A PASSIONATE APPRENTICE: The Early Journals 1897-1

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A PASSIONATE APPRENTICE: The Early Journals 1897-1

Name: A PASSIONATE APPRENTICE: The Early Journals 1897-1
Author: Virginia Woolf
ISBN: 15-171287-5

By Virginia Woolf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 1991

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These seven journals of Woolf (1882-1943), begun when she was almost 15 and spanning 12 years, cover her life at home as well as trips to various parts of Great Britain and to Greece and Italy. As Leaska (Communication Arts/N.Y.U.) says in his excellent introduction, these were "private books, written quickly, spontaneously," and they show an apprentice learning her craft. The journal for 1897, "the first really lived year of my life," as Woolf says, would be of little interest were the author not Virginia Woolf. The brief entries are mostly mundane: "After luncheon Nessa went back to her drawings; Stella to the work house, and Father to Wimbledon." But they do reveal her absolute compulsion to put down her thoughts and experiences in writing: "What shall I write tomorrow?" Beginning with the Warboys 1899 journal, as Leaska says, "she was practising the art of essay writing for the first time," and from then on the daily entries are interspersed with short essays. Clear indications of her later skill become evident: Some relatives "move awkwardly, & as though they resented the conventionalities of modern life at every step. They all bring with them the atmosphere of the lecture room." Her career as a fiction writer is clearly indicated by: the 1905 Cornwall entries that recall her childhood, and whose details she would reimagine in To the Lighthouse; an especially moving passage in 1903 speculating on a note left by an unknown drowned woman; and her reflections in the 1906 Greece diary on Prosper MerimÇe's letters to an unknown woman. These later entries plainly reveal Woolf's strengths: accurate vivid details that bring people and places to life; compassion; and truth-telling, even when painful. Although these notebooks do not record the turbulence of her life at this time—her father's death, her own spells of depression—the reader may often infer her state of mind by the calmness or agitation of her entries. The volume also contains full footnotes and useful, interesting appendices. Necessary for Woolf scholars and fascinating for even casual readers.

Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1991

ISBN: 15-171287-5

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.