A Month in the Country (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Don’t let the bland cover or blurb lead you to think this is just the charming story of the healing effect of a bucolic month in a quiet village. It is that. But it’s much more. This story brought out a mixture of feelings for me …. I was expecting to read about a guy who was gloomy and very lonely —

A Month in the Country (New York Review Books Classics): J.L A Month in the Country (New York Review Books Classics): J.L

The introduction to the book in the NYRB version is written by Michael Holroydand it is excellent. I love it when an introduction fires up the reader to read the book. He talks about his own odd intersection with J. L. Carr, but the most resonating bit he shares is in regards to Carr's funeral. I felt that if I couldn't do it in the present, suggesting internal pain by performance, then I wouldn't really want to do it at all. [7] Upon its release in 1987, the film was generally well received by critics. Rita Kempley, writing in The Washington Post suggested "It's all rather Arthurian, with its chivalric hero on his spiritual quest, the atmosphere suffused, seeming to dance with once and future truths." [16] Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times praised O'Connor's direction, suggesting it lent the film "a strong sense of yearning, as well as a spiritual quality more apparent in the look of the film than in its dialogue." [17] Desmond Ryan of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote "Rarely has the impossibility of love been more wrenchingly presented than in the scenes of dashed hope between Firth and Richardson. [18]

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There is so much about this short novel that defines a perfect read for me . It’s a quiet story where seemingly nothing happens, but yet there is so much that happens in ordinary moments of life , which for me make them extraordinary. I always enjoy these intimate, introspective stories and I felt for Tom Birkin right away . The writing is lovely. What more could I ask for? If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.” When the protagonist is tasked to restore a 500-year-old painting which have been white-washed over a hundred years after it was painted, he leaves behind a shattered life in London. He survived WWI but his wife left him for another man. He had little else to lose when he left for the northern village where the church is located. While cleaning up the painting, he intensely experiences the joy and sorrows of the original artist, as though they were communicating across the centuries, even discovering how the unknown master died so many centuries ago. If the author of this book had more appropriately named this Elegy of a Broken Man rather than A Month in the Country, I think my preconceptions and attitudes would have met him in that proper space rather than taken a continuous nose dive into confusion. In particular, he forms a close friendship with archaeologist James Moon, another war veteran, who like Birkin has been emotionally scarred. Moon is employed in the village under the same bequest, working to uncover a mysterious lost grave, but is more interested in discovering the remains of an earlier Saxon church building in the field next to the churchyard.

A Month in the Country (film) - Wikipedia A Month in the Country (film) - Wikipedia

But the edges are brighter for it. Birkin's idyll in the country is brought into relief by what Birkin has gone through in the past and the disappointments that, it is implied, await him. Carr's great art is to make it clear that joy is inseparable from the pain and oblivion which unmake it. But actually after the initial snottiness welcome from Vicar Keach …. who was not terribly enthusiastic about hiring Tom to restore a medieval wall mural, thinking he wasn’t a suitable person for the job….or happy that Tom would be living in the church’s bell-loft — I could never make out what this book wanted to be, when it grew up. It was sometimes boring and disorganized, and also sometimes inspired and filled with big, important “thinks.” I thought, quite mistakenly, that it was a summer-inspired travelogue, in the spirit of a book penned by a Frances Mayes or a Gerald Durrell, but instead it was a book about post-war trauma, dark in tone and unsure of its arc. Also, I believe that many writers who actually WROTE in the 1920s had a more modern voice and a more progressive feel than Mr. Carr did, writing this as a reflective novel, 60 years later. in other words — not getting the best welcome or given the best living situation— Tom was actually rather happy — or at least content. His inner pride and strength—trust in his own abilities to handle the daily hard work—was never a question for Tom. I had come to South America to get over someone after an awful breakup, and so I wasn't looking for anything. I wanted zero complications. Right? Sure. As I said to myself on several occasions. So nothing happened that night. Nothing happened the next nDenis Gifford (editor) British Film Catalogue: Two Volume Set - The Fiction Film, Volume 2, 1895-1994, p. 960, at Google Books The genius of this short novel, under 50,000 words, is that it doesn't tart up the glory of the images with overwrought settings. Keep it simple, make it well, and quality will out. It is a joy to find laughs and savors in the same book. It is a rare joy to find them polished to a deep flash, set at just the right moment, and not vulgarly paraded for our approval but rather simply put in their proper place and left for us to notice as we will. Birkin considers odd couples more than once, especially Keach and Alice, and how utterly different they are at home, compared with elsewhere. There is forbidden love of at least two kinds (“coddling it up in myself”), missed opportunities, and a casual revelation by a third party that forever affects a friendship. I’m not quite sure what message Carr intended with the last of those. Birkin learns that Moon was dishonourably discharged for homosexuality. He says he doesn’t mind, but “from that time on, things were never quite the same between us”. And then, God help me, on my first morning, in the first few minutes of my first morning, I felt that this alien northern countryside was friendly, that I'd turned a corner and that this summer of 1920, which was to smoulder on until the first leaves fell, was to be a propitious season of living, a blessed time.