The strange case of Barbara pym and its conversion to a classic of literature after going unnoticed in life. Maybe it's because he's narrating inconsequentialities of the moment. In the sense that the realism sometimes it passes by brushing the obvious of existence. It is something like a photo seen shortly after being taken or, conversely, found decades later.
The look is not the same and everything is magically transformed. The gestures of the people captured at that moment hide secrets that we would like to reveal with the pressing love of the soul; a simple glance finds us on the other side as if hypnotizing us with everything that its brilliance counts ...
Barbara Pym was that storyteller as a photographer. And then their portraits seemed nondescript when they really aspired to immortality over time. Paradoxes of literature and of existence, in unison. Now it is time to just appreciate a literature with that aroma of ancient ways of seeing the world and of interacting in society with a precious degree of detail.
Top 3 Recommended Novels by Barbara Pym
Excellent Women
The good of Lady chatterley and her lover told us about their love affairs against all odds in 1928. 30 years later in England itself there was an involution, a maintenance of customs and customs. And it is that revolutions do not always reach everywhere in the same ways. In the contrast is located this protagonist weighed down by habit and yearning for her will to push her towards other vital voyages.
Mildred Lathbury, the narrator, is a single woman living in London who spends her time in various tasks in the parish, in having tea with friends, in charity work and in meeting the needs of others. She is intelligent and observant, but also shy and insecure, partly due to her single status, as many would like to see her married now, in her early thirties.
In addition to his good friends, the vicar Julian Malory and his sister Winifred, Mildred, will become intimate with their neighbors, the Napiers, who have just settled downstairs from their house. You will also meet Allegra, a widow who is staying in the parish, and countless other characters. Mildred will be involved in various matters of a sentimental nature.
Unrequited love
With a certain counterpoint inspiration to the previous story, this novel opens to the sentimental frays in the midst of a sociological conflict for complete moral liberation. Without excelling in erotic stridency, the author's pulse accelerates with that precise undressing of her passions.
Dulcie Mainwaring, the heroine of this book, is one of those seemingly disinterested "fine women" who is always around; helping others but not able to take care of himself; herself, especially as regards the love field. In 'Unrequited Love', a novel at the height of the best English comedies, Pym, with his characteristic sarcasm and sense of humor, presents us with a delicate love affair, full of unfulfilled dreams and hidden secrets.
Foreigners welcome
When Barbara Pym died in 1980, she left behind a considerable amount of unreleased material. Among this, an early novel, ALIENS, WELCOME, from 1936, and "Finding a Voice," the only written document in which Pym talks about her career as a writer and the origins of her literary personality.
In "Strangers Welcome" a young couple, consisting of Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon and her self-centered writer husband, Adam, are shaken by the arrival of a mysterious Hungarian in their village. Cassandra, one of the first "excellent women" that Pym was able to portray so well, will seek in the flight of her monotonous life and in the figure of the foreigner the realization of the hypocritical words of her husband: «Do you know that for me you are much more that an excellent housewife? ».
