The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
“There was such a long pause that I wondered whether my Mamma and Papa were ever going to speak to each other again.” At times, this is one of the funniest novels I have ever read. It’s slightly overlong at times, and given that there’s two more books in the series, I don’t think that’s going to change. The book is a roman a clef by way of a bildungsroman. I don’t know how much of it directly based on Rebecca West’s life, but if […]
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
Cbr14bingo Gaslight/Bingo Blackout Action takes place during and in decades prior to WWI. A couple of characters struggle to believe the truth and question each other’s reliability. The Return of the Soldier is a novella that exposes the iniquities of Britain’s class system against the backdrop of World War I. It is a heartbreaking love story that focuses on the women in one soldier’s life as he convalesces following an unusual injury in France. This story features four main characters. The injured soldier, Captain Chris […]
The New Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West
This is a revised edition of a book that came out not that long after WWII had ended and was revisited about 20 years later when the geopolitical situation surrounding the concept of treason further shifted from the politics of fascism and democracy to one of the Cold War logic of communism and democracy (and I know that communism is an economic system, but meaning here the authoritarian governments under communist regimes in Soviet Union, and within time China and North Korea, although the book […]
Harriet Hume by Rebecca West
This is a British novel from 1928 by the writer Rebecca West, most well known for The Return of the Solider, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (a 1400 page diary/journal through Eastern Europe), The Birds Fall Down, and The Fountain Overflows. I have only previously read The Return of the Soldier and recall more about the physical object of the book itself than the story (it was a first edition from 1917 that my library had in the stacks, so it was really neat, and […]
