for accidentally breaking an egg on a wall, throws a baby down the stairs because she will not stop crying and only the quick catch of a nursery nanny prevents a tragedy. His gardener disposes of unwanted kittens by cutting off their heads, which is over the top for me.

These kinds of passages made this a bit hard, but there were also funny episodes since the children were mischievous and less than angels and some of their hijinks were humorous. There is no Marmie handing out sage advice, no Meg loaning gloves so that her sister will be presentable, and certainly no Beth spreading sweetness and light in this novel. The oldest girl, Mary, refuses to allow the other girls to wear any colored dresses, they are forced to wear drab brown, so that she alone will shine and strictly forbids them to read any book that she loves, so Wind in the Willows is off limits. I will admit, however, that the girls’ relationships with one another seemed quite realistic and genuine to me. I grew up in a family of girls, and there are surely those moments between the older and younger that are neither kind nor fair.

In the end, I am leaving it with mixed feelings. I actually liked parts of it very much and, despite the passages that I objected to, I never considered putting it aside. So, I’m plotting it right in the middle...didn’t hate it, didn’t love it.

La hija del veterinario es una novela inquietante y fantasiosa, pero perfectamente controlada por una voz narrativa delicada, intencionada e inteligente. Barbara Comyns confirma en ella su singular humor, su maestría para un punto de vista familiarizado con la catástrofe y con esas «pequeñas cosas que nunca se olvidan».

Another weird and wonderful novel by the weird and wonderful Barbara Comyns. Hilarity, squalor, love and loss.

I think Comyns has one of most genuinely strange ways of seeing of any writer I know. And somehow the very strangeness of her seeing marks her, and her writing, out as incredibly authentic. Even when things are at their worst — when she's an indentured skivvy to a horrible backyard dog-breeder in an Amsterdam suburb, bite-wounds going septic, with no money or means of escape, or when she ("Vicky" in this thinly-fictionalised autobio) and her sister Blanche are starving in London, boiling spuds over a candle and breaking out in boils — the "drunkenness of things being various", to quote MacNeice, shines through. She eschews analysis, preferring to let "things", and emotions, speak for themselves. It doesn't matter why she feels a certain way; what's important is the nature of what she feels. It's the same with the world — she writes like a painter, obsessively looking and showing with prose full of brightness, contrast, and something unexpected on every page.

She's like Stevie Smith running a three-legged race with a Mitford.

Everything is off-skew and hobbledehoy. Returning to her flat after a few weeks away she notes that nothing has changed but "the cockroaches had returned, two living and one dead." The title invokes mistletoe's aspect as a clinging, climbing, stifling plant as well as its traditional amatory significance. Vicky marries three times, only once for love, and is never quite able to alter her default state of cloying penury. Men have a tendency to be awful, smothering her with unwanted "sucking kisses" or arbitrarily withholding her inheritance. One is described like this: "he worked at night in a bakery and looked like a piece of mildewed bread and people said he was a gambler."

The eponymous vet's daughter is Alice, who lives with her mother and father, the veterinarian. The vet is a brutal and sadistic bully to his wife and daughter (and to his patients). Alice and her mother spend their days in fear of the vet. As with many of Comyns's novels, the story seems at first to be well-grounded in reality, with a touch of quirkiness, but soon there is a heavy dose of a lurking and sinister menace. After Alice's mother dies (and Alice has been the victim of an attempted rape), she has what we think is a dream-like, hallucinatory levitation experience. Her naivetee and lack of real world experience lead her to believe that everyone has such experiences, and we are soon questioning reality.

This was a strange book, and I guess you could call it a typical Comyns work, but I've liked the other books I've read by her better.

3 stars

A quick and peculiar read which was almost universally disliked by my book group. I however rather liked it - there is madness, black humour, terrible family members and some awful violence - what's not to like? I am a fan of Barbara Comyns' writing style in all the books of hers I have read.½

Published at the time of COVID 19 as its main theme is some kind of plague that wipes out many people in a village. Rye bread is blamed. The whole plot is mad and revolves around an eccentric family. The humour can be described as dark and in some cases daft.½

Such a strange and wonderful little novel.

An odd book, commendably short and very well written, felt a bit old fashioned even for it's time (1954). I guess it is Cold Comfort Farm and Gormenghast combined.

Nice enough writing, and kind of a weird story, but there wasn't a lot of heft.

Too depressing too read. A mordant mystery would be more fun.

An anecdotal collection of childhood memories written in a childlike conversational tone that simultaneously captures the fragmentary nature of a childhood in recollection, as well as casually and straightforwardly - without sympathy or even acknowledgement - reveals the darker abusive environment in which the narrator and her sisters grew up.

In fact, Comyns' deliberate choice of run-on prose and occasional misspellings was very effective in distracting me from the horrific anecdotes until I was about midway through. In this way, I felt I was sucker-punched similar to that time I read Karen Russell's Swamplandia! Or perhaps I'm only reminded of it because the river played a significant part in both stories.

As with my first Comyns, I loved how she captures the way that childhood days seem to all blend together into one long long long day, or season, or event. There's no real structure to the overall story, with the barest of story progression happening in the final pages.

Aside: Apparently this book was very autobiographical and Comyns wrote it as a record for herself. After The Skin Chairs, I felt certain that Comyns will be a favourite. I'm still certain, but feel that this book would be perhaps better read last in my pursuit of Comyns.½

Funny and grotesque, this novel reads like a British version of Southern Gothic.

An oddly exquisite gem of a novel, it captured so perfectly the accepted randomness of childhood and the inconsistent ebb and flow way that time flows in childhood.

