The Bookshop

Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Bookshop, is truly a delightful book. It tells the story of Florence Green, a World War Two widow, who opens a bookstore in a long-abandoned centuries-old house in a small town in Suffolk. It’s a tale of Florence’s courage to go ahead with the bookshop despite the opposition of the most powerful woman in town who had designs to make the ancient house a community arts center.

Fitzgerald believed that the world we live in is divided in her own words of “exterminators and exterminatees.” And the spunky Florence falls into the latter category, as the powerful Mrs. Gamart triumphs in the end. Yet her grace and tenacity in fighting the good fight to the end are inspiring.

Penelope Fitzgerald began her literary career rather late in life at age 58. Her first novel was published at age 60. She soon received literary recognition as her third novel, The Bookshop, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978. The following year, her novel Offshore, won the Booker Prize. Both these novels reflected true life experiences of the author, who had worked in a Suffolk bookshop and lived on a barge on the Thames.       

      

The Post-World War 2 Generation of British Women Writers

In my recent reading, I have enjoyed some of the novels of British writers Bernice Rubens and Penelope Fitzgerald. They, along with Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Anita Brookner, Penelope Lively and Brigid Brophy represented a group of post-World War Two women novelists that shaped British writing for a generation. Here is what Louis B. Jones has to say about this group in a review of Ms. Fitzgerald’s book The Gate of Angels in the New York Times on March 1, 1992: “Provided, of course, that she’s of a certain class, the British woman writer has always occupied a very comfortable room of her own. In her dexterous hands, the postwar British novel has become a most elegant, wicked artifact. Her ascendancy can’t be credited to modern feminism alone, advanced though our era may be. Always, historical circumstances have blessed the British woman writer with a strength and mercy that incarnate Authority, especially out here in far-flung ports.”          

Movie Recommendations

I am recommending two movie adaptations of novels that are currently streaming. The first is The Bookshop, adapted from Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel written in 1978. It is a wonderful story, set in a small coastal East Anglian town in the late 1950’s, of a World War Two widow’s struggle against adversity to keep her bookshop going. The second movie is The White Tiger, a novel by the Indian author Aravind Adiga, which did win the Booker Prize in 2008. It is an enthralling tale, set in the India of the first decade of the 21^st century. It depicts the adventures of a low-caste young man who rises from abject poverty to become a successful entrepreneur. While there is much humor in the film, there is also a disturbing dark side to it. The Bookshop can be found on Amazon Prime Video. The White Tiger is on Netflix.