I have read The Skin Chairs but don't remember it well -- what makes it a favorite for you?
I tend to love stories about children navigating an adult world, but don't often find books that do that. This book did it particularly well, I thought.
a Comyns novel with a relatively happy ending. It probably reads best against the others.
That makes sense. Comyns novels rarely offer comfort.
I agree with you about the voice in Sisters By A River. It's the most disjointed of all her books, but she writes some haunting imagery, like the goat buried with its horns sticking up above ground, tying her hair around her chin so the bats don't get tangled in it, and licking your hand and pressing it to the wallpaper so that the bird printed on it came off onto your hand.
I haven't read Out of the Red, into the Blue, Birds in Tiny Cages, or A Touch of Mistletoe. Do you know any of those well?
Out of those three, I haven't read Out of the Red, Into the Blue either, and it seems near impossible to get my hands on, but the hope that it will be reissued like many of her other books gives me something to look forward to in life (a biography called Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner is due to release next year so maybe that will encourage some publisher to publish Out of the Red as one of Comyns's more autobiographic works).
Birds in Tiny Cages is not very Comyns-like, but you might enjoy it if you enjoy mid-20th century writing in general. A Touch of Mistletoe was recently reissued by Daunt Books which is how I could get my hands on it, and it's got the classic Comyns heroine, with the grim fairytale view of the world, buffeted by circumstance, experiencing bleak moments in-between and surviving everything, including wartime.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2023-09-30 01:34 am (UTC)I tend to love stories about children navigating an adult world, but don't often find books that do that. This book did it particularly well, I thought.
That makes sense. Comyns novels rarely offer comfort.
I agree with you about the voice in Sisters By A River. It's the most disjointed of all her books, but she writes some haunting imagery, like the goat buried with its horns sticking up above ground, tying her hair around her chin so the bats don't get tangled in it, and licking your hand and pressing it to the wallpaper so that the bird printed on it came off onto your hand.
Out of those three, I haven't read Out of the Red, Into the Blue either, and it seems near impossible to get my hands on, but the hope that it will be reissued like many of her other books gives me something to look forward to in life (a biography called Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner is due to release next year so maybe that will encourage some publisher to publish Out of the Red as one of Comyns's more autobiographic works).
Birds in Tiny Cages is not very Comyns-like, but you might enjoy it if you enjoy mid-20th century writing in general. A Touch of Mistletoe was recently reissued by Daunt Books which is how I could get my hands on it, and it's got the classic Comyns heroine, with the grim fairytale view of the world, buffeted by circumstance, experiencing bleak moments in-between and surviving everything, including wartime.