Quartet in Autumn (Picador Classic, 35)

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If the two women feared that the coming of this date might give some clue to their ages, it was not an occasion for embarrassment because nobody else had been in the least interested, both of them having long ago reached ages beyond any kind of speculation.

I do love me some Chaka Khan, but even I don't wish to hear one line of one of her songs play out for eight hours.

Yet. . . day two of my illness brought what felt like a similar repeating pattern by day, with this novel presenting to me a world so puny, it seemed almost absurd. Characters doing the same boring things, every day, rinse, repeat. Here, in contrast, I can write whatever I want, no matter how inadequate my understanding might be. My blog posts are narratives of my own reading experience, and so I’m answerable only for being honest and thoughtful about that. Did you find the main characters believable? Did you think some were more successfully drawn than others? The organisation where Letty and Marcia worked regarded it as a duty to provide some kind of a retirement party for them, when the time came for them to give up working. Their status as ageing unskilled women did not entitle them to an evening party, but it was felt that a lunchtime gathering, leading only to more than usual drowsiness in the afternoon, would be entirely appropriate…

Since Pym can’t use proximity as she did in the first case, where both occurrences of the name “Norman” are separated by only a few words, she makes the transition by putting the phrase “No Visitors” in the same place, in the first sentence of each paragraph to create structural similarity: “If they said “No Visitors” then we can’t very well barge in” and “No visitors? Has she just had an operation then?”Yes, but it was an important stage in our lives,” said Letty, deciding definitely on lavender water. Thanks for the information on WW2 experiences and book suggestion Venbede. I have always hated and been scared of war and bombs (the fear was worst when I was a child) and found the idea of them terrifying so I always find it hard to imagine not being affected long-term by living through a war that directly affected you. I hated the sound of air raid sirens on T.V. shows, even the comedy "Allo, Allo" after I found out what the sound meant. Hearing it still gives me the creeps. But perhaps in the past most people were affected, but the culture was to keep it to yourself. While reading this book I also read 'Three Mothers and a Camel' by Phyllida Law (British actress and mother of Emma and Sophie Thompson). She was deeply affected by being an evacuee from Glasgow to the countryside during WW2. It was also interesting comparing her everyday life experiences to the characters in 'Quartet in Autumn'. These four old codgers in London in the 1970s, none of them have any family or friends, they work together in an office doing virtually nothing for an unnamed organisation while a fine layer of dust sifts gently over their lives and having completed their waxing decades ago, if they ever did wax, they are for sure waning now. The two women retire partway through the story and the whole thing is about all the things they then don’t do, and just a few tiny things they do. We are very familiar with this kind of soft, hushed comedy here in Britain. It turns up (beautifully) in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, (not so beautifully) in How it All Began by Penelope Lively, and more recently in The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (that one modulates from gentle to less gentle comedy and finally to lurid tragedy. But it starts in Barbara Pym territory). And it can be seen in a zillion sitcoms. And in the funnier films of Mike Leigh. Neste livro em particular, a forma como pequenos nadas se tornam o eixo central de uma vida, é talvez o detalhe mais interessante.

One thing I found interesting was how little the character's wartime experiences seemed to impact on their lives in the 1970s. These people lived through the Blitz yet have no worries about post traumatic stress or the possibility of WW III, except for Marcia - it may help explain her tin hoarding. Despite living through such dangerous times they are just as caught up in the small annoyances and everyday problems of life as those of us who have grown up in peacetime.Whenever a man “liked” Pym, and they often did, she decided they were boring and ran in the other direction. Perhaps this was because, as Dulcie Mainwaring, the heroine of No Fond Return of Loveputs it, “It seemed […] so much safer and more comfortable to live in the lives of other people – to observe their joys and sorrows with detachment as if one were watching a film or play.” Or, as Pym herself confided to a friend when in her late 40s, “I love Bob, I love Richard, I love Rice Krispies … perhaps it is better in the end just to love Rice Krispies.” I am so taken with Barbara Pym. She mysteriously manages to touch a part of my soul that even I cannot reach.

And then there is Marcia, the character Pym imbues with the greatest quota of pathos. Thehighlight of her life was the time she needed major surgery, an event about which she regularly reminisces. That’s when she’s not talking about the wonderful surgeon who performed her mastectomy and about whom she maintains particularly warm thoughts. One of her happiest moments comes when she takes the bus to his home, hoping to spy him if only in the distance. Marcia isa birdlike figure, an obsessive who hoards empty milk bottles and plastic bags in a shed in her over-grown garden. In her house stand row upon row of tins of food yet Marcia is slowly starving. Indeed. And people who appreciate Pym’s novel agree. When her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle came out, Antonia White in The New Statesman wrote that Pym worked “in petit point [making] each stitch with perfect precision.” When her second novel, Excellent Women was published, The Church Times made the first flattering comparison with Jane Austen. Later on, in his review of Excellent Women, Alexander McCall Smith wrote: “Like Jane Austen, Pym painted her pictures on a small square of ivory, and covered much the same territory as did her better-known predecessor.” By the end of this short novel I felt I had really got to know all four characters, and was sad to bid them farewell despite none of them being remotely exceptional or charismatic. Something I find very impressive. More Pym(s) please. Of the four only Letty used the library for her own pleasure and possible edification. She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realize that the position of an unmarried, unattached, ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction.It’s a funny thing when you work. You spend more time with your work colleagues that you do with your spouse, children or friends. Sometimes friendships occur but for some but not for others. And what happens when you retire? Quartet in Autumn was only my second experience of Barbara Pym’s work and now I can see why she has such a devoted group of followers. What I enjoyed about Some Tame Gazelles (her debut novel) was her ability to portray the peculiarities of ordinary life in an English village of the 1950s. She uses the same approach in Quartet in Autumn but this time the focus is on the minor irritations and peculiarities of office life in 1970s London. Burnett also considers the theme of nutrition in this novel: Marcia hoards tinned food (among other things – milk bottles, plastic bags), and we are often told what the office quartet are having for lunch or supper – usually as an index of their social status and mental state (Marcia slips quietly into a kind of anorexia, subsisting largely on tea and the occasional biscuit). Quartet in Autumn, shortlisted for the Booker Prize when it was published in 1977, is one of Barbara Pym’s most unsentimental books, about four English office workers who face ageing in different ways. Edwin, Letty, Marcia and Norman have little in common except that they have worked in the same office for many years. They are each eccentric and difficult in their own way, and resist connections with each other. Letty is a spinster who doesn’t know why life seems to have passed her by. Marcia is an anti-social eccentric, whose quirks and paranoia are becoming more pronounced since her mastectomy. Edwin is a widower obsessed with church-going. And Norman is a ‘strange little man’ with a sarcastic sense of humor and more than a touch of misanthropy. The novel was released as an audiobook by Chivers Press, read by Elizabeth Stephan. It was published in Portugal as Quarteto no Outono, France as Quatuor d'automne, Germany as Quartett im Herbst, and Turkey as Sonbahar Kuarteti.