We follow a few years of young Frances' life as her family's circumstances suddenly changes for the worse. Life happens, we learn about specific village happenings through Frances - essentially the highlights of everyday village gossips -, she has her own childish imagination-fueled fears and occasional daring and (mis)adventures.

Comyns concisely packs a whole lot of lives into two hundred pages, her prose glides over that timeless haze of childhood, her characters so human in their relentless flaws. Reading it was like having some love-ambrosia slowly filling up my heart. I can't pinpoint exactly why I love this novel, I just do. And I look very much forward to my next Comyns.

Aside: this book taught me that when something is described as the colour of primrose, it is not pink as I've always imagined but a pale yellow and I wonder what other colours I've been assuming wrongly.

This writer, a Brit, is a new one for me, as is the case with many of us as our new feminist awareness is putting many literary women back in the forefront of a domain that previously ignored them. Our primary character herein, one Sophia, is a naive but apparently attractive young woman (I say this as she is constantly being 'rescued' by reprobates) who finds herself enmeshed in a horrific mariage, terrible in-laws and a laggard husband (aren't they all -- and let's not forget the 'manolescent' boyfriends of today, a plague upon the land!), a pregnancy and delivery from hell (thirties style!), and the class-ridden society of class conscious pre-war Britain. I intend to read more works from B Comyns, a true luminary!

In this mostly depressing novel, a young woman recounts her early adulthood. She married way too young and had a baby right away, lived in poverty, gets ill, husband is unsupportive and leaves her, etc. It was sort of like a first person Hardy novel set in the mid-1900s.

I liked it, but not as much as the other Comyns novel I've read (The Vet's Daughter). I mainly liked the voice of the narrator in this one. She is very straightforward and matter of fact about all the terrible things happening to her. I actually found it sort of funny at times.½

Comyns’ The juniper tree is a novel based loosely on the Grimm fairy tale of the same name. The main character, Bella, is a single mother to a mixed-race daughter. She finds a new job running an antiques boutique and becomes friends with a nearby wealthy family whose husband decides she needs an education in literature, art, and theatre; the wife, Gertrude, becomes a close friend. Their mansion’s garden becomes a park that Bella and her daughter frequent. Then there’s her mother, who is a severe narcissist, though Bella is rather good at enforcing No Contact -- the mother doesn’t even know about Bella’s daughter.

As the book develops, the story flows along nicely, avoiding major speed bumps. Gradually, though, a few details start feeling slightly off: there’s thieving magpies in the garden; the narcissist mother turns up for semi-regular visits and turns out to be horribly racist as well; her ex-boyfriend wants to impress her with his new conquest. Pushing in from beyond Bella’s new idyllic life are ominous reminders that the Outside World is cruel and self-serving, though they remain under the surface; their pressure is subtle.

It was nice to read a book centring on the stepmother character, and a sympathetic portrayal at that. Other than that this book was just plain well done. It was a gentle, languid read, and, like a fairytale, feels largely untethered to the decade in which it is actually set (the 1980s) -- large sections of the book could have been set in pre-War London, too, or even the 1800s. If I have any point of criticism it is that the events in the plot were kept a little too much in the middle distance -- again, like in a fairy tale: sometimes it feels more like we’re being told about a series of events rather than seeing them happen through the main character, particularly as the story nears its conclusion.

But on the whole this book was a quiet, understatedly nasty read. Not quite character-driven enough, but the buildup and the gentle flavour of the narrative more than make up for that.½

Interesting. Author Barbara Comyns writes a semi-autobiographical novel set in the 1930s (she cautions that nothing in the book is true except a few chapters; I won’t mention what those are about to avoid spoilers). The protagonist, Sophia, marries in haste and repents at leisure; she’s breathtakingly naïve, and her husband is a callous jerk – but can be slightly forgiven because he’s also breathtakingly naïve. The couple have no idea of how to support themselves, and unfortunately don’t seem to realize how reproduction works (Sophia volunteers to the reader that she thought if you firmly believed you wouldn’t get pregnant, you wouldn’t. This turns out not to be the case). The main charm of the book is the writing style; simple declarative sentences narrating their descent into genteel poverty – and continuing into pretty ungenteel poverty – somehow turns the commonplace into grand tragedy. Still, Sophia manages to muddle through being unable to afford clothes and furniture and heat and food and medical care and ends up reminding the reader that simple joys – enough to eat, a new pair of shoes, a pet – are the best.

A quirky book about a family--a detestable grandmother, her self-centered son, his three children by a dead wife (one of whom, his favorite, is actually not his), an old caretaker, and two young maids--living in an English village, which experiences first a flood and then a rash of poisonings causing hallucinations and various bizarre deaths. Comyns has an understated writing style, and there is a wicked dark humor underlying her writing that I quite enjoyed. However, I agree with some reviewers that there didn't seem to be much point to this, other than telling a wickedly horrific story just for its own sake. I found it light but enjoyable.

dead animals floating over the rose bushes -- a butcher slices open his own throat -- a tyrannical grandmother -- plague -- ominous cows -- fire and murder -- getting in the family way -- swanky new yellow automobiles -- punting up the river -- funerals -- a sleepy english countryside village reveals its dark, bloodstained heart.

A vivid, melancholy and poetic novel about poverty in mid-20th century England by a woman who is quickly becoming my favourite new writer (new to me, I mean). This is pitched somewhere between the quirky, self-conscious voice of a Muriel Spark protagonist and the depictions of working class life from one of Orwell's social novels, maybe Keep The Aspidistra Flying or one of those. Comyns should be much better-known than she is